Meta to add display to Ray-Bans as race over smart glasses intensifies

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Meta plans to add displays to its Ray-Ban smart glasses as soon as next year, as the US tech giant accelerates its plans to build lightweight headsets that can usurp the smartphone as consumers’ main computing device.

The $1.5tn social media group is planning to add a screen inside the $300 sunglasses it makes and sells in partnership with eyewear group EssilorLuxottica, according to people familiar with the plans.

The updated Ray-Bans could be released as early as the second half of 2025, the people said. The small display would be likely to be used to show notifications or responses from Meta’s virtual assistant.

The move comes as Meta pushes further into wearable devices and what chief executive Mark Zuckerberg hopes will be the next computing platform, as rivals such as Apple, Google and Snap also race to develop their own similar products.

In September, Meta unveiled its augmented-reality glasses prototype Orion. According to people familiar with the matter, the company has accelerated Orion’s development following the enthusiastic response of early testers.

These people said Meta had brought forward plans to turn the device into a consumer product, though any release is still likely to be years away.

Orion’s compact design, lightweight frame and innovative displays, which overlay 3D content on to the real world, have been hailed as breakthroughs after years of failed AR headsets, including Google-backed Magic Leap and Microsoft’s Hololens.

Meta declined to comment on its smart glasses strategy. But in mid-December, Andrew Bosworth, its chief technology officer, wrote that 2025 would be “the most important [year] in the history of Reality Labs”, the unit that builds its glasses and Quest virtual reality headsets.

Reality Labs has been lossmaking since its creation in 2020 as part of Zuckerberg’s long-term bet on the metaverse. The division lost $13bn in the first three quarters of 2024, and generated only around $1bn in revenue.

The Ray-Ban Meta glasses have become a surprise hit among consumers after the latest version was launched in September 2023. The current model features discreet in-ear speakers, cameras and microphones, for listening to music, taking photos and chatting with Meta’s artificial intelligence assistant.

While the first version of a display would be likely to show simple text and images, it would represent a significant step towards converging the device with Zuckerberg’s longer-term vision of AR glasses that can display a virtual world transposed upon the real world.

With the Ray-Bans, “Meta proved that these lightweight glasses, even without a display, could be interesting and useful,” said Michael Miller, who leads on augmented reality hardware at Niantic, the developer of Pokémon Go and other AR games.

Meta’s remains in the early days of experimenting what AR headsets might look like. Its Orion glasses are controlled by wristbands, which take signals from the body, including from the brain, in a neural interface. One person familiar with the matter said Meta was also exploring using a ring with a track pad or ball to control a headset.

Experts say the platform faces big hurdles in developing fashionable glasses with adequate hardware performance and battery life, at a desirable price point. There are also serious supply chain challenges.

One of Orion’s biggest innovations is its novel use of silicon carbide lenses. The material has not been widely used in optics before and helped Meta create a much larger and brighter image for Orion’s users than is possible using regular glass.

However, the high cost and lack of large-scale manufacturing of silicon carbide lenses present a significant barrier to turning Orion into an affordable mass-market product without compromising on one of its advantages.

“If the goal now is to expedite Orion commercialisation, one path would be to reduce the field of view . . . and use more ubiquitous glass materials,” said Miller.

Experts said that products such as Ray-Ban Meta glasses and Apple’s Vision Pro are helping to get consumers comfortable with the idea of smart headsets, given the challenges of societal acceptance that ultimately thwarted Google’s Glass eyewear almost a decade ago.

The first Ray-Ban Meta glasses launched in 2021 and suffered from limited sales. However, the newest generation, which launched in October 2023, sold more in a few months than the previous ones did in two years, according to EssilorLuxottica’s chief executive Francesco Milleri. Shipments of glasses wearables in 2024 grew by 73 per cent across the market.

Meta’s push comes despite Zuckerberg shifting focus away from his plans to build a 3D avatar-filled online world, known as a metaverse. Instead he has laid out his intention that Meta becomes a leader in AI, pouring billions in investment into the space, including developing its own open source large language models.

“What’s starting to become interesting about the Ray Bans and Orion is the way Meta’s AI strategy is converging with mixed reality,” said Luke Alvarez, founding general partner at Hiro Capital, which invests in games and metaverse tech. “Maybe [Zuckerberg] can end up owning a big piece of the next-gen operating system, which is clearly his stated goal.”