Meta unveiled three groundbreaking smart glasses at Connect 2025, showcasing their vision for wearable technology. The Meta Ray-Ban Display, priced at $799, features a high-resolution color display and innovative Neural Band control. The Oakley Meta Vanguard, designed for athletes, offers sport-specific enhancements and fitness app integrations. The Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 improves upon its predecessor with longer battery life and enhanced camera capabilities. All models benefit from software upgrades, including conversation focus and expanded live translation. Meta also introduced Hyperscape for Quest headsets, allowing users to create photorealistic digital spaces, and a new Horizon TV entertainment hub. These innovations represent significant strides in blending digital and physical worlds, positioning Meta at the forefront of the next computing platform.
In a groundbreaking showcase at Meta Connect 2025, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a trio of next-generation smart glasses that are poised to transform how we interact with technology in our daily lives. The event, held on September 18, 2025, demonstrated Meta’s ambitious vision for wearable technology with the introduction of the Meta Ray-Ban Display, second-generation Ray-Ban Meta glasses, and the athlete-focused Oakley Meta Vanguard. These innovations represent a significant leap forward in Meta’s ongoing mission to create seamless interfaces between digital and physical worlds.
The most anticipated release from the event was undoubtedly the Meta Ray-Ban Display, which at $799 represents the company’s most advanced consumer wearable to date. These glasses feature a high-resolution color display embedded in the right lens with an impressive 600-by-600-pixel resolution and a 20-degree field of view. The display boasts a remarkable 5,000 nits of maximum brightness, ensuring visibility even in bright outdoor conditions, while maintaining only 2 percent light leakage to preserve privacy – meaning others can’t see what you’re viewing.
What sets these glasses apart from earlier attempts at similar technology, like Google Glass, is their practical integration with everyday life. The Ray-Ban Display allows users to view text messages, Instagram Reels, maps, or photo previews without having to pull out their phones. The display only appears in one lens and doesn’t fully obstruct vision, making it less intrusive than previous smart eyewear attempts.
Perhaps the most innovative aspect of the Ray-Ban Display is the Meta Neural Band, a wristband that utilizes electromyography to read subtle muscle signals, allowing users to control the glasses with discreet gestures. Users can pinch with different fingers to select items, navigate menus, and even type messages by tracing letters on any surface. This neural interface eliminates the need for conspicuous hand movements or voice commands, providing a natural, unobtrusive control mechanism that works even when your hand is at your side or behind your back.
Battery life, often a pain point for wearable technology, has been addressed with six hours of “mixed use” for the glasses and an additional 30 hours with the collapsible charging case. For those requiring prescription lenses, the Ray-Ban Display supports prescriptions from -4.00 to +4.00, making them accessible to a wide range of users.
For the more athletically inclined, Meta introduced the Oakley Meta Vanguard at $499, designed specifically for “high-intensity sports.” These glasses feature the quintessential wraparound Oakley design beloved by sports enthusiasts, with several sport-specific enhancements including an IP67 rating for water and dust resistance. The camera has been repositioned to the nose bridge for better framing during activities, and control buttons are placed underneath the arms to accommodate hats and cycling helmets.
According to Oakley Global President Caio Amato, the Vanguards were envisioned as a “revolution” not just for elite athletes but for weekend warriors and everyday fitness enthusiasts. The glasses feature integrations with fitness apps like Garmin and Strava, allowing users to ask Meta AI about their fitness data and statistics in real time – a first for smart glasses. With up to nine hours of battery life and improved speakers that remain audible even at speeds of 30 mph, the Vanguards address practical concerns for active users.
Meta hasn’t forgotten about its existing Ray-Ban smart glasses line, launching a second generation with significant improvements. The Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 glasses, starting at $379, feature eight hours of continuous battery life – double that of the previous model. The charging case now offers an additional 48 hours of battery life, up from 36 hours, and can charge the glasses to 50 percent in just 20 minutes. The camera has been upgraded to support 3K video recording at 30fps, and new capture modes including slow-motion, time-lapse, and hyperlapse will be coming to all Meta AI glasses later this fall.
Beyond hardware, Meta is enhancing its software capabilities across all models. A new “conversation focus” feature will be coming to both Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta glasses, using the speakers to amplify the voice of the person speaking to you in noisy environments. Meta is also expanding its live translation capabilities to support more languages, including German and Portuguese.
During the same event, Meta unveiled advancements in its VR ecosystem with a new feature called “Hyperscape” for Meta Quest 3 headsets. This technology allows users to scan their physical surroundings with a Quest 3 or Quest 3S headset and transform them into photorealistic digital spaces for VR. Initially, users will only be able to visit their scanned rooms alone, but Meta plans to enable shared experiences via private links in the near future. This represents another step in Meta’s vision of blending physical and virtual realities.
Meta also introduced a new Horizon TV entertainment hub for Quest headsets, bringing together streaming apps like Prime Video, Peacock, Twitch, and YouTube, with Disney Plus, ESPN, and Hulu coming soon. The hub will support Dolby Atmos surround sound, with Dolby Vision planned for later this year. Some movies will even feature “immersive special effects” exclusively viewable inside Quest headsets.
The Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses will be available starting September 30th at Best Buy, LensCrafters, Ray-Ban stores, and Verizon, though initially only in the US. Meta plans to expand sales to Canada, France, Italy, and the UK in early 2026. The Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses, priced at $499, will launch on October 21st with preorders available now.
These announcements at Meta Connect 2025 clearly demonstrate the company’s commitment to making wearable technology more practical, versatile, and integrated into everyday life. As Mark Zuckerberg himself stated, “Glasses, I think, are going to be the next computing platform device.” With the Neural Band control system and increasingly sophisticated AI integration, Meta is positioning itself at the forefront of the next evolution in personal technology.
While privacy concerns remain – as with any technology that can discreetly capture and share information – the practical applications for accessibility, fitness tracking, navigation, and hands-free interaction suggest that smart glasses may indeed become as ubiquitous as smartphones in the coming years. Meta’s continued investment in this space, despite the challenges faced by previous attempts at smart eyewear, indicates a long-term vision for how we’ll interact with technology in the future – less through screens we hold and more through experiences seamlessly integrated into our field of view.
