The price is $299. That is about $80 less than the starting price of the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2, and it is the main reason Meta says it dropped the Ray-Ban name from its newest smart glasses.
The Verge got a hands-on session with the new Meta Glasses, which come in three styles and seven colors: Fury, Adventurer and a Kylie Jenner collaboration called Meta Glasses by Kylie. The reviewer wrote that for three years “Meta” and “Ray-Ban” had been synonymous in smart glasses, and “Not anymore.”
Why drop Ray-Ban
EssilorLuxottica is still involved. Its name is stamped, in tiny type, on the inside temple of all three styles, and the company helped with design, manufacturing and shipping. Alex Himel, Meta’s vice president of wearables, explained the cheaper line this way: “We just feel like we need to have a pair of glasses at a lower price point.” EssilorLuxottica owns lower-priced eyewear brands, he said, but “they’re not really that well known, so there wasn’t an obvious fit there.”
Specs match the recently released Ray-Ban Meta Optics Styles, with slightly longer battery life. Adventurer frames have thinner rims. Fury is chunkier and closer to the Meta Ray-Ban Display. The Kylie style has a Y2K look, is meant to sit low on the nose and carries a small gem in the upper corner of the left lens.
Fit options go further than before. Nose pads click into three positions, temple tips bend on a wire, and overextension hinges suit wider faces. Prescriptions run from -12 to +2.25, though anything stronger than -6 requires an optician.
AI upgrade
All the new glasses launch with Muse Spark, the first model from Meta’s Superintelligence Labs. It will reach older Ray-Ban and Oakley glasses in the US and Canada by software update. Meta AI now supports 14 more languages, among them Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin, Hindi and Korean. Pedestrian turn-by-turn navigation is coming to Meta’s displayless glasses, and a “dynamic photo” feature that captures several frames and suggests the best one is due later this month.
In demos, live Mandarin translation ran fairly smoothly with a touch of lag. Asked for recommendations in Kylie Jenner’s voice and told the reviewer wanted a cute purple keychain charm, the assistant suggested grape-shaped or lavender-donut ones. Asked about a plate of canapes, it estimated 280 calories. The reviewer called the overall experience a slightly better version of what he had tried before.
The privacy problem
The bigger issue is trust. The New York Times and Wired have both reported that Meta is building facial recognition for its glasses, and the event was dominated by questions about misuse. Himel acknowledged tampering: “If people aren’t comfortable with you wearing the glasses, not only do we personally think that’s bad, but we wouldn’t have a business anymore.” He promised updates “really soon” but gave no details. He also said he wants consistent rules across states and countries, since a patchwork “becomes hard for people.”
The Verge’s verdict: these are affordable, well-made glasses, but hardware “hasn’t been Meta’s problem for some time now.”
