Meta Connect sent a clear message: smart glasses were evolving from curiosities to everyday tools. The attention was on the Ray-Ban Display with in-lens HUD, Oakley’s Vanguard sunglasses for sports, and a neural wristband that converts small hand movements into inputs. Add in a generative creation suite for virtual worlds, and a unified TV hub, and Meta is aiming to make its ecosystem something that spans face, wrist, and living room.
Ray-Ban Display gets HUD into your eyewear
At the top end of the hardware spectrum is the Ray-Ban Display, a waveguide-equipped offering that casts a monocular overlay for glanceable info like translations, turn-by-turn cues, and context courtesy of Meta’s assistant. Meta touted a peak brightness of 5,000 nits for outdoor visibility and stressed the microdisplay is high-resolution enough to be easily read while not blocking the wearer’s field of vision.
- Ray-Ban Display gets HUD into your eyewear
- Neural Band adds sEMG gestures to glasses
- Ray-Ban 2 doubles down on battery and audio
- Oakley Vanguard targets athletes with performance design
- Live AI and agentic helpers come to smart glasses
- Horizon Studio and a shiny new graphics engine
- Meta TV consolidates streaming in one place
- Asus ROG Tarius gaming-class headset teased
- Price, availability and what’s next for Meta’s wearables
What’s critical to understand is that this isn’t a full spatial AR headset. The HUD is anchored to your perspective instead of objects in the world. That trade-off allows the frames to remain slim and battery-efficient while providing helpful “heads-up” direction. The marquee demos are live translation and navigation among commuters and travelers; quick-reply and notifications are the everyday hooks for creators.
Neural Band adds sEMG gestures to glasses
What comes with the Ray-Ban Display is the Meta Neural Band, a wristband that reads small electrical signals created when your hand and wrist muscles move (sEMG). In practice, this means you can pinch, swipe, and even pretend to write on the on-glass interface. In a live demonstration, volume adjustments came through by way of the very simple motion of “turning the knob,” while an attempt to answer a phone call failed—a helpful reminder that these are ambitious technologies still in need of maturation.
sEMG control has been researched elsewhere by institutions such as Carnegie Mellon and companies like CTRL-Labs (which Meta acquired), and it’s valued for low-latency, private inputs that work without cameras.
The real test will be how accurate they are across different skin tones, wrist anatomies, sweat, and motion—areas where early wearables often fall down.
Ray-Ban 2 doubles down on battery and audio
Along with the HUD model, Meta unveiled a second-generation camera-first Ray-Ban that retains the familiar look but fixes some of their practical complaints: it’s designed to last all day on a charge, it should be more comfortable, and its microphones and speakers have been upgraded. There’s also a new Audio Boost mode that will roll out to older models, which amplifies voices in person—an example of how software can stretch the value of hardware, a play straight from the playbook that has helped smartwatches achieve daily-wear status.
Oakley Vanguard targets athletes with performance design
Developed with Oakley, the Vanguard embraces performance use. A centered 12MP camera records in up to 3K resolution and the frames are sweat and weather resistant with an IP67 rating. Native integration with Strava offers real-time audio updates—pace, distance, segments—all without looking at a watch or phone. It’s priced at $499 to start—squarely in the realm of action-cam workflows but with the added bonus of AI and voice control.
Runners and cyclists could see the center-cam placement leading to steadier POV footage (than a temple-mounted camera), while the curved lens itself continues Oakley’s signature wraparound protection. Trade-offs are weight and thermal management, something performance eyewear wearers will feel on longer outings.
Live AI and agentic helpers come to smart glasses
Meta is weaving “agentic AI” through the glasses: context-aware suggestions that pop up on the Display—like adding a calendar item after you say “let’s meet,” or translating a menu while viewing it. Capabilities will grow over time, but Meta says initial feature sets will be limited. That staged approach is similar to those of industry rollouts from Apple, Google, and OpenAI, which frequently deliver conservative first passes before enabling more aggressive behaviors as reliability and safety grow.
Horizon Studio and a shiny new graphics engine
Looking beyond glasses, Meta announced Horizon Studio, which is described as a generative playground that lets creators create explorable worlds from the simplest of prompts—say, an octagon, a living room, or an ocean scene—powered by the new Horizon Engine.
The idea: shorten the time from concept to interactively explorable environment from hours to minutes. If Meta can develop a viable marketplace for these tools, it could lower the barrier of entry for creators and brands to prototype experiences, which some analysts at CCS Insight have pointed out is crucial to metaverse stickiness.
Meta TV consolidates streaming in one place
Meta TV acts as a federated launcher which aggregates apps and content from leading providers into one experience, with support for Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos where available. It’s a simple play: improved discovery and fewer input swaps have proved to be excellent engagement drivers in the living room, as evidenced on platforms including Roku and Apple.
Asus ROG Tarius gaming-class headset teased
Gaming is still driving growth in XR, and the Asus ROG Tarius (made in conjunction with Meta) represents new competition on that front. Here, early signs suggest support for eye and face tracking, as well as a high-contrast display stack (micro‑OLED, QD‑LED with local dimming, etc.). And the fact that it falls under the ROG banner means this isn’t a budget Quest alternative but a performance-first device. The open questions: price, weight, and how far developer support goes at launch.
Price, availability and what’s next for Meta’s wearables
Ray‑Ban Display starts at $799 and Oakley Vanguard is starting off at a base price of $499. Meta’s bet is that hands-free capture, live guidance, and a faint display will help recruit mainstream users who don’t want a clunky headset. As market research groups have pointed out, comfort, battery life, and obvious use cases are the bouncers standing in the way to wearables; Meta directly confronted each with longer runtimes, sport-first ergonomics, and more systemic software integrations.
The metrics to focus on now are retention and daily active use. If Strava users wear Vanguards on training runs, if commuters reach for the Display during translation or wayfinding, then perhaps after hitting a series of singles and doubles, smart glasses will finally break through from novelty to everyday utility. The Neural Band may be the quiet breakthrough—provided Meta can make sEMG inputs as reliable and intuitive as tapping a screen.