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I’ve been reviewing smart smart glasses for years, and while many have shown promise, none have truly delivered detailed visual information in a way that feels natural and untethered. Some, like the Rokid Glasses, come close—but they’re consistently held back by technical shortcomings, clunky controls, and a lack of refinement. The new Meta Ray-Ban Display could be the pair to change that. I had the chance to try them out at a demo event in New York, and I came away genuinely impressed. There’s still more testing to do before I can say if they’re worth $799 (especially with the month-plus waitlist just to book a demo), but based on this first hands-on experience, the potential is clear.

Display: A Full-Color AR View

The Meta Ray-Ban Display’s waveguide display is the best of its type I’ve seen yet, for several reasons. To clarify exactly what that means, I should first explain waveguide display technology.

Displays in smart glasses can be separated into two categories: prism and waveguide. Both use tiny projectors to send an image to your eyes, but they differ in terms of how the image actually reaches your eyes. Prism displays use angled lenses, located behind the front lenses, to redirect projected light toward the eyes, much like a prism. These lenses are bulky, and while you can see through them, they can dim and obscure your view even when the display is turned off. The advantage is that they can show high-resolution, full-color images with a wide field of view. 

Waveguide displays use a single lens with special patterns etched into it. They’re far lighter than prism displays and completely transparent when not in use, but the trade-off is that they have significantly lower resolutions and fields of view. They’re also usually monochrome: Other waveguide-equipped models I’ve tested, including the Even Realities G1, Vuzix Z100, and Rokid Glasses, all have green-only displays.

The Meta Ray-Ban Display solves at least one of those problems. It features a full-color waveguide display, and considering the challenges of the technology, it’s truly stunning. When I tried on the glasses, colors looked surprisingly vibrant, and the picture was quite bright in a reasonably well-lit room. Even though the resolution is only 600 by 600 and the field of view is a tiny 20 degrees, to my eye, menus, text, pictures, videos, and even maps were large and sharp enough to read easily. 

I say eye singular, because the display is only built into the right lens. This could be awkward for users with a dominant left eye, but I didn’t have any difficulty reading it. Moreover, I could easily see everything in front of me, both around the projected image and through the other, clear lens. I couldn’t take them outside to see if the display is still visible against a sunny day, a challenge of waveguide displays.

I’ve used prism smart glasses with bigger, sharper, and more colorful displays before; I’m writing this with an XReal One Pro connected to my laptop right now. However, prism displays are bulky and make the glasses difficult to see through. Even if my laptop wasn’t tethered by a cable to the One Pro glasses, I wouldn’t feel comfortable wearing them while walking around. The Meta Ray-Ban Display is a different beast, and while it wouldn’t be my first choice for remote work or movie watching, I can definitely see myself using it on the go.

The waveguide in the right lens is nearly invisible, which might not seem important unless you’ve tried competing smart glasses. The waveguides on every other pair I’ve used have appeared to outside observers as distinct rectangles with weird, colorful reflections. The actual details of what the displays show couldn’t be seen, but they’ve still been invariably distracting to anyone I talked to while wearing them. On the Meta Ray-Ban Display, I didn’t see a hint of the waveguide from the outside. At least, I couldn’t see it in the lighting of the specific room where I had the demo. It might still be visible under different lighting conditions, but from my early testing, it’s the least outwardly recognizable waveguide I’ve seen so far.

Controls: You Use Your Fingers

 

The Meta Neural Band enables gesture controls (Credit: Will Greenwald)

More than the color display, the biggest draw of the Meta Ray-Ban Display is its controller. It uses what Meta calls a Neural Band, a wristband that uses electromyography (EMG) to track hand gestures. Instead of sensors directly on your hand or a camera array constantly watching it like on the Apple Vision Pro, the Neural Band measures tiny movements on your arm to determine what your hand is doing.

In my short demo, the Neural Band controls worked better than I expected. Gestures are simple: Curve your fingers inward and swipe your thumb up, down, left, and right on the side of your index finger to move the cursor in different directions, pinch with thumb and index finger to click, pinch with thumb and middle finger to go back, double-pinch with thumb and middle finger to sleep and wake the display, and double-tap your thumb against the side of your index finger to bring up the AI assistant. There’s also a contextual gesture where you hold your thumb and index finger together and rotate them, as if turning a knob, which can adjust the volume or zoom in and out, depending on the situation. 

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(Credit: Will Greenwald)

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