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Oct 15, 2024

A Year With Meta's Smart Glasses: Mark Zuckerberg May Be On to Something | PCMag

Meta's Ray-Ban Stories debuted three years ago to little fanfare and with some significant flaws. But they set the stage for the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, which are becoming a must-have device for

Meta's Ray-Ban Stories debuted three years ago to little fanfare and with some significant flaws. But they set the stage for the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, which are becoming a must-have device for those interested in seeing the future.

The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses feature a 12MP camera that captures respectable pictures and videos. They also include rich-sounding stereo speakers hidden in the stems and a five-microphone array that picks up voices exceptionally well.

I've been experimenting with smart glasses since late 2016, when I picked up the first-gen Snapchat Spectacles. But 12 months with the Ray-Ban Meta has changed my view of how smart glasses can improve my everyday life. That's what Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is betting on; he tells The Verge that he expects people will start swapping smartphones for smart glasses "over the next decade." Here's what that might look like.

The initial draw of the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses was the novelty of a point-of-view camera with better performance than a low-end mobile phone camera. Capturing a bike ride or memories with my kids without holding a phone has been great. My second wave of enthusiasm came from the speakers, which are about as good as Apple’s second-generation AirPods. Listening to music and podcasts without plugging up my ears is a game-changer.

More recently, Meta AI on the smart glasses has become part of my daily routine. Sometimes it’s simple questions I could have asked Siri, like, "What ingredients are in carrot cake?" But with the help of the onboard camera, my requests have become more visual, like "What kind of succulent is this?" And then, "How much should I be watering it?" It’s taken time to explore the AI possibilities—and to remember the visual AI aspect exists.

One of the breakthroughs has been wearing Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses with transition lenses so I can move seamlessly between the indoors and outdoors. With only sunglasses, I wasn’t wearing them frequently enough to get into the habit of using their AI capabilities. Wearing them all the time—at my desk, in the kitchen, and at a store—has unlocked another level of possibilities.

One of my recent discoveries was asking Meta what the Spanish text says in English while looking at a website in another language. Instead of just reading off words it sees, the Ray-Ban Meta snaps a photo and then summarizes the translation. From a recent online CNN article, the AI told me through the speakers that the story was about Hurricane Milton and picked out a few details about fatalities and rescue efforts.

Identifying objects is cool, but I'm most excited about some of the "continuous real-time help updates" Meta announced at this year's Connect conference, including language translation. If someone speaks a supported language, the glasses will pipe a translation into your ears.

Despite their advances, the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses are still just an introduction to wearable AI. With the Orion augmented reality glasses that Zuckerberg teased at Connect, the company is poised to take smart glasses to the next level.

Right now, Orion is just a technology demo, but Meta says it will overlay graphics onto a person’s view of the world and use AI to help them make sense of what they see. The interface looks like the tiled windows from a Meta Quest 3 or Apple Vision Pro. Those graphics aren't currently good enough to want to watch a movie, but they can read text or handle a video call, The Verge says.

Part of what makes Orion such an impressive demo is that the glasses are fully wireless and almost as slim as traditional specs. While the frames include eye-tracking and a ton of outward-facing cameras to anchor digital windows to your room, they offload hand gestures to a wristband and computing to a separate box. As such, Orion's components are pricey, putting the device firmly in the prototype stage for now.

It's easy to imagine seeing name tags pop up above various people in a room or a recipe appear next to a group of food items. But I'm most intrigued by the passive abilities. With AI constantly viewing what I can see, it can point out things before I recognize them—perhaps a preemptive warning about a road hazard or a poisonous creature camouflaged in foliage.

I've also played around with the XReal Air 2 smart glasses, which add a video screen in front of your eyes. But its AR capabilities are rudimentary. It's mostly a personal TV screen only you can see that’s ideal for connecting to a handheld console like a Steam Deck or Nintendo Switch.

Google teased AR glasses during its Project Astra demo at I/O in May, which reminded us a lot of the TCL RayNeo X2. But it's also still in the prototype phase.

Most people think of the Vision Pro as Apple's primary AR product, but in 2022, it released Door Detection as part of iOS’s accessibility features. The feature has evolved to detect more objects and is integrated into the Magnifier app in the latest version of iOS. Detect mode will identify objects and scenes and say them out loud, which is not far off from what Meta is doing.

The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, meanwhile, may seem like a novelty, but unlike some competing products and prototypes, they're useful right now. The Orion demo made me lean into using the Ray-Bans more because they're a bridge to the future. I was hopeful Mark Zuckerberg was onto something when he announced the improved Ray-Ban glasses a year ago, but now I’m convinced these are the real deal, with something even better coming in the not-too-distant future.

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I’ve contributed to PCMag since 2019, covering all kinds of consumer electronics. As a self-identifying early adopter of technology, I’ve stumbled through the changing devices over the years and usually end up writing about how they work, why they're great, or how they could be better.

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