Meta’s leaky ship has finally reached port, just in time to disgorge three new sets of smart glasses. Two are made by Ray-Ban, including the leaked-early Ray-Ban Display, while a new Oakley set has turned up to make life interesting for cyclists and other sporting types.
One of the three new sets of wearable tech is a familiar face. The surprisingly popular standard version of its Ray-Ban smart glasses has received a hardware upgrade. It’ll still shoot video and perform AI-bolstered tasks, including translation (now in German and Portuguese), but it’ll do so with an improved 3K camera and up to eight hours of battery life. American pricing for the upgrade is about R6,600 ($380).
Meta’s better Display
The one you should be most excited about, unless you own a carbon fibre racing bicycle, is the Ray-Ban Display. For the super-low price of R14,000 ($800, and no, it’s not cheap), you can have the social media company’s AI smarts sitting on your face along with a neat little display in the right-hand lens. As expected, it’ll also include the Meta Neural Band, an electromyography (EMG) peripheral that translates wrist movement into on-screen navigation.
This makes receiving and replying to messages simpler, while also facilitating more accurate snapshots and videos from the onboard camera. The 12MP camera features 3x zoom, so you needn’t be right next to your video subject (that won’t be creepy at all), and the social media company reckons you’ll get six hours of usage on a charge. We suspect that’s an optimistic figure.
Along with the usual smarts, the non-display version of these smart glasses features, Display wearers also get captions. Basically, you can watch everything, including the people you’re talking to, with subtitles on. That sounds like an attractive feature on its own, though we’ll reserve judgment until we see it in action.
Captain of the Vanguard
If your preferred method of locomotion is a bicycle or a snowboard, the Oakley Meta Vanguard will ensure that you look the part. The sport-focused specs use Oakley frames along with an IP67 rating to make these more rugged than the day-to-day kit on offer. A 122° 12MP 3K camera captures action footage, and pairing compatible Garmin devices dumps new features into your rapidly oscillating lap.
These include automatic updates of key metrics and milestones, plus an auto-capture feature that starts recording once you reach a certain speed or your heart rate or elevation passes a set threshold.
Strava users also get a few goodies, like the ability to overlay performance data “onto videos and photos captured with Oakley Meta Vanguard and share [them] directly to your Strava community.”
The only drawbacks so far are the price (R8,700 or $500) and the fact that they’re only slated for the Americas, Europe, and Asia so far. The closest they’ll get is a launch in the UAE later this year, so if you’re passing through Dubai, it might be worth visiting the duty-free tech store. There are bound to be a few of those about.
