If you can’t resist the urge to check your phone multiple times, even if you’re out with friends, Meta has a solution. Check out your glasses instead.
“The promise of glasses is to maintain this presence that you have with others,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in the Meta Connect 2025 Keynote. “I think we lost a bit of it on the phone, and I think we’ll have the opportunity to get it back with glasses.”
The reality is that Meta is making sure it doesn’t have to siphon profits through the app store as its own hardware eats up the Apple and Google markets. But nonetheless, this is the angle that Meta is still taking to sell the Metaray-Ban display, the most sophisticated smart glasses.
Meta’s Reality Labs Division burns cash at an incredible rate that has been associated with investors for many years. However, Wednesday’s event gave us a glimpse into what the division’s $70 billion loss is heading since 2020.
Meta has a significant share of the flop, like the overall promise of its social metaverse. (Remember when Metaverse’s avatar finally announced they were getting their feet?) But with Metaray-Ban Display, Meta has created amazing technology unlike other consumer products in the market. We haven’t tested it ourselves yet.
Like Meta’s existing smart glasses, which sells millions of pairs, the new models will have cameras, speakers, microphones and onboard AI assistants. The glasses display, which is offset, is offset so that it doesn’t obstruct your gaze, allowing you to view meta apps such as Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and other directions and live translations.
What stands out for most Metaray-Ban displays is the metaneural band. Metaleneural bands pick up signals sent between the brain and hands when performing gestures using surface electromyography (SEMG).
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Meta’s keynote did not go into detail about how Zuckerberg writes these texts, but a survey by Reality Labs on SEMG shows that users can write such messages by holding their fingers together, as if they were grabbing a pen and “write” the text.
The live AI demo at the keynote failed, but Zuckerberg denounced Wi-Fi, but at least we were able to see the wristband working. Zuckerberg immediately wrote a text message and sent it to Ray-Ban.
“I only have about 30 words per minute about this,” Zuckerberg said on stage at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters. “You can get pretty fast.”
On touchscreen smartphones like the iPhone, research estimates that people send text messages at around 36 words per minute, making Zuckerberg’s claim impressive. On average, participants in Reality Labs studied were close to 21 words per minute.
Unlike the Metaray-Bans of the past, this technology allows people to actually use their glasses without speaking out loud. Apple Watch users can send text without a voice prompt, but the process is very boring and slow, so it only serves as a last resort.
Other gesture controls on the wristband appear to be more similar to the technologies previously used by consumers, such as Nintendo’s Joy-Cons and Apple Watch. However, if the silent text messaging interface is as good as it appears, the wristbands will allow us to make more complicated gestures than we have before.
Meta has invested heavily in SEMG research since 2021, showing a prototype of a heavy product called Orion. Like Apple and Google, Meta is preparing for a future that is not as impossible as these smart glasses could potentially cover their smartphones.
But like the risks of large-scale hardware investments, there is no way to know if this actually feels more natural to people in their daily lives.
This may be Meta’s biggest bet. It’s probably a bigger bet than that lower metaverse. That’s why Zuckerberg announces this technology not only as an attractive innovation, but as something that he wants to portray as more prosocial than a smartphone. Despite him being the one who makes apps that demand our attention, he is a way to capitalize on our growing mal lazyness in our ever-growing screen time.
“This technology needs to be out of the way,” Zuckerberg said.
Will smartphones become an outdated relic of Nokia with a T9 keyboard? It depends on whether there is a truth in Zuckerberg’s story that these glasses help us to be more present. But Meta and its competitors have placed a big bet on the cultural shift from smartphones to smart glasses, and Ray-Ban Display gives consumers the first taste of this potential future.
