It appears that Meta’s ‘Hypernova’ announcement, slated for later this week at its Connect conference, is the company’s new Ray-Ban Display glasses. How do we know this? Meta accidentally published a brief video to its YouTube channel that revealed the glasses.
The social media company corrected its mistake as quickly as it could, but the folks at UploadVR still managed to get a look at the new glasses. The visual design is fully on display, revealing a set of eyewear that doesn’t look terribly different from the regular stuff partner company EssilorLuxottica makes.
What a Ray-Ban Display
The Ray-Ban Wayfarer design favoured by Meta is largely unchanged. The largest difference, according to the leaked video, is that the Ray-Ban Display will include… well, a display on the right-hand lens. How it’s put there isn’t known, but brief snatches of the video show navigation and environmentally contextual information showing up on the lens.
Paired with the upcoming smart(er) glasses is a wristband that offers additional navigation options, including the ability to send messages via the Ray-Ban Display by touching a regular surface. The band traces hand movements, turning any finger and a surface into a smart glasses interface. It’ll be a handy feature when it launches, making Meta’s glasses a more active device rather than the largely passive experience it is now.
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These glasses could be a stepping stone to Meta’s more ambitious project — its Orion smart glasses are supposed to offer full augmented reality as opposed to the (possibly projected) single display seen here. Whether Meta is able to “integrate contextual information with the real world using interactive holographic displays, and offer constant Meta AI assistant access,” as we explained last year, remains to be seen.
But we should get a closer look at Hypernova later this week — Meta Connect kicks off on 18 September at 02h00 (SAST), which is a more civilised 17h00 in American time zones.
