Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses cost $799, fail demos

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday unveiled what he called the company's "first AI glasses with high resolution" — the Meta Ray-Ban Display, coming September 30 for $799. But the unveiling didn't quite go as Zuckerberg hoped.

Zuckerberg's MetaConnect 2025 keynote, held at Meta's California headquarters at the unusually late hour of 5 p.m. Pacific (8 p.m. Eastern), was expected to reveal a groundbreaking pair of smart glasses, codenamed Hypernova. What we got: An upgrade to the preexisting Ray-Ban Meta frames; a new sports-focused set of Oakleys, the Meta Vanguard; and the new model, confusingly called Meta Ray-Bans.

"This is one of those special moments where we get to show you something we've poured our lives into," Zuckerberg told a packed house and a livestream with 4,000 viewers. The Meta Ray-Bans had a bright, crisp display rated at an impressive 5,000 nits, he said.

Then Zuckerberg revealed not just the Meta Ray-Bans he walked in with (and quickly stashed), but also a companion device called the Meta Neural Band, a light fabric wristband that picks up on small movements in the wrist. This allows you to enter words on the smart glasses display by pretending to handwrite. "I'm up to about 30 words a minute on this," Zuckerberg said.

And then the CEO stood helpless as a repeated WhatsApp video call from Meta CTO Andrew "Boz" Bosworth appeared on his glasses. Zuckerberg's Neural Band interface was apparently unable to pick up the call; Boz had to join him live on stage.

Zuckerberg's demo game had started strong; the keynote opened with a live view through his Meta Ray-Bans, showing Zuckerberg as he fired up a hype song (the Neural Band also allows for volume control) and replied to incoming texts with a muscle-arm emoji.

But then a live demo of the new Ray-Ban Metas (available now for $379) ran aground on the glasses' "LiveAI feature," which was supposed to be instructing one presenter on how to make a sauce with all of the ingredients in front of him.

"Now that you've made your base ..." the glasses began several times, ignoring the presenter's repeated request for instructions on how to make that base: "What do I do first?"

Zuckerberg later blamed that demo failure on the WiFi, but he was unable to explain why his Meta Ray-Bans could not pick up Boz's call. Finally, a non-live non-demo video purported to show the Meta Ray-Bans being used to design a surfboard and order parts.

Zuckerberg explained this was how the glasses would work with agentic AI, brushing past any concerns about whether agentic AI is a thing that works at all — in live demos or otherwise.