You may have heard that Meta announced some high-tech smart glasses this week. You also may have seen a viral demo video featuring Mark Zuckerberg where the product didn't work at all. Like, at all. The good news is that's apparently not always the case.
The two major differentiators between these glasses and the other Meta Ray-Ban specs is that there's now a built-in display, and it comes with a fancy, futuristic wristband that lets you use hand gestures to navigate around apps on said display. Some members of the tech press got hands-on sessions with the new Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, which retail for a whopping $799.
Spoiler alert: Apparently, these smart AR glasses are the real deal.
Meta Ray-Ban Display: What hands-on testers had to say
Let's start with Mike Prospero of Tom's Guide. Prospero compared the Ray-Ban Display glasses to other competitors with built-in displays, and one of the bigger things that stood out to him was that the display required no tweaking or tinkering to make it look right.
"I've used smart glasses and goggles with built-in displays before, and they've all been so-so: You have to position the glasses just right, or make minute adjustments, or else you can't see anything," Prospero wrote. "Not so with the Ray-Ban Display: The screen was front and center from the moment I put the glasses on my face, no fussin' or mussin' needed."
Ray-Ban Display comes with a 600x600, 90Hz display in the right lens with a peak brightness of 5,000 nits, which should make it usable in most conditions. Michael L. Hicks of Android Central said the brightness was adequate, claiming he never had issues with readability or anything like that. Perhaps most importantly, Hicks also said other people can't see what you're doing from the outside looking in.
"With Meta Ray-Ban Display, I got up close to Meta's engineer wearing a second pair, looked from various angles, and couldn't see any light leakage," Hicks wrote. "That ensures privacy: you can glance at messages or videos without it being obvious (or rude) to people nearby."
It sounds like these were very brief and cursory demo sessions lasting about 15 minutes, so there are lots of features and other aspects of the Ray-Ban Display that will have to wait until the device is out for further analysis. That said, the last thing everyone surely wants to know about is the Neural Band, a wrist-worn control mechanism for the glasses. It uses hand gestures for navigational control, which could be iffy if not done properly.
According to Gizmodo's James Pero, the controls feel "like a bit of magic" when they work, but it sounds like it's not perfect just yet.
"Personally, I still had some variability on inputs—you may have to try to input something once or twice before it registers—but I would say that it works well most of the time (at least much better than you’d expect for a literal first-of-its-kind device)," Pero wrote. "I suspect the experience will only get more fluid over time, though, and even better once you really train yourself to navigate the UI properly."
The last thing from these hands-on pieces that's worth mentioning here is live voice transcription for in-person conversations. According to Pero and others, this works well and could eventually be used for live translation across languages in the future. However, Pero had mixed results when it came to the glasses transcribing one person's speech while others were speaking nearby.
"While the transcription focused mostly on the person I was looking at, it still picked up stray words here and there," Pero wrote. "This feels like a bit of an inevitability in loud scenarios, but who knows? Maybe beamforming and AI can fill in the gaps."
Meta's Ray-Ban Display glasses go on sale on Sept. 30 for $799.
