Hands-on: Next-gen Meta Ray-ban AI smartglasses offer same slick style, better battery and camera

There may be a smartphone in every pocket in the world now, but the Silicon Valley tech giants have entered another race for your hard-earned cash.

The next personal tech battlefield is in smartglasses and Meta — parent company of Facebook and Instagram — are taking an early lead in the space. As well as an all-new Oakley collaboration, it’s updated its much-loved Meta Ray-bans, squeezing cutting edge tech into a pair of frames that don’t look all that different from regular glasses. And we’ve been hands-on (or should that be eyes-in?) with the latest model at an exclusive launch event in London.

If you’re familiar with the previous Meta Ray-ban glasses, you should know what to expect here. A relatively slim set of frames with regular prescription or sunglasses lenses, the new Meta-Ray bans come equipped with small cameras pointing where you look, and tiny speakers that sit over your ears for personal listening. They’re battery equipped, recharging when placed in their accompanying case, but remain svelte enough to be easily mistaken for regular Ray-bans. If you like the classic Ray-ban frame shape, there’s a good chance you’ll love these too.

Though there’s a touch sensitive panel on the arm of the frames, and a camera shutter button, the magic kicks in with hands-free, voice activated controls. Connecting to your smartphone, all you need to do is say the ‘hey Meta’ wake word, and then you can ask the Ray-bans all manner of requests. You can place calls, select music streaming tracks from all the top services, and trigger the camera shutter.

AI assistance

Things get even more interesting when Meta’s artificial intelligence bot, Llama, gets involved. Asking complicated questions of the glasses sees them return a response from the agent, letting you get conversational, in-depth answers to almost any topic imaginable. The AI can also power a live translation feature alongside its app, letting you get English translations in real-time from those speaking German, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese to you. It’s a little stilted, and accuracy is in part dependant on the clarity of the speaker, but it’ll help make those who failed their languages A-Levels a little more confident when travelling.

Bring the cameras into the equation and the glasses become even more useful. Image recognition capabilities mean that you can ask the Meta Ray-bans to not only translate text from other languages (even recognising precise phrases you’re pointing at), but identify and describe objects in front of you. Not sure which plant is growing in your garden? Can’t identify a football kit? The glasses can handle that for you.

What’s new on the inside? Specs, price and release date

From an external and feature point of view, the Meta Ray-bans are very similar to their predecessor. But there’s a few key upgrades when it comes to internal specs.

Firstly there’s a massive jump in battery life. The last-gen Meta Ray-bans were only active for four hours before needing to be recharged in their case. But a redesigned battery and software refinements sees that number double to eight hours on this new model, meaning you’ll get a good chunk of a day with these working away before needing to give them some more juice.

Video capture also jumps from 2K up to 3K, allowing for more detail in the videos and photos that you take. It also means a number of new shooting styles can be triggered, including slo-motion and hyperlapse (e.g, long clips sped up).

Tech improvements, naturally, mean there’s a bit of a price bump here. The new Meta Ray-bans will cost £379 ($379), up from the £299 of the previous model. I’d say the battery jump here just about justifies that and, having lived with the previous edition for coming up to a year, the steady improvement of features on the software side has been impressive. Meta clearly cares about this hardware race.

When it comes to actually picking up the Meta Ray-bans, you’ll have a huge amount of options to pick from. The specs will be hitting shelves in 27 different combinations of frame shapes (Wayfarer and Skyler), colour and lens varieties, including in limited edition seasonal shades. And lens options will include clear glass, sun blockers and transitionals, along with prescription options at the point of purchase.

Expect to find these on sale from September 17th.

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