Meta Launches $799 Glasses With Screen and AI Integration

Meta Platforms Inc., seeking to turn its smart glasses lineup into a must-have product, on Wednesday unveiled its first version with a built-in screen. The latest model, the $799 Meta Ray-Ban Display, features a screen in the right lens. It can show text messages, video calls, turn-by-turn directions in maps and visual results from queries to Meta’s AI service. The subtly integrated display can also serve as a viewfinder for the camera on a user’s phone or surface music playback. Bloomberg News Managing Editor for Global Consumer Tech Mark Gurman joins Bloomberg Businessweek Daily to discuss.

Speaking at the company’s annual Meta Connect event, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said Meta’s future glasses will be a vehicle for “superintelligence,” a term he has adopted to describe advanced artificial intelligence development and the name of a team inside the company.

“AI should serve people, not just be something that sits in a data center, automating large parts of society,” he said Wednesday from the stage at Meta’s Menlo Park, California headquarters.

For smart glasses — or AI glasses, as Meta now calls them — a display is key. The addition, over time, could allow consumers to offload some functionality to their eyewear that they would normally expect their phones to handle.

In an interview ahead of their launch, Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth called the new glasses “the first serious product” in the space. This launch is a key part of Meta’s effort to build its own consumer electronics ecosystem, positioning itself against rivals like Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. Since debuting its first virtual reality headset in 2016, Meta has aimed to attract users away from the dominant platforms.

“This feels like the kind of thing where you can start to keep your phone in your pocket more and more throughout the day,” Bosworth said. He added that the phone isn’t going away, but glasses offer a more convenient way to access its most popular features.

The glasses introduce a new control system. While users can still swipe along the frame as with previous models, the primary interface is now hand gestures, detected by a neural wristband strapped around the wearer’s dominant hand.

The user can select items by pinching their thumb and index finger, swipe through items by sliding a thumb across their gripped hand, double tap their thumb to invoke Meta’s AI voice assistant, or twist their hand mid-air to adjust music volume and other controls.

In addition to app interactions and the ability to handle AI queries, the glasses include a live caption feature that displays spoken words in real time — including translations — similar to closed captions on a TV. The video calling function lets wearers see the person they’re speaking with while sharing their own point of view.

Users can reply to texts by sending an audio recording or dictating a response. Later this year, the wristband will add another option: handwriting words in the air. A future update will also let the glasses focus on the person a wearer is speaking with while filtering out background noise.

The new glasses will go on sale Sept. 30 and will include the wristband. Meta is offering two sizes and two color options: black and a brown shade called sand. They will be sold by EssilorLuxottica SA’s Ray-Ban, Lenscrafters International Inc., Best Buy Co. and a limited number of Verizon Communications Inc. locations.

At launch, they’ll support apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and a music app powered by Spotify Technology SA. The Instagram app will initially only support direct messages, but Meta plans to add Reels viewing later this year.

The glasses’ display offers a limited 20-degree field of view with a resolution of 600 x 600 pixels. Its brightness ranges from 30 to 5,000 nits, providing decent visibility in most outdoor conditions, though it can struggle in the brightest sunlight. Some prescriptions are supported, but only as a built-to-order option.

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