Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) Hands-On: You Can Forget About Gen 1 Now

Smart glasses with displays in them may be the future, but for now, Meta seems to understand that not everyone is willing to spend $800 on a pair^[1]. And for those people, it now has Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2)^[2], a sequel to its surprisingly popular AI and camera-equipped smart glasses^[3], which are designed in tandem with EssilorLuxottica, the owner of the eyewear brand.

I already have a pair of the $379 second-gen glasses, which were announced at Meta Connect^[4] this week, and while I haven’t had a chance to test them thoroughly for a full review, I have a decent impression of the features that I can use at this point in time. One of those features is better video capture.

In this iteration, Meta is giving video recording a pretty big upgrade, allowing you to record in 60 fps at 1080p. You can also record in 3K resolution, though that’s limited to 30 fps right now. That upgrade should be great if you’re like me and you enjoy taking videos while you’re bike riding—something I’ve done often with my first-gen Ray-Ban smart glasses. I tested the Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) on my way back from Connect and a little bit when I got home, and the results are definitely higher fidelity than its predecessor. I haven’t had time to take any videos while bike-riding—a high-motion activity that should really make the 60 fps capability useful—but I did shoot some footage of my friends’s new dog in 3K.

I don’t have a good way of showing you how crisp that looks right now, but you’ll have to take my word for it. I’m not cruel, though; I won’t deprive you of baby pug pics taken with the smart glasses. Here’s Young Puggins:

There are more features in the Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) that I unfortunately can’t test yet, since the features haven’t been rolled out. One of those new capabilities is “hyperlapse,” which condenses longer videos into a shorter snippet—the opposite of slo-mo. I did get a chance to see content that was supposedly made with the feature, though, and it looks similar to other fast-forward features I’ve seen captured with smartphones. Meta told me that the videos of someone paragliding off what looked to be the coast of California were captured by an employee, too. I hope Meta has good insurance.

Also, speaking of slo-mo, Meta says it also plans to roll that feature out across all its AI smart glasses (that includes the ones right before the Gen 2, but not the original Ray-Ban Meta Stories) along with hyperlapse in the fall, though I didn’t get a preview of what slo-mo looks like IRL.

The biggest feature of the Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) doesn’t have anything to do with capturing video. Meta says its new smart glasses have a massive battery life improvement over the first generation. That’s thanks to a new “ultra-narrow steelcan battery” design, the same kind of battery that’s in its upcoming Ray-Ban Display glasses^[5]. I wasn’t given specifics on how those work, but Meta says the Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) smart glasses have two times the battery life. For reference, the first-gen Ray-Ban smart glasses are rated for 8 hours of battery, so you can do the math there.

Again, I haven’t had a chance to test the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 fully yet, but I will say that since I took them out of the box two days ago, I haven’t had to charge them with a moderate amount of use, including video capture and audio playback. At the time of writing this, the battery is still 47%, which is pretty impressive. Oh, and the case gets a battery step-up, too, giving you “48 hours of additional battery” life as opposed to the first-gen’s 32 hours with the case. That alone should probably justify the slight premium over the first-gen Ray-Ban Meta AI smart glasses.

Built-in storage also gets a big upgrade, which is necessary since capturing videos in 3K can eat up space pretty damn quick. While Meta’s first-gen smart glasses have only 4GB of storage, the new Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) have 32GB.

If you’re reading all of this and thinking it seems like an incremental upgrade, I’m inclined to agree with you, though even if things like battery life improvements aren’t going to knock your socks off, they’re pretty great for quality of life. I’ll have a better idea once I spend more time with the Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2), but if you’re not ready to shell out $800 for smart glasses with a display in them, these seem like a wiser way to fork over your hard-earned money.