The future of smart glasses comes into focus

Twelve years ago, Google kicked off the human cyborg revolution with its Google Glass product. The ugly, clunky, expensive Glass product was way ahead of its time. But it signaled a future when ordinary-looking glasses with a heads-up display would enable hands-free “computing” anywhere, all the time.

Well, that future time is now.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled $799 Meta Ray-Ban Display AI glasses this week during the Meta Connect 2025 conference at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

The glasses are not the first heads-up display glasses. But they’re the most socially acceptable and most promising for mainstream acceptance.

The company has already succeeded with Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which have no display. The new Display line has a screen in the right lens, designed for showing app notifications, navigation instructions, picture previews, and other visual alerts. Another new feature is that the glasses can be controlled with Meta’s included Neural Band wristband, which enables tasks like scrolling, tapping, and composing messages by tracking muscle signals rather than simple physical movements.

The glasses are basically Ray-Ban Meta glasses with cameras, microphones, and speakers for hands-free operation, plus the new additions of wristband controller and screen. The glasses include a 12MP camera with 3x zoom, six microphones, open-ear speakers, and photochromic lenses in two sizes.

The new full-color 600×600 pixel display provides live captions, real-time translation, video calling, navigation aids, camera viewfinder previews, and on-board Meta AI assistant with the ability to show visual results.

Meta claims a battery life of six hours, with an included collapsible charging case raising that to 30 total hours and the Neural Band offering up to 18 hours per charge.

Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses go on sale exclusively in physical stores in the United States from September 30, 2025, with retail partners including Best Buy, LensCrafters, Sunglass Hut, Ray-Ban stores, and select Verizon stores; Meta says online sales and international launches in Canada, France, the UK, and Italy will follow in early 2026.

The glasses look good. The early reviews are good also.

A growing lineup of AI glasses

The new Meta Ray-Ban Display AI glasses join a growing lineup from Meta and others. Going into the holiday season, Meta offers four lines: one line with a heads-up display and three lines with no display. All have cameras. The lines are:

Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses.

Oakley Meta Sphaera glasses designed for athletes, featuring a centrally placed cyclops camera and no display.

An updated version of Ray-Ban’s AI glasses.

The existing Oakley Meta HSTN glasses.

Oakley Meta Sphaera glasses represent a category of product that spells the beginning of the end of GoPro-like action cameras. The sub-brand is awkward. Even before camera quality approaches the quality of the GoPros, the ease and appeal of use of the glasses will be preferred by skiers, skydivers, mountain bikers, and skaters.

Snap is innovating. The company today announced Snap OS 2.0, the operating system for its upcoming sixth-generation consumer Spectacles AR glasses, expected next year.

The new OS has a better web browser, according to the company. It lets users take and see pictures, enjoy AR music experiences, translate text, and see contextual information about what the camera sees.

In general, Snap Spectacles will be more advanced but less socially acceptable than Meta’s glasses.

Amazon’s AI glasses should ship in the middle of next year.

AI glasses from Apple, Google, Samsung, and Xiaomi are expected to go on sale by late next year.

We’ll see offerings from big AI companies and small startups.

What Meta does matters

The company owns 70% of the global smart glasses market, thanks to Ray-Ban Meta glasses.

And what Mark Zuckerberg says about AI glasses matters, too, because (unlike subjects like the “social graph,” the future of social being all about people interacting with bots instead of other people, and the metaverse) he’s been completely right about all AI glasses matters he’s pontificated upon.

Here’s Zuck’s most recent proclamation:

AI glasses are the ideal form factor for interacting with AI because they place the cameras, speakers, microphones, and displays in the right place;

AI glasses will become the main way people interact with AI;

AI glasses will become the world’s primary computing platform; and

people not wearing AI glasses in the future will be at a “cognitive disadvantage” compared to people enhanced with these devices.

The future of smart glasses

By the end of next year, AI glasses will go totally mainstream. In the year 2027, the replacement of smartphones as the most important information gadget in our lives will begin.

The one brake on the rapid growth of AI glasses will be concerns about privacy. You may be thinking that you have no interest in wearing smart glasses because their cameras violate the privacy of others and their location tracking and data harvesting violate the users’ privacy.

But over the next two years, the privacy-violating products like Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses and, in fact, all Meta smart glasses, will no doubt create demand for privacy-focused glasses that have no camera and harvest no user data.

Another barrier is cost. Some AI glasses cost less than $300, including the category leader Ray-Ban Meta glasses.

And the final barrier is the form factor itself. Some people just don’t want to wear glasses.

Still, the best prediction is that this holiday season will drive huge adoption among gadget enthusiasts. And by the end of next year’s holiday season, we will see widespread mainstream adoption by the public in general. Within five years, AI glasses will displace smartphones as the most important “computers” for advanced users.

The era of AI glasses has begun. The human brain will be augmented with the superpowers of an omnipresent agentic AI assistant that sees what you see and hears what you hear and say.

More on smart glasses:

Alibaba unveils AI-powered smart glasses

Why enterprises are choosing smart glasses that talk — not overwhelm

Why I want glasses that are always listening

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AI and AR can supercharge ‘ambient computing’