Meta Connect 2025: Ray‑Ban Display, Oakley Vanguard

Meta’s yearly display emphasized smart glasses even more, focusing on everyday AR and sport-first wearables. The headliners: Ray‑Ban Display, a waveguide-equipped pair overlaid with context in your field of view, and Oakley Vanguard, an athlete-geared model that puts the cameras front and center. Meta also demonstrated a neural wristband for subtle hand gestures, a generative world builder for creators and a unified TV hub.

Ray‑Ban Display brings context to your line of sight

A product of EssilorLuxottica, Ray‑Ban Display overlays a monocular waveguide over your right eye to display glanceable prompts — like navigation arrows, live translations, notifications and Meta AI tips — without all the bulk of a full AR headset. According to Meta, the virtual image is also bright enough for outdoor viewing and optimized for legibility without washing out the real world.

The display links up with on‑device microphones and a small touch surface, and can hand off to voice or a new wrist controller for fast input. They come in Black and Sand at launch, with optional transition lenses to turn the glasses into sunglasses. The pitch is that it is utility without spectacle: frames that are light on your face and, in front of them, keep you engaged while offering just‑in‑time information.

Live AI capabilities are in‑box and will grow over time. (Early demos displayed in‑lens suggestions culled from conversation context — say, an afterthought calendar addition once you’ve accepted a meeting or a translation suggestion when it detects a language shift.) And that “agentic AI” framing sits well with analyst guidance from firms such as Gartner on how to think about assistants who take action on behalf of users.

Neural Band puts sEMG gestures on your wrist

Meta’s Neural Band is a gentle first foray into neural interfaces, relying on surface electromyography (sEMG) to pick up little electrical signals from wrist tendons. It has ancestral roots in the neurotech startup CTRL‑labs — the objective is subtle, low‑friction input: pinches to click, swipes to scroll or “writing” a message so you can compose and send an SMS without lifting your phone.

Onstage demos were a hodgepodge of awesome and glitchy — volume controls worked just fine, but a live video call handoff didn’t. That is not uncommon in early sEMG UX; the accuracy increases significantly with per‑user calibration and machine‑learning adaptation. If Meta nails comfort and battery here, this band could finally be the last missing link to make heads‑up displays practical in public.

Oakley Vanguard goes after athletes, with Strava in tow

Co‑developed with Oakley, Vanguard is unapologetically sport‑built: a centered 12MP camera for balanced POV capture, 3K video, IP67 water and dust resistance and integrated Meta AI voice control.

Strava support pipes your pace, splits and segment notifications into bone‑conduction audio while you keep your eyes on the road or trail.

For a platform that has been pursuing momentum with runners and cyclists, that is a reasonable (if not inevitable) bet. Strava has well over 120 million athletes globally, and action‑cam content still leads the way on short‑form social feeds. Vanguard simply gives content creators a hands‑free alternative that eliminates the forehead‑mounted cam look we’ve all become accustomed to over the years, which matters in an era where adoption is based as much on social consideration as specs.

Ray‑Ban 2, and upgrades for those who own a pair already

Along with Display, Meta unveiled a second‑gen camera‑first Ray‑Ban model that focuses on the basics: improved comfort, better mics and a bigger battery that at last aims for all day. For existing users, a software update (Audio Boost) increases real‑world conversations — useful while out in busy streets or on the move in transit — without modifying the hardware.

This bifurcated approach, one line for capture, a different line for display, plays off the smartphone market’s “Pro vs. standard” level today. And it gives Meta more space to breathe design‑wise too, since Meta waveguides still need additional volume in the temple and lens stack at this point that fashion‑forward consumers may not be prepared to stomach.

Horizon Studio, Horizon Engine and a unified TV hub

Going beyond hardware, the company revealed Horizon Studio, a generative playground where creators can construct interactive scenes from natural language prompts — a fight arena, a beachfront loft, an underwater tableau — and then iterate with fast edits. There’s a new Horizon Engine under the hood, Meta’s join‑compatible real‑time stack for procedural objects and agent behavior.

For living‑room screens, Meta TV combines services like Netflix and Disney+ into a single interface and supports Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos for high‑quality playback. Aggregation is not a novel concept, but it won’t be the differentiator either: watch on TV, pick up on Quest, and eventually hand off to smart glasses for glanceable controls and recommendations.

What we didn’t yet get: details on ASUS ROG Tarius VR

Gaming enthusiasts looking for the ASUS ROG Tarius VR headset received little more than a glimpse. The rumors have suggested face and eye tracking at a minimum and a high‑contrast display, but Meta and ASUS played their cards pretty close. With Quest handling mainstream mixed reality, a ROG‑branded device would likely court enthusiast gamers and esports content — but we’ll need hard specs to judge where it’s landing.

The big picture: where Meta’s smart glasses go next

Smart glasses are finally getting actual jobs: capture, coaching and glanceable compute. That accords with what researchers and industry tracker IDC have observed — short‑term growth from specific, high‑frequency use cases rather than do‑everything AR. Meta’s collection embodies that realism: a utility HUD for daily context, a sport camera with training cues and finally a preservation of Meta in the form of a camera‑first lifestyle pair.

The open ones are the right ones: privacy defaults for always‑on cameras, safe brightness and eye comfort for waveguides, battery life under real workloads, and how useful agentic AI turns out to be when it makes the leap from demos to daily habits. If Meta continues to ship gains iteratively — and if Neural Band matures — then perhaps this will be the year heads‑up computing stops seeming like a science project and starts feeling inevitable.