I wore the Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses for a week — here’s my pros and cons

“I don’t know how I feel about those,” said one of my neighbors when she saw me wearing the Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses. She was intrigued — and even more weirded out — when I described what they could do.

After having used Meta’s most advanced (and most expensive) smart glasses for a week, I’ve come to the same conclusion. Like Meta’s other smart glasses, the Ray-Ban Displays have a camera and meta’s AI, so you can not only take pictures, but ask the AI to describe what you’re seeing.

Because the Displays have a display, it opens them up to far more abilities. For example, if someone is speaking to you in a foreign language, the glasses can provide a near-instantaneous translation. Or, if you’re in an unfamiliar city, you can get turn-by-turn walking directions that show up literally right before your eyes.

But while the Ray-Ban Displays are perhaps the most complete smart glasses we’ve tested, they’re not the best smart glasses.

Meta Ray-Ban Display review: Cheat Sheet

What is it?
Meta’s most advanced — and most expensive — smart glasses, with a built-in display

Who is it for?
Early adopters.

What does it cost?
A very pricey $800 — in my case, $869 including taxes. That’s more than twice as expensive as the regular Ray-Ban Meta (gen 2) glasses, and they don’t come in as many colors or styles: just black or sand, though both options come with transitions lenses.

What do we like?
They’re the most accessible and practical smart glasses yet for a mass audience. The display is easy to read, and the neural band works well.

What don’t we like?
They’re expensive, and most of the functionality is confined within Meta’s ecosystem of apps and services. You have to charge two things.

Meta Ray-Ban Display: Specs

Display resolution: 600 x 600 pixels
Refresh rate: 90HZ max (content refresh at 30HZ)
Brightness: 30-5000nits
Camera: 12MP camera with 3X zoom
Video: 1440x1920 pixels @30 Fps
Battery life: 248 mAh / up to 6 hours (glasses), 134mAh/ up to 18 hours (band)
Charging case: up to 24 hours
Storage: 32GB
Wireless: Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3
Microphones: 6 (2 in left arm, 2 in right arm, 1 near nose pad, 1 contact mic)
Compatibility: iOS 15.2 and higher, Android 10 and higher

Meta Ray-Ban Display review: The ups

For years, I’ve been waiting for the worlds of AI glasses and AR glasses to become one. From the first moment of putting on the Meta Ray-Ban Displays, it’s clear this is starting to actually happen.

The display overlays your world

It’s there when you need it, and works without a fuss. Two taps of your middle finger against your thumb and it magically appears, and it’s wonderfully bright and crisp.

I especially liked that it would automatically adjust its brightness based on the ambient light — lighting up to even overcome something as subtle as my bedroom lamp. It was so bright that I was even able to read it easily against one of the more challenging backdrops: a snow-covered field on a sunny day.

More than a convenience, it also enables far more functionality, such as letting you preview photos and videos you’re taking with the glasses, showing album art from music you’re playing, and displaying live translations and dialogue from people who are talking to you.

Gestures are almost magical

If you’re going to have a display, you need some way to navigate it, and meta seems to have found a clever solution with the Neural Band.

This strap, which reminds me of the Whoop fitness tracker, has a series of contacts that detects muscle movements in your wrist as you tap and move your fingers, and translates them into gestures so that you can move about the Ray-Ban Display’s screens.

It took me a few days of practice (I still don’t get everything right), but navigating the interface is pretty easy. One of my favorite gestures is pinching your index and thumb, and then twisting your wrist right and left to do such things as increasing and decreasing the volume of music, changing the brightness of the display, and zooming in and out of the camera.

Virtual typing is the coolest extension of gestures. Within the Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger apps, you can reply to messages literally by lifting a finger. It’s pretty cool — you simply trace, either on a surface or in mid-air, what you want to write, and the glasses will interpret the gestures and write out the letters in the display.

You’re not going to write the next great American novel this way. You can only draw out letters, numbers and some punctuation (there’s a submenu for everything), and it’s much more time-consuming than dictation, but I can see it being helpful if you need to respond to someone and can’t speak out loud.

The one caveat to all this is that during my testing, my Neural Band would occasionally stop working — at least once or twice a day — so I would have to turn it off and on again to get it back up and running.

Meta AI is getting smarter

What makes these smart glasses smart is Meta AI, which powers some of the more interesting functions of the Ray-Ban Display

Like Meta’s other smart glasses, you can say “Hey Meta, what am I looking at,” and it will attempt to describe what it is you’re seeing, but with the added benefit of occasionally showing you a picture in the display itself. For example, when I looked at the Empire State Building and asked Meta what it was, it not only identified the New York skyscraper, but displayed an image of it on-screen.

I used it in a number of situations, and Meta AI was able to identify objects with reasonable accuracy, such as objects in my rooms, as well as things such as toys — it even correctly identified my Voltron. It was less accurate with cars. While it could tell if something was an SUV or a sedan, it had trouble identifying the specific bands, such as mistaking a Toyota for a Range Rover.

The two features unique to the Ray-Ban Display are live translations and live captions, which function similarly to each other. Basically, they’ll listen to someone speaking, and show that person’s words as text on the glasses’ display. It currently works with English, Spanish, French, and Italian.

Live captions are nearly instantaneous; as someone was talking to me, their words appeared about a split second or two after they were spoken.

To test Live translation, I fired up some foreign language shows on Netflix. I started with “The Leopard,” an Italian series. The glasses did an adequate job of translating, but were far from perfect, and would miss some dialogue, especially when people spoke fast.

For example, when one character said “When they say death to the Bourbons, they mean us, right?”, Meta AI translated it as “ When they say dead in Borgone, they mean us, right?”

The camera has some neat tricks

One of the advantages of having a display in your smart glasses is that it makes framing a shot far easier. When you fire up the camera, you get a preview window of the picture or video you’re about to take. Even better is the Ray-Ban Display’s 3x zoom (a feature not found on Meta’s other smart glasses) so you can get even closer to your subject. Below is an example I took of the Empire State building, both zoomed in and zoomed out.

Image 1 of 2

Nighttime photography was passable, though you'll want to keep yourself fairly steady. When I stopped for a moment, I was able to take this pretty pleasing image of the large button sculpture in New York's garment district.

You can also use the pinch-to-zoom feature when viewing photos you’ve taken, and even move your hand vertically and horizontally to pan and tilt.

Also thanks to the screen, the Ray-Ban Displays have their own version of FaceTime. Called Two-way video calling, only while you can see the caller, they can only see a view from your glasses’ camera. This feature works with Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, and Instagram, and is a neat way of showing someone else what you’re seeing in real time.

Meta Ray-Ban Display review: The downs

There are three key areas where the Meta Ray-Ban Displays fall down — namely the lack of things to do, not being able to find your way around, and the low stamina.

Maps are a work in progress

This was one of the features I was looking forward to the most, and one that was most disappointing. To be fair, it’s still in beta, but I wish Meta had something more polished for when the glasses rolled out.

Map data comes from Overture and OpenStreetMap, and, at least in New York City, it worked well. I asked Meta for a list of pizzerias near me, and the glasses displayed several options with ratings. After selecting one, it gave me turn-by-turn directions that updated accurately as I walked to the destination.

At the moment, turn-by-turn directions are only available in 23 U.S. cities, as well as Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto, Milan, Rome, Naples, London, Manchester, and Paris. Plus, the glasses only provide walking directions, so it’s only useful if you’re getting somewhere on your own two feet. It doesn’t even include such things as mass transportation.

In his brief hands-on time with Google’s Android XR glasses, my colleague Mark seemed to have a far richer time using its Maps app, which is understandable given how much development has been put into Google Maps over the years. I can only imagine that when it launches, it will be more fully realized than Meta’s version.

Needs greater app support

As a newish product, the Ray-Ban Displays work well with Meta’s other apps, but there’s not a lot of integrations with any other apps, which limits what you can do with the glasses.

You can connect it to Gmail and Google Calendar, as well as Outlook, and audio apps are also well represented — Apple Music, Amazon Music, Spotify, Audible, and iHeart — but outside of that, there’s not much else.

For example, if you’re looking through your fridge and notice you’re out of milk, you can’t ask Meta to add a quart of two-percent to your shopping list — the best it can do is set up a reminder.

There’s also no smart home integration to speak of, so you can’t say “hey meta, turn on my living room lights,” and have your floor lamp turn on. It would also be great to use the glasses to order an Uber, and then have the Displays show you where the driver is en route.

You need to charge two things — and battery life isn’t great

Meta says that the Ray-Ban Displays should last up to 6 hours with mixed use, and the band up to 18 hours. However, in my testing, the battery life dropped a lot faster. After about an hour and a half of listening to a podcast, the battery had decreased to 40%.

Fortunately, the Displays charging case gives you an extra 24 hours — and even better, the case folds down into a very compact size when you remove the glasses.

One small annoyance: While you can recharge the case via USB-C, the Neural Band uses a proprietary charging cable.

Meta Ray-Ban Display review: Verdict

For now, the Meta Ray-Ban Displays are perhaps the most complete pair of smart glasses you can buy, and the most stylish too (especially when compared to the RayNeo X3 Pro’s dorky aesthetic).

Their built-in screen enables some pretty cool things, such as framing photos and videos, getting turn-by-turn directions, and being able to read and reply to messages more easily and discreetly.

Yet, as much as the Meta Ray-Ban Displays can do, I was left wanting them to be able to do more. When I attended the launch of Alexa+, Amazon leaned very heavily on its partner integrations with rideshare apps, food delivery, and other third-party services, some of which you can already do with the dated (and display-less) Echo Frames.

Meta’s own apps cover some of what I want out of a pair of smart glasses, and there is some integration with music apps, but when you have a display built in, there are far more opportunities with third-party apps and services, which makes their absence all the more glaring.

As I said in my first 24 hours with the Ray-Ban Display, Meta has a little bit of time to make its smart glasses even more functional, but it’s going to face some real competition when Google and Amazon release their own glasses — which look to be far more capable.

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