At Meta Connect 2025, the company’s biggest event of the year, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled three new smart glasses: the second-generation Ray-Ban Meta, the Meta Ray-Ban Display and wristband controller, and the Oakley Meta Vanguard.
Meta says it has sold 2 million of the first-generation Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, and earlier this year, Meta unveiled its latest AI-powered smart glasses with Oakley, which were designed for athletes. Silicon Valley is leaning heavily into AI wearables, and Meta seems to be one of the companies leading the charge.
With Meta looking to regain its footing in the AI race and sell more hardware, the company had a lot at stake during Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Connect 2025 keynote. Overall, Meta showcased some pretty impressive technology — the Meta Neural Band, the wristband controller that comes with the Meta Ray-Ban Display, is a particular highlight.
And yet, in a twist that felt reminiscent of HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” Zuckerberg’s demo of the AI capabilities on the Ray-Ban Metas failed. Whoops!
While sharing a live video feed of the cooking content creator Jack Mancuso at Meta HQ, Zuckerberg asked the chef to demonstrate how his Ray-Ban Meta glasses could help him whip up a Korean-inspired steak sauce.
“I love the setup you have here, with soy sauce and other ingredients. How can I help?” asked the chipper Meta AI voice.
Mancuso asked for a recipe for a Korean-inspired steak sauce, and the AI voice began to list the ingredients that he would need — but Mancuso knows he needs to keep the demo succinct, so he interrupts and asks, “What do I do first?”
After a moment of silence that dragged a bit too long, Mancuso repeated, “What do I do first?”
“You’ve already combined the base ingredients, so now grate a pear to add to the sauce,” the AI said. But he had not yet combined the base ingredients, because he had not started making the recipe, hence the question of what to do first.
Mancuso asked the same question again, and the AI gave the same response. The audience laughed.
“I think the Wi-Fi might be messed up — back to you, Mark!” Mancuso said.
“You know what? It’s all good. The irony of the whole thing is that you spend years making the technology, and then the Wi-Fi of the day kind of … catches you,” Zuckerberg said. “Anyway, we’ll go check out what he made later.”
The whole interaction was a bit awkward, especially since the issue did not seem to be with the Wi-Fi. But even when things are going according to plan, these presentations can feel a bit hokey … like the end of the keynote, when Zuckerberg and Diplo quite literally ran into the sunset together, wearing their Meta Oakley Vanguards. It had to be a busy day for Mark, so maybe he just needed an excuse to build some cardio into his schedule.
Meta unveiled the second generation of its Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which first debuted in 2023. This spruced-up model features double the battery life of its predecessor, now lasting up to eight hours of mixed use on one charge. The second-generation glasses also support ultra HD 3K video recording, which the company says is twice as sharp as the last model.
Meta’s smart glasses are also getting some new features with the release of the second-generation Ray-Ban Metas, like conversation focus, which will be available on the Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta HSTN glasses.
“If you’re eating at a hot new restaurant, commuting on the train, or catching your favorite DJ’s latest set, conversation focus uses your AI glasses’ open-ear speakers to amplify the voice of the person you’re talking to,” Meta said in its press release.
Conversation focus isn’t out just yet, so we can’t say for sure if it’ll be any help for your next night out.
The Live AI feature — which Meta failed to properly demo onstage — is also on its way. But it’s so energy-intensive that you can only use it for about an hour or two.
“As we make battery and energy efficiency optimizations, Meta AI will transition from something you prompt with a wake word to an always-available assistant,” the company said.
The second-generation Ray-Ban Meta glasses are priced at $379.
The Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses are the most impressive glasses that Meta has unveiled to date, featuring a built-in display for apps, alerts, and directions on the right lens. But what sets this pair of smart glasses apart is its accompanying wristband controller, the Meta Neural Band.
This wristband lets Meta show off a bit of what it’s been spending so much time (and money) on in its Reality Labs division, which is notorious for losing billions of dollars a quarter.
Visually, the Meta Neural Band looks like a Fitbit without a screen. It’s powered by surface electromyography (sEMG), which can pick up on minute hand gestures and small movements. This is far more sophisticated than a wrist gesture on an Apple Watch. Users can write out text messages by holding their fingers together as if they were gripping a pen and “writing” out the text. This means that you can see a WhatsApp message come in on your right glasses lens, then answer it by “writing” your response.
For now, the glasses support Meta apps, but the company will have to support a wide variety of apps in the future to get the kind of adoption they’re looking for. Like Apple and Google, Meta is betting that smart glasses could cut into the market share of the smartphone in the future — but it will be a big challenge to force such a massive cultural shift.
The Meta Ray-Ban Display, which comes with the Meta Neural Band, will cost $799 and launches on September 30.
For the bearish among us, it seems hard to imagine wearing smart glasses and sending text messages by handwriting in the air. But the Oakley Meta Vanguard smart glasses, which are designed for athletes, offer the most coherent use case yet for this kind of technology.
Bikers, trail runners, and skiers can photograph their adventures without pulling out their phones; the glasses’ open-air speakers can play music during your workout, and even link with apps like Strava and Garmin to relay your stats. Like the other new glasses, the Vanguard model is also AI-enabled.
Unlike other models of Meta smart glasses, the Oakley Meta Vanguards have just one unified front lens with a camera in the middle, rather than two lenses with cameras on either side — it’s a design that makes more technical sense, and it’s a fashion statement that you can pull off in athletic eyewear, but not in eyeglasses (prove me wrong). The new glasses can capture video in up to 3K resolution and feature a 12-megapixel camera with a 122-degree wide-angle lens.
The glasses have an IP67 dust and water resistance rating for use during intense workouts. Meta says the wraparound design of the glasses features Oakley PRIZM Lens technology, which is designed to block out sun, wind, and dust.
Unless you’re an ultramarathon runner, these glasses will easily last throughout your workout. The glasses can stay on for nine hours, or six hours with continuous music playback. But the charging case that the glasses come with can provide an additional 36 hours of charge on the go. Meta claims that the charging case can quickly get the glasses to a 50% charge in 20 minutes.
The Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses retail for $499 and go on sale on October 21.
On the VR front, Meta did not release any new Quest headsets as part of this year’s Connect. Even though the conference and company are named after the metaverse, we learned about just a small number of updates to its VR, such as Hyperscape, which will allow developers and creators to build photorealistic spaces in virtual reality.
Meta is reportedly developing an ultralight VR headset for launch by the end of 2026, so maybe we’ll see that come to fruition at the next Meta Connect event.
