Victoria Song, reporting for The Verge:

The glasses look just like a chunky pair of Ray-Bans. But put them on, pinch your middle finger twice, and a display will appear in front of your right eye, hovering in front of your vision. It’s not augmented reality overlaid on the real world so much as on-demand, all-purpose menu with a handful of apps. You can use it to see text messages, Instagram Reels, maps, or previews of your photos, letting you do all kinds of things without having to pull out your phone. In fact, since it pairs to your phone, it sort of functions like a pop-up extension of it.

The display shows apps in full color with a 600-by-600-pixel resolution and a 20-degree field of view. It has a whopping 5,000 nits of maximum brightness, yet only 2 percent light leakage, which means it’s nigh impossible for people around you to see that it’s there. Each pair of the Display glasses comes with transition lenses, and the brightness adjusts depending on ambient UV light. Since it’s monocular, the display only appears in the one lens, and while it can be a little distracting, it doesn’t fully obstruct your vision.

The glasses run a custom operating system modeled after Meta’s virtual reality headsets, which failed spectacularly during the demonstration at Meta Connect, and use a wristband called the Neural Band to detect hand movements. Unlike Apple Vision Pro, they don’t use cameras and sensors to find a person’s hands, which means people are limited to wearing the wristband and only controlling the glasses with the hand they’re wearing the Neural Band on. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, says the battery should last half a day and is waterproof.

For $800, I think Meta really has a winner on its hands. Anything over $1,000 falls through the “normal people” radar, and Meta seems to be inclined to lean on the breakout popularity of its Ray-Ban Meta glasses. Rightfully so: The Ray-Ban Meta glasses are highly successful and beloved by even Meta haters, and they have genuine utility. The camera is high resolution enough, they have a decent speaker, and the Meta artificial intelligence assistant is good enough to control the few functions the glasses have. The Ray-Ban Display spectacles are a big leap in the same direction, adding a display to people’s right lens to bring augmented reality to tens of thousands of people.

But Zuckerberg, in typical Zuckerberg fashion, posited that the new glasses are more than an enhanced version of the Ray-Ban Meta. From a business perspective, he’s correct to do so: Everything Meta announced on Wednesday is almost a one-to-one copy of visionOS, perhaps with a better hardware execution Apple is sure to announce in a few short years. And when Apple does make AR glasses, they’ll be way higher resolution, won’t use a dinky wrist strap, and they’ll be much thinner. They might be more expensive, but that’s the Apple shtick: late but (usually) great. Meta, despite literally renaming itself to advertise the (now failed) metaverse, has not had a good VR headset platform until Wednesday.

Zuckerberg’s vision was AI-infused, explaining how the glasses run an agentic AI companion that works similarly to Gemini Live or Project Astra, making decisions and quips in real-time when “Live AI” is enabled. It isn’t a novel tech demonstration. Nothing Meta makes is novel. But the new glasses are a fully fledged package of all the bits and pieces the tech industry has been working on. It has Google’s state-of-the-art agentic generative artificial intelligence, Apple-esque software, and cutting-edge hardware that I’m inclined to believe genuinely feels like the future. I have no patience for Zuckerberg’s corporate antics, but I have to give Meta credit where it’s due: these are good glasses.

Broadly, I think Meta is the Blackberry of this situation, though I’d be a bad writer if I said Apple wasn’t behind. Apple is, undoubtedly, behind, a position I’ve held since earlier this year when Apple Vision Pro turned out to be a flop. The interesting part, though, is that Apple will continue to be behind if it doesn’t wrap up a project just like the Ray-Ban Display and sell it at no more than $1,500. The problem with Apple Vision Pro isn’t that it’s a bad product; it’s much better than anything Meta could ever dream of making. But it’s $3,500, a price nobody in their right mind is willing to pay for a device that has no content. To be behind is twofold: Apple needs to be price-competitive and manufacture a technically impressive product. Meta has done both.

Why I think this product will succeed is not solely due to its technical merits, though they are admirable, but its price. $800 for a significantly better version of the already beloved Ray-Ban Meta specs is a no-brainer for people who already love the product, and that’s historically been Apple’s most important advantage. People buy Macs because they love their iPhones so much. They buy AirPods because they trust Apple’s headphones will work better with their other Apple devices. Apple has brand loyalty, and for the first time in Meta’s corporate history, it is beginning to develop hardware loyalty. This is the path Zuckerberg aimed for when he touted the metaverse in 2021, and it’s finally coming to fruition. That’s Apple’s biggest threat.