Meta announced an advanced new set of virtual reality glasses and a collection of new smart glasses Wednesday, including an audio-only version without a camera. At the firm’s Meta Connect conference in Menlo Park, California, executives said the new Ray-Ban Meta models set new standards for battery life and weight. They said the new glasses with screens in the lenses squeeze capabilities previously reserved for a full headset into a light set of spectacles that rest on a user’s ears.
The new wearables come at a time of uncertainty for the smart glasses category, which is broadly facing a backlash from sceptics and privacy campaigners around their ability to record video, frequently being dubbed “perv glasses” or “spy glasses”. Meta’s smart glasses are the most popular gadget in the category. The Ray-Ban Meta Audio AI glasses seem tailored for the time.
Lacking a camera, they may help avert some privacy worries, though Meta claims they have been in the works for several years. The glasses have microphones and speakers for music, calls and interacting with the company’s AI assistant, taking the recognizable form of Ray Ban’s Clubmaster or Burbank styles. The new versions are thinner and lighter than the camera versions and last up to 12 hours on battery and will cost £319 (€349/A$529).
The new Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 glasses, which do sport cameras, have longer battery life than their predecessors, lasting up to nine hours with support for Dolby Atmos audio. They will cost £409 (€449/A$679). Meta is also launching two new styles of its own-brand glasses in partnership with singer and actor Lisa.
All of the firm’s smart glasses have an LED warning light that flashes when recording, but Meta said it has made improvements to its tampering detection, including during a livestream. Finally, Meta is expanding availability of its Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses to outside the US for the first time since their announcement a year ago. The glasses with a virtual display in the right lens will go on sale in the UK and Canada from 23 September priced at £749 (CA$1,149) and will later expand to France, Germany and Italy on 13 October for €899.
The new Meta VR glasses are an evolution of the company’s pioneering Quest VR headsets, which have become some of the most popular on the market. But instead of being a bulky plastic headset, the 100g device is made of magnesium alloy and looks like an oversized set of glasses. The wearer peers through small lenses on to a 5K microOLED screen with a crisp 37 pixels per degree, making text look sharp and rivalling Apple’s high-end Vision Pro headset.
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