The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses set out to achieve a worthy goal: Combine the basic functionality of a pair of glasses (or sunglasses) with many of the media and AI features you’d get from a smartphone. This way, you can capture photos and videos, listen to music, and interact with a digital assistant without ever having to pull out your phone. Instead, the glasses you’re already wearing can cover all those functions — at least, that’s the idea.
In practice, the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses are a bit more style than substance. The main issue? In most cases, your smartphone still offers a better experience for all the smart things these glasses can do. They’re miles beyond the ugly Google Glass prototypes from a decade ago, but they’re not ready to take over your digital life.
To be fair, the Meta Smart Glasses make it incredibly easy to take a photo or talk to an AI assistant, but they often live on an island: They’re not compatible with many popular apps and services you likely use for everyday functions like directions, checking your calendar, or reading your email.
I think smart glasses will eventually become worth the investment. But Meta’s Ray-Bans just aren’t useful enough to be a must-have for most people. That said, they are fun to play around with, and they look wonderful. In that sense, they could still appeal to tech enthusiasts who love to try out the latest innovations, especially if they’re already in the market for a new pair of Ray-Bans.
Ray-Ban Wayfarer Meta Smart Glasses
Ray-Ban’s iconic Wayfarers now offer the powerful features of Meta AI. These glasses have built-in cameras, so you can take photos and videos and even ask questions to get real-time answers about what you’re looking at.
The smart glasses look and feel fantastic
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The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses are available in three styles: Wayfarer, Skyler, and Headliner. Within each style, you can also choose between different sizes, colors, and lens types. Prescription lenses are available, too, but only from -6.00 to +4.00. For my review, I tested a pair of the Wayfarer sunglasses.
Were it not for the camera and LED indicator adorning the front of the frames, you’d probably have no idea that these were smart glasses. Meta’s design is impeccable. It perfectly captures the essence of Ray-Ban’s classic look without mucking it up with unnecessary adornments, like Google Glass’ ugly over-the-eye display.
The glasses’ temples, or arms, are slightly bulkier due to the electronics contained within, but they’re only ever-so-slightly wider than what you’d find on Ray-Ban’s conventional Wayfarers. It’s an engineering feat in itself that Ray-Ban and Meta could pack in so much technology without sacrificing style.
And while the smart glasses weigh more than a typical pair of sunglasses, they’re still comfortable to wear for hours at a time. The hinges are a little stiffer than my normal Ray-Ban Wayfarers, but that was the only awkwardness I encountered. These smart glasses feel as good as they look.
The speakers, camera, and controls are seamlessly built in
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Two open-ear speakers are located on the bottom of each of the glasses’ arms, with two tiny holes as the only visible indication they exist. They sound solid, providing plenty of clarity and surprisingly decent bass performance, given their size. Audio enthusiasts will still do better with a pair of dedicated headphones or earbuds, but the Meta Ray-Bans are fine for casual listening. That said, they don’t provide much isolation, so everyone around you will be able to hear what you’re rocking.
For controls, the glasses use a touch-sensitive pad that seamlessly blends into the right arm. You’ll get used to it as you run your finger back and forth to adjust the glasses’ volume and long-press to summon your favorite (compatible) music-streaming app or fire off a question to Meta AI. Alternatively, you can use speech commands and simply say “Hey Meta” to launch the digital assistant. The left arm is otherwise barren; it’s just an arm.
A tiny capture button on the top-right of the glasses, toward the front, lets you take photos using the integrated 12MP (megapixel) camera. Press once to shoot, or hold it down to take a video up to three minutes long. Yes, holding the button down makes it a pain to record your favorite band at a concert, even more so because a bright LED on the front-left corner of the glasses illuminates whenever you take a picture or shoot a video. The light can be irritating, but Meta earns kudos for putting such a visible privacy indicator front and center.
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The glasses are rated for up to four hours of battery, and they include a handsome charging case that offers up to eight additional charges. I’ve found that if you’re just using the glasses for regular, everyday tasks like asking occasional questions, they can make it through most of a workday, but taking photos and especially videos really starts draining them. Thankfully, if you’re able to slap the glasses in the charging case when you aren’t using them, battery life won’t be a problem for a full day of use. Of course, that could be an issue if you use a prescription pair.
The Meta Ray-Bans support Bluetooth and WiFi 6 connectivity, but they’re fussy. Initially, the glasses refused to connect to any of my WiFi networks. A little troubleshooting revealed that it was likely their use of the WPA3/WPA2 security protocol. I had to build a separate WiFi network, using WPA2 exclusively, to get the glasses to connect. I haven’t encountered similar issues with any of the other smart devices I’ve used over the past year.
Capture quality is decent, but it can’t match a typical smartphone
The glasses’ image and video quality are fine, but only that. You get serviceable captures of whatever you’re looking at. Still, I wouldn’t rely on these smart glasses as my only camera for that once-in-a-lifetime hike or vacation getaway.
They’re best for when you need to capture action quickly, like when I wanted to snap a photo of something cute my cat was doing. If I had to fish out my phone, my cat would have stopped by the time I had the camera ready to go.
Still, I found the glasses’ overall picture quality to be lacking compared to most modern smartphones. While I understand that comparing an iPhone 16 Pro camera against a pair of smart glasses isn’t exactly fair, the issues plaguing Meta’s camera are pretty obvious to the naked eye.
David Muprhy/Business Insider
David Murphy/Business Insider
Images appear less saturated, and the white balance tends to be slightly warmer than natural. Darker parts of images feel bright when they should look rich. A number of my indoor photos also came out blurrier than expected.
This could be a result of the camera’s limited 12MP resolution (something you’d expect in a top-shelf smartphone camera from five years ago) or the fact that the glasses can’t help but wobble a bit when you press down on the capture button while wearing them. I didn’t have as many issues when shooting outside, but a well-lit room shouldn’t give any camera such a challenge in 2025.
The glasses only shoot pictures in portrait orientation, which is another odd limitation. It’s not the framing I’d prefer when I’m staring at a lovely California sunset on the beach, and something I wish I could change with a quick command to Meta AI.
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Sharing your photos and videos on the go is quick and easy, provided the glasses are paired with your phone’s data connection and you’ve synced the Meta View mobile app with your contacts, Facebook Messenger, or WhatsApp. Taking a picture and immediately sending it to a friend is just one voice command away. On iOS Messages, the friend receives a link to see the photo you’ve shot, which they can tap on to view and save the image. It’s not as organic as sending a pic with your smartphone, which embeds the image directly in the chat itself, but it gets the job done.
The one hitch? You can’t preview any photos or videos you send to a friend this way, so that gorgeous sunset you’re staring at might look a little blurry or overexposed without you realizing it. And this brings me back to questioning the underlying usefulness of smart glasses like this. Since the glasses rely on your phone’s data connection when you’re out and about, you might as well just use your phone to take the photo to begin with. Sure, it takes a little longer, but it will be of higher quality, and you can see it before you send it.
If you don’t want to share snapshots right away, you can also store photos and videos on the glasses using their built-in 32GB of storage. This way, you can upload media to your phone to view and send later. However, the process to do this is a bit cumbersome. If the glasses are out of their charging case, the only way to initiate an upload is to take out your phone, launch the Meta View app, and connect to a specific WiFi network that the glasses emit.
Automatic imports do fire off when the glasses are tucked safely in their charging case, so long as your glasses are within range of a WiFi network you previously saved within the Meta View app.
Though Meta AI is fun to play around with, it’s only compatible with certain functions
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The glasses’ built-in Meta AI is useful when you have a question that needs answering, but less so when it relates to triggering a task you’d like the glasses or your connected smartphone to do.
For example, having a digital companion in the kitchen is great when you need to convert measurements. And if you have some random question that requires a quick answer, Meta AI returns decent results akin to what you’d get from Google Gemini or Siri (using ChatGPT).
Asking Meta AI to read anything you’re looking at is also fun to mess around with and great for accessibility. The same is true when you ask the glasses to simply describe what’s in front of you, although you shouldn’t always believe what Meta AI returns. It couldn’t correctly identify the brand of laptop I was looking at, even with the logo clearly visible, and it confused a figurine of Frollo from Disney’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” for Maleficent. However, it excelled at translating text in other languages to English. I could see that being incredibly useful when traveling abroad, assuming you have a cellular or internet connection.
Unfortunately, Meta AI’s reliance on Meta services is limiting. The AI can’t tie into your smartphone’s existing assistant and is incompatible with many popular apps you likely use.
For instance, you can’t ask for directions. Even if you manually ask Meta AI to take you from one specific location to another, you’re out of luck. Meta AI can read turn-by-turn directions you’ve already set up on your phone’s Apple Maps or Google Maps app, but so can every other pair of connected headphones and earbuds.
You can’t use Meta AI to put new items on whatever digital calendar you use, nor review what’s coming up. You can set reminders, but that’s all delivered via the Meta View app, which is likely not what you use to manage your digital life. Gmail? Not happening. FaceTime? Proprietary. Text messaging? You can send them, and your glasses will read what you’ve sent, but it won’t prompt you for a reply like Siri (and will annoyingly tell you it can’t reply if you ask it to, even though you can fake it by telling Meta AI to send a new message to that contact instead.)
Again, Meta AI is useful for answering random questions, but so is a quick “Hey Siri” or “Hey Google” command with a smartphone or voice-enabled pair of headphones. And there’s little Meta’s Ray-Bans can do that Gemini or Apple Intelligence can’t. Using glasses you’re already wearing is more convenient than reaching into your pocket for your phone, but the layers of additional functionality you get with a smartphone are often worth the extra effort needed to grab it.
Should you buy the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses?
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In their current form, the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses are more of a novelty than an essential tech product. They’re the kind of device that’s super fun to play around with for a few weeks, but might end up in a drawer later on. You can simply get better use out of combining other products you probably already own, like a smartphone, a smartwatch, and a pair of wireless earbuds.
That said, they’re good for casually listening to music, asking quick questions, or snapping pictures in a pinch, and there is something cool about handling these functions through a pair of slick glasses without ever lifting a finger. If you’re already in the market for a pair of regular Ray-Bans, you could view these as a step-up option to consider. They cost at least $100 more than standard Ray-Bans. In that context, tech enthusiasts with money to spare could find them worthwhile, but most people are better off waiting until a next-gen model comes along with more features.
On that note, Meta has a few fancier tiers of smart glasses that it’s reportedly working on — built-in screens and all, as the rumors go — which might feel a bit more futuristic than this offering. But for now, the current-gen Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses simply aren’t convenient or innovative enough to recommend to a mass market.
