The rumors were true. Meta’s first pair of AR glasses with a built-in screen is the Meta Ray-Ban Display. They’ll cost $799 and will come to a limited number of brick-and-mortar stores in the United States on September 30. Those retailers include Best Buy, LensCrafters, Ray-Ban and Verizon, and availability will expand to Canada, France, Italy and the United Kingdom in early 2026.
The Ray-Ban Displays have a camera, audio functionality, and a translucent heads-up display that shows and allows the wearer to respond to text chats, AI prompts, directions and video calls. You’re able to use gestures to interact with the HUD, including small actions like swiping your fingers to type out a chat reply. Each pair requires and comes with a dedicated EMG wristband, the Meta Neural Band, which enables these interactions.
At least, that’s what Meta promises. The glasses failed to receive a phone call in a live demo during their announcement at the Connect 2025[1] conference, but they did perform other actions just fine. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg opened Spotify and played a song, took and viewed photos, and successfully demonstrated a real-time subtitle feature that looks legitimately useful. As outlined by Meta[2], the HUD supports Meta AI with visuals, messaging and video calling, previewing and zooming in on photos, turn-by-turn pedestrian navigation, live captions and translations, and music playback.
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Connect 2025 kicked off with Zuckerberg streaming his POV from a pair of Ray-Ban Displays, including a HUD on the right side showing Spotify, calendar reminders, text chats and incoming images with options to respond by dictating a message, dropping an emoji or selecting a typed phrase. The glasses and wristband come in two colors, black and sand, and two sizes, standard and large. All pairs have Transitions lenses that automatically adjust to light conditions.
The glasses’ display is “extremely high resolution,” Zuckerberg was stoked to report. The HUD is full-color and supports 42 pixels per each degree of the field of view — compare that with the Meta Quest 3S, which has 20 pixels per degree. The glasses boast “six hours of mixed-use battery life and up to 30 hours of battery life total,” while the Meta Neural Band has 18 hours of battery life and an IPX7 water rating.
The Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses join a lineup of smart spectacles revealed at Connect 2025, including the second generation of the Ray-Ban Meta[3] glasses (which also hilariously failed during a live demo of their AI assistant capabilities), and the sporty Oakley Meta Vanguard[4].
A leak earlier this week[5] spoiled the Meta Ray-Ban Display surprise, capping off a year[6] of rumors around Meta’s HUD-based efforts.
References
- ^ Connect 2025 (www.engadget.com)
- ^ by Meta (shopping.yahoo.com)
- ^ second generation of the Ray-Ban Meta (www.engadget.com)
- ^ Oakley Meta Vanguard (www.engadget.com)
- ^ A leak earlier this week (www.engadget.com)
- ^ a year (www.engadget.com)