Bloomberg reported earlier this week that Meta, which successfully launched at the end of 2023 the Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, is working on a new generation of wearable devices that are scheduled to ship this year. That includes smart Oakley glasses aimed at athletes and high-end glasses – code-named Hypernova – whose design is closer to the current Ray-Ban model.
As a reminder, the Meta Ray-Ban device was not the long-awaited augmented reality (AR) glasses despite all its features (phone calls, music streaming, photos and AI assistant) as the lenses are just lenses and not displays capable of overlaying digital images on real-world environments.
But it looks like the Hypernova will get close to the AR glasses status as it will reportedly include a display on the bottom portion of the right lens that projects information into a user’s field of view, allowing users to view notifications, run basic apps (e.g. navigation) and see photos taken by the glasses.
Price for the device is rumored to stand around $1,000 (vs. $299 starting price for the current Meta Ray-Bans), which is not cheap but less prohibitive than the Apple VR device. Anyway, we believe Meta is only in testing mode with this new device and that Hypernova represents an intermediate step before the launch of full AR smart glasses at a lower price point.
Meta had unveiled a few months ago an AR glasses prototype, called Orion, that integrates a holographic display, offers multitasking windows and big-screen entertainment and, obviously, comes with an AI assistant that understands the world around it. With the Bloomberg report hinting at a commercial release in 2027, this leaves some time for Meta to tackle various challenges. The Orion prototype is indeed bulky – notably when compared to the Meta Ray-Bans – and needs to be slimmed down, the AR displays need to improve (relatively low resolution) and the battery life is still limited.
In conclusion, there’s definitely some traction in the smart glasses space and we are getting closer to fully functional AR glasses that could hit the market in the next couple of years and achieve smart glasses’ stated goal: allowing users to have access to their daily digital apps, hands free – in other words, complementing or even replacing the smartphone…
While Meta is attempting to take an early lead in what could become a major computing platform in the future, Apple’s initiatives in the space should also be monitored as it’s likely that the Tech giant will redirect at some point its Vision Pro spending and spatial computing technologies towards smart glasses that have much more mainstream potential.
Should AR glasses turn into an everyday device/computing platform, they would open up a massive market to connectivity/AI chips makers (e.g. Qualcomm provides the main chip for the Ray-Ban Meta), optical/photonics specialists for the optical waveguide (which basically consists of a set of reflective surfaces transmitting images from a tiny projector located in the glasses’ frame to the user’s eyes) and display makers (Sony’s displays have been selected for Apple Vision).
