Have you ever wished you could document your life without needing to strap a GoPro to your chest or hold your phone up? For the past year, I’ve searched for a solution to capture my travels without being actively involved.
I’ve tried action cameras — only for most of the footage to be shaky and unusable from a yacht trip — as well as many different phones, and eventually, you face the same issue with all of them: you’re more focused on the screen or capturing the experience, rather than enjoying the experience at the moment. The Ray-Ban Meta solves this by being an incredibly sleek and discreet way to capture your viewpoint. This is how Ray-Ban and Meta have built a nearly perfect product for social creators.
Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses
The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are a fantastic way to share a hands-free POV with others in a way that a phone or a GoPro can’t. The camera is excellent in many conditions, and I enjoyed them so much that I’ll be buying a second pair to use them day or night.
Price and availability
The Ray-Ban Meta starts from $299 in the US for various styles and color choices (more on that below). Prescription lenses are available, as are non-prescription transition lenses that transition between clear glasses and sunglasses depending on the ambient or direct light hitting them. You can buy them from Ray-Ban, Sunglass Hut, and Best Buy.
Design and hardware
An iconic look
The Ray-Ban Meta is ostensibly a pair of sunglasses virtually indistinguishable from a regular pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses, except for the camera in the left corner. The right corner features an LED that pulses when capturing a photo or video, but it’s easy to miss, even for seasoned tech journalists who have and use the product.
I’ve got several pairs of Ray-Ban aviator glasses, and the Ray-Ban Meta features all the same hallmarks of Ray-Ban sunglasses, including the iconic logo on the arm and the corner of the lenses. The only difference is the build, with the plastic arm housing the electronics and feeling cheaper than my Aviators. In partnering with Ray-Ban, Meta has delivered a product that fits its core purpose as a pair of sunglasses. Compared to the Bose Frames — which don’t quite work as a pair of stylish sunglasses — the Ray-Ban Meta can easily pass as a regular pair of sunglasses when the battery has been depleted.
Unlike the Bose Frames, Google Glass, and other attempts at smart glasses, the Ray-Ban Meta crucially comes in various styles, sizes, and colors. The core styles are Wayfarer and Headliner, which resemble other Ray-Ban styles. Each of these comes in seven different options: three are polarized (Blue Shiny Jeans frames with Dusty Red lenses, Black frames with brown lenses, and Black frames with Green lenses), two are sunglasses that aren’t polarized (Brown frames with blue lenses and Black frames with black lenses) and two have clear lenses, one of which has a blue-violet light filter. There are also three frame sizes so you can find the perfect fit. The Ray-Ban Meta offers quite literally something for everyone.
A touch control pad on the right arm lets you change the volume from the built-in Open Air speakers. I’ve found the speakers loud enough in most environments and incredibly useful in big cities where you don’t want to close your ears to the surrounding environment. Near the hinge between the arm and the face of the glasses is a single button that will be your most used: by default, you press once to take a photo and press and hold to start or stop recording a video, although you can reverse this behavior in the app.
A Qualcomm processor, 4K camera with video stabilization, embedded battery, and a charger built into a sunglasses case that looks stylish and is effective at charging. With no direct competition, it would have been easy for Meta to cut corners, yet the Ray-Ban Meta hardware ticks every box.
The processor is fast, and the voice control responds quickly, although it is somewhat limited in its feature set. The case is one of my favorite features as, unlike devices such as the Focals by North, you dock the Ray-Ban Meta into the case with a very reassuring click, and the little LED on the front lights up to let you know the glasses are charging.
The speakers feel like other open-air audio solutions and have been a joy to use, although if you have the Ray-Ban Meta perched on your head, you’ll find that they’re still connected to your phone.
Battery life
Ample storage, okay battery life
The 154mAh battery lasts about five or six hours of active use, which drops to around three hours when capturing content. They are rated as offering up to six hours of active use and four hours of live streaming, and while it doesn’t deliver this fully, I think the battery life is more than acceptable. The case can provide eight full charges and is fairly quick to charge the glasses, while the case itself takes around 3.5 hours to charge using a USB-C cable.
32GB of storage should let you capture around 500 photos and 50 one-minute-long videos. I’m yet to run out of memory, as the Ray-Ban Meta will connect to your phone (via the Meta View app) and import all the content to your phone’s memory. This means you’ll want to ensure you have a larger phone storage, especially if you plan on creating a lot of content.
The camera can struggle in low light
The Ray-Ban Stories offered a barely passable 5MP camera, while the Ray-Ban Meta has a much better camera that captures in social-friendly formats: 3024 x 4032 px photos and 1080px + video. This is paired with a five-mic system that is very good and captures excellent audio, even when capturing a voice across a table and distinguishing it from other conversations happening around you.
In excellent lighting conditions, this is a camera that won’t fail you. It can capture phenomenal photos and videos from a perspective you wouldn’t otherwise capture. For travel vloggers, it’s a fantastic way to be present while also capturing your experience, and even for tech journalists, it offers an opportunity to capture unboxings and other content for products that you may need two hands for but need to record.
In lower light, it becomes more questionable. The stabilization lacks a little, especially when taking photos, and if you’re capturing a photo while moving, there’s a decent chance it’ll have some motion blur. With a phone, this is easy to rectify immediately, whereas with the Ray-Ban Meta, you won’t discover this until you import the media into the app. You’ll have to accept this trade-off for all the other benefits the Ray-Ban Meta offers.
Creating content is the primary use case of the Ray-Ban Meta. The ultra-wide 12MP camera is surprisingly good, so good that the Ray-Ban Meta will become my go-to glasses for tradeshows like CES or travel vlogging. The immersive audio recording is excellent, and the glasses offer a significantly improved experience over the Ray-Ban Stories. The live-streaming integration with Facebook and Instagram means that these are the glasses you’ll want to use to create social content. There are trade-offs, but the benefits far outweigh them.
App and software
‘Hey Meta’ isn’t exactly essential
The Meta View app bridges the connection between your phone and the Ray-Ban Meta. You’ll use the app to set up and pair your glasses during the initial setup and import content from the glasses to the app. The app is where you’ll also change the various settings, which are quite limited on the content side.
There are only two options for changing content capture settings: the default behavior of the content capture button and the video recording length (15, 30, or 60 seconds). The app offers little else, and it would have been nice to see options to change the aspect ratio. This can easily be changed with a future update, but it also makes sense why Meta wouldn’t offer this; it would be far too easy to crop to a certain aspect ratio only to crop out content and disappoint the user.
The app allows you to import content automatically when the glasses are in their case. Alternatively, you can manually import content whenever you open the app. Either way, your phone will join the Wi-Fi network broadcast by the Ray-Ban Meta and import them fairly quickly.
Rather than wait for a high-quality video to import fully, it quickly imports at a lower resolution and then replaces it with a full-resolution video. This is great if you want to review the content you’ve captured quickly.
One feature you may or may not use is the Meta AI conversational assistant. Activated through the “Hey Meta” command, it lets you quickly take a photo or start recording a video with your voice. This AI is also available in WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and the Meta Quest 3. It’s a custom model that is fairly capable, but I have barely used it.
The hot word activation has been fairly good in most scenarios, but I’d rather press a button to take a picture, and I haven’t felt the need to call it for its other features. I can see why it would be useful, such as taking photos of a beautiful sunset while your hands are busy, but I haven’t used it much.
Safety and security
Travel might be tricky
The hardware and software experience of the Ray-Ban Meta is excellent overall. Still, there will inevitably be users who attempt to capture photos and videos of someone without their permission.
Meta and Ray-Ban have taken a step towards this by solving the obvious: whenever you capture photos or videos, the LED pulses to make it obvious. If you try to cover the LED, the glasses won’t take a photo or video (or will stop transferring content in the app), but you can start the video and then cover the LED, and it’ll continue recording.
These are little steps that both companies have taken, but regulation will ultimately determine and require them to do more. In the US, you can record someone’s likeness in public with no problems, as there’s no reasonable expectation of privacy in a public space. In most other countries, this is different.
I travel to the Middle East often, and in some countries, they’ll take your drone away in airport customs. The Ray-Ban Meta are not well known right now, but as they become more common, I’m worried they may become banned in some countries. Similarly, capturing content in public may result in the police confiscating and destroying your glasses, especially in tourist spots like Dubai, where you’ll be stopped from filming inside a mall using your phone.
Then there’s the elephant in the room: for every technological advancement, people will use it in nefarious ways. As the Ray-Ban Meta are virtually indistinguishable from regular sunglasses, they present a very real privacy threat. They are far less obvious than filming with a phone or traditional camera.
These challenges must be overcome for glasses like the Ray-Ban Meta to be commonly accepted. I think Ray-Ban and Meta may have to use AI to prevent the capture of certain content capture (for example, to block the creation of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM for short) — whether by choice or regulation — but I also think it’ll be possible for them to solve these existential problems.
Competition
The Ray-Ban Meta doesn’t have any direct competition in terms of smart glasses. It is far better than its predecessor – the Ray-Ban Stories – and the Snapchat Spectacles, which launched this nascent category.
If you want to capture Point-of-View content, you could use a phone or a GoPro, but neither offers the convenient hands-free nature of the Ray-Ban Meta. Each has its own benefits, but as the Meta is also an excellent pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses, there’s little reason not to buy it if it appeals to you.
Should you buy them?
We live in an era where most people want to share their lives in the moment: the Ray-Ban Meta is made for this generation. If you’re a content creator or want to capture memories from your eye’s perspective, the Ray-Ban Meta are the smart glasses you’ll want to buy.
Yes, the Ray-Ban Meta does have some challenges. No tech product is perfect, but these glasses feel more polished and capable than I imagined they would be. I expected a niche product that I would inevitably return. Instead, I’ve enjoyed them so much that I will buy a second pair, opting for prescription clear lenses. This means that I’ll be able to record day or night.
I can’t wait for CES in January, where I plan to film most of my social content on the Ray-Ban Meta. I would have laughed if you had told me this before I started using them. That’s how impressed I’ve been, and this feels like the product that Meta has been building up to.
Nirave is a creator and Chief Analyst at Mint Insights, focusing on health, productivity, and technology. He has reviewed technology for 18 years and shares insights, testing analysis, and more atMintInsights.comand onTwitter,Instagram,Threads, andYouTube.
The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are a fantastic way to share a hands-free POV to social, in a way that a phone or a GoPro can’t. The camera is excellent in many conditions and I enjoyed them so much, I’ll be buying a second pair so I can use them day or night.
