It’s no secret Meta is working on more smart glasses, but the cost and how the next Ray-Ban Meta follow-up will work has been revealed.
According to Bloomberg, the upcoming Meta smart glasses will start at more than $1,000, and could cost as much as $1,400. The publication’s sources say pricing is yet to be nailed down ahead of a release potentially as early as later this year.
The cost represents is a huge jump from the $329 Ray-Ban Meta Wayfarer pair, but there’s a solid excuse for the increased cost. The Meta smart glasses, currently going under the name Hypernova, will have a screen behind the lenses.
How Meta’s Hypernova Smart Glasses May Work
The screen sits towards the bottom of the right lens, meaning the person wearing it will need to look down in order to see what’s displayed on it.
That will include notifications from WhatsApp and the Facebook Messenger app. But apparently the plan is not to open up its functionality as much as possible. It won’t have an app store, giving Meta tight control over what the Meta Hypernova smart glasses can actually do.
Therefore, its jobs won’t necessarily be all that different to those of the current Ray-Ban Meta pair. You might use these Hypernova smart glasses to capture photos and video, play music and interact with Meta’s AI assistant.
Of course, having a screen to rest on could significantly ramp-up the kind of interactions that are feasible, compared to the current Meta Ray-Ban pair.
The concept here is not entirely different to a pair of smart glasses announced well over a decade ago, Google Glass. That pair was released in 2013, and used a tiny projector that placed 640 × 360 pixels of image data into the top-right of the wearer’s vision. Meta has opted for the bottom-right, apparently.
The other difference, with any luck, is Meta’s Hypernova smart glasses will become a pair people actually want to wear. In February, the manufacturer of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses EssilorLuxottica announced two million pairs have been sold so far — they were released in October 2023.
Meta has said it aims to sell 10 million pairs a year by 2026’s end, but a set that costs more than $1,000 is unlikely to make too much of a dent in such a figure. However, the company plans to continue offering cheaper pairs.
It will also bump up the top-end model to a dual-screen design — one for each eye — in 2027 according to Bloomberg.
These screen-packed Meta smart glasses will use capacitive stems for control, turning the glasses’ arms into touch surfaces, and Meta is apparently planning a wristband codenamed Ceres to offer another method of control.
The Meta Hypernova smart glasses are separate from the Orion pair Meta officially announced as “the most advanced pair of AR glasses ever made” in September 2024.
That pair appears to display elements towards the centre of the wearer’s vision, while Hypernova will presumably strive to make the AR elements as close to invisible as possible to anyone but the wearer.
For some the primary upgrade of this upcoming pair might be a simple camera boost, which has been compared to that of a jump between two phone generations.
