Meta plans to announce further advances in smart glasses at its annual Connect conference next month, including the launch of the company's first consumer-facing glasses with a display. According to people familiar with the matter, this is one of two new devices Meta plans to launch at the conference. The company will also launch its first wristband that will allow users to control the glasses with gestures, people familiar with the matter said.
Connect is a two-day developer conference focused on virtual reality, augmented reality and virtual worlds. Originally called Oculus Connect, it got its current moniker after Facebook renamed its parent company Meta in 2021.
The glasses, which are internally codenamed Hypernova, will feature a small digital display on the right lens of the device, people familiar with the matter said.
The device is expected to cost about $800 and will be sold in partnership with Essilor Luxottica, people familiar with the matter said. In October last year, it was reported that Meta was working with Luxottica to develop consumer glasses with displays.
Meta began partnering with Luxottica to sell smart glasses in 2021, when the two companies released the first generation of Ray-Ban Stories, which allowed users to take photos or videos with simple voice commands. The collaboration has since expanded, including the addition of advanced artificial intelligence capabilities last year, making the second-generation product surprisingly popular with early adopters.
Luxottica owns several eyewear brands, including Ray-Ban, and is licensed to many other brands, including Prada. It's unclear which brand of AR glasses Luxottica will use, but a job posting from Meta this week revealed that the company is hiring a technical program manager for its "wearables organization" which is "responsible for the Ray-Ban AR glasses and other wearable hardware."
In June this year, Meta and Luxottica plan to launch Prada-branded smart glasses. People familiar with the matter said Prada glasses are known for their thick frames and thick arms, which may make them a suitable choice for Hypernova devices.
Last year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg used Connect to showcase the company's experimental Orion augmented reality glasses.
Both lenses of the Orion glasses have augmented reality capabilities, capable of integrating 3D digital vision into the real world, but the device is only intended to be a prototype to show the public what is possible with augmented reality glasses. Still, Orion brings some positive momentum to Meta. Since the end of 2020, the Reality Labs unit responsible for manufacturing hardware devices has lost nearly $70 billion.
With Hypernova, Meta will eventually offer glasses with a display to consumers, but some sources say the company has lower expectations for sales. That's because the device will require more components than its voice-only predecessors and will be slightly heavier and thicker, people familiar with the matter said.
Luxottica CEO Francesco Milleri said in February that Meta and Ray-Ban had sold 2 million pairs of second-generation glasses since 2023. In July this year, Luxottica said sales revenue from the smart glasses had more than tripled year-on-year.
As part of the extension agreement between Meta and Luxottica announced in September last year, Meta acquired approximately 3% of Luxottica's shares. Meta also received multi-year brand exclusivity rights to Luxottica’s smart glasses technology, a person familiar with the matter said in June.
While the Hypernova will feature a display, those visual features are expected to be limited, people familiar with the matter said. They say the color display will offer about a 20-degree field of view, meaning it will appear in a small, fixed-position window and will be used primarily to convey simple information, such as incoming text messages.
Meta's head of technology, Andrew Bosworth, said earlier this month that having just one display has advantages over two, including a lower price.
"Monocular displays have a lot of advantages," Bosworth said in a video on Instagram. "They're affordable, they're lighter, and they don't require parallax correction, so they're structurally much simpler." "
"Interacting with an AI assistant"
In July, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) disclosed additional details about Meta's upcoming glasses in a letter to an attorney representing Meta. Although the company and product names were omitted from the letter, a person familiar with the matter confirmed that the letter was referring to Meta's Hypernova glasses.
"This mode will enable users to take and share photos and videos, make phone calls and video calls, send and receive messages, listen to audio playback, and interact with AI assistants in different forms and methods, including voice, display, and manual interaction," the July 23 letter reads.
CBP's letter is part of routine communications between the company and the U.S. government when determining the country of origin of consumer products. The company calls the product "a new class of smart glasses" and says the device will feature "a lens display that allows users to interact with visual content generated by smart features, as well as components that provide image data retrieval, processing and rendering capabilities."
The Hypernova glasses will also come with a wristband that will use technology developed by Meta's CTRL Labs unit, people familiar with the matter said. Meta acquired CTRL Labs in 2019, a company focused on developing neurotechnology that allows users to control computing devices through gestures on their arms.
The band is expected to be a key input component for future full AR glasses released by the company, so getting data through Hypernova now could improve future versions of the band, people familiar with the matter said. Instead of using camera sensors to track body movement like Apple does.
Meta's wristband uses so-called myoelectric sensor technology, which can read and interpret electrical signals from hand movements.
One of the challenges Meta faced with the band was how people chose to wear it, said a person familiar with the product's development. If the device is too loose, it won't be able to read the user's electronic signals as intended, which could affect its performance, the person said. In addition, the band encountered some problems in testing, such as which arm it should be worn on, how well it works on men and women, and how well it works on people wearing long-sleeved clothing.
In July, the CTRL Labs team published a paper about its wristband in the journal Nature, which Meta also mentioned in a blog post. In the paper, the Meta team details their use of machine learning techniques to make the wristbands work with as many people as possible. The additional data collected by the upcoming device should improve these features of future Meta smart glasses.
"We successfully prototyped a myoelectric wristband with Orion, our first true pair of augmented reality (AR) glasses, but that's just the beginning," Meta wrote in the post. "Our team has developed advanced machine learning models that convert the neural signals that control the muscles in the wrist into commands that drive people to interact with the glasses, eliminating traditional, more cumbersome forms of input."
Meta recently began reaching out to developers to begin testing Hypernova and accompanying wristbands, people familiar with the matter said. The company hopes to attract third-party developers, particularly those specializing in generative artificial intelligence, to develop experimental applications that Meta can showcase to spark interest in smart glasses, people familiar with the matter said.
In addition to Hypernova and the wristband, Meta will also announce a third-generation voice-enabled smart glasses in partnership with Luxottica at Connect, a person familiar with the matter said.
CBP also mentioned the device in its July letter, calling it "next generation smart glasses." The glasses will include "components that provide capacitive touch functionality, allowing users to interact with the smart glasses through touch gestures," the letter said.