Mark Zuckerberg has figured out a way to get a phone on your face — by shrinking it down and cramming it into a pair of glasses.
Does that sound good to you?
If so, you’ll be able to buy a pair in two weeks. They’ll cost at least $800.
I’ve gotten a brief test-drive with Meta’s new Ray-Ban Display Glasses. They’re fun because they’re the kind of thing you’ve seen and read about in science fiction forever. Except now they’re real, and they work.
I’m also not sure how I would use them in real life after the novelty wears off. But I’m reasonably confident some people will be really into them.
And while Meta is pitching this as something that you, a consumer, will want to buy, I think we’re most likely to see this kind of tech worn by workers whose bosses require it. Think about cops, soldiers, factory workers, or anyone whose job makes it difficult for them to look down at their phone to get information they need.
A few important points about Zuck’s new specs:
- These are not the Orion glasses Meta showed off a year ago, which are much more technically advanced, but are too difficult and expensive to make and sell at the moment.
- These are a riff on earlier versions of Meta Ray-Ban glasses the company has been selling for a couple of years, which allow you to take pictures and videos, make phone calls, listen to music, and access Meta’s AI engine. Meta continues to sell those glasses, and is rolling out new iterations of them.
- The big difference with the Display glasses is right there in the name — there’s a small electronic display screen on the right lens, that lets you see things like a text message, a video call, or a map at the same time you’re seeing the rest of the world. In the (very brief) demo I had, they seemed to work very well — well enough that I could imagine using them instead of my phone. And like the Orion glasses Meta showed off in 2024, you control these by flicking your fingers in space, using a gee-whiz wrist band that tells the glasses what your hand is doing.
- But! While Meta is interested in building hardware that replaces a phone, this is not that. You’ll still need to carry a phone with you to make the glasses work.
Back to the big picture: These new glasses are yet another attempt by the world’s biggest companies to get you to wear tech on your face.
So far, none of them have really panned out. There appears to be a modest market for people who want virtual or augmented reality goggles for games, but that’s about it. And the list of face-computer flops goes back to Google Glass in 2012, and extends to the Apple Vision Pro in 2024.
For context: Meta considers its original Ray-Bans a surprise success, and they’ve sold… a couple million of them. Apple sells more than 200 million iPhones a year.
Earlier this year, Zuckerberg made a point of putting out an Apple-like goal for this kind of tech, telling investors that “This will be a defining year that determines if we’re on a path towards many hundreds of millions, and eventually billions of AI glasses.”
I don’t think Meta thinks that’s happening with these glasses in the near future, but they’re going to keep at it. So are its competitors: Earlier this year, for instance, Google announced a line of new headsets that includes something very similar to what Meta is now selling — but hasn’t put a price or on-sale date out yet.
Back to Zuckerberg’s new Ray-Bans, which I very much encourage you to test-drive, just to see what’s possible to jam into glasses right now. The neural wristband, which lets you control images on your screen with a “Minority Report”-like interface, is particularly impressive.
Meta people swear they’ll use these things in everyday life, all the time. But Meta people say the same thing about their first line of Ray-Bans, and the only time I’ve seen people wearing these outside a Meta building is … when I’ve seen Meta people outside a Meta building.
I think the place I’d most likely want to use these, for real, would be if I’m traveling and want the information my phone can supply without looking at my phone. The map feature — for pedestrian use only — seems very cool. So does the ability for the glasses to translate Spanish, French, and Italian in real time.
And there are also some features here that I probably wouldn’t use, but can see other people wanting to, like the ability to make video calls. Or to provide real-time closed captioning that lets you understand what someone is saying to you in a noisy room, even if you have trouble hearing them yourself.
The con side starts with the price, which is what Apple charges for its lowest-priced iPhone 17. That’s a lot for a device that you’ll use along with, but not instead of, a smartphone. Of course, I’m assuming this stuff will get cheaper over time.
Then there’s the comfort and aesthetics of the device: These look like chunky Ray-Bans, and I’m led to believe chunky glasses are in fashion now. I think some people will carry the look off really well — but the rest of us will look like people wearing tech on our faces.
And while these glasses are way more comfortable than wearing goggles on your face, they’re still heavier than regular glasses, and you can feel that weight while you’re wearing them. (Meta says the new glasses weigh 69 grams, which is around 3 times what a normal pair of glasses weighs — and maybe 1.5 times more than a pair of tech-free Ray-Bans might weigh.) Meta says the batteries in the glasses (which are one of the reasons they weigh more) will last six hours, but I think I might not want to wear them for that long.
Your mileage may also vary when it comes to wearing Mark Zuckerberg’s tech on your face — whether that’s for political reasons, or simply because you don’t want to wear tech on your face. There’s a burgeoning movement to get people off phones and into the real world, but I don’t know that moving the phone from your pocket to your head is what those folks have in mind.
But I also very much appreciate it when our tech overlords deliver us something that’s genuinely new and intriguing. Or, like smartwatches and these glasses, something we’ve seen in fiction forever but never in real life. What we do next with them is (still) up to us.
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