5 upgrades I want to see in the next Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses coming Sep 17

Jason Hiner/ZDNET The hype continues to build around the arrival of Meta's futuristic Hypernova (a.k.a. Celeste) smart glasses, which will reportedly add a small heads-up display in one eye and a neural wristband (Ceres) to control the interface. These will reportedly cost around $800 and will be announced at Meta Connect on September 17. Some have even started calling these the next version of the current Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses. However, both Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and CTO Andrew Bosworth have been teasing that Meta is going to release multiple products in the smart glasses space this fall. And the CEO of EssilorLuxotica (maker of Ray-Bans) Francesco Milleri said in early 2025 that over 2 million units of Meta Ray-Bans had been already sold and that the company was preparing to scale up to sell 10 million units annually by the end of 2026. Also: I've worn the Meta Ray-Bans for half a year, and these 5 features still amaze me All of that points to an upgraded version of the $300 to $400 audio-only Meta Ray-Bans coming this fall -- and being announced alongside the future-oriented Hypernova glasses at Meta Connect. I'm a daily user of the Meta Ray-Bans for audio calls, listening to podcasts and music, and taking photos -- and I've been using them for the past two years. I'll be at Meta Connect in-person on September 17 to see and demo everything Meta unveils. Here is the list of practical upgrades that would make Meta's AI glasses even more useful and usable. 1. Double the battery life The Meta Ray-Bans are officially rated for four hours of battery life. However, if you turn off the always-on listening for the "Hey Meta" prompt (and long-press the right stem to activate it instead), you can increase that pretty significantly. That's true if you're using the smart glasses mostly for phone calls, listening to audio, and perhaps a few AI prompts. However, once you start taking a bunch of photos and recording multiple videos, the battery can completely drain in as little as one to two hours. Of course, you can pop them back in the case and charge them to 50% in about 20 minutes or get a full charge in a little over an hour. Meta claims you can get eight full charges of the glasses from a fully charged case. But what the Meta Ray-Bans need is battery life more on the level of the Meta Oakley smart glasses released in July 2025. They are rated by Meta for eight hours of battery life, and the early reports from reviewers suggest that they are lasting three to four hours under heavy video and photo use. Since we know that kind of battery life is possible in a similar product, that's the kind of longevity we should expect in the new Meta Ray-Bans. 2. Shoot horizontal photos and videos The Meta Ray-Bans' most pleasant surprise when they launched in 2023 turned out to be the viability of the photos and videos -- which ended up being the equivalent of a smartphone camera from 3-4 years earlier. In other words, something along the lines of an iPhone 11 or 12 camera. But once we all figured out that these photos were surprisingly usable -- and that it was super helpful to be able to take photos without pulling out our phones -- we quickly ran into the camera's biggest drawback. It only shoots in vertical / portrait mode. Also: I took my Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses fly fishing, and they beat GoPro in several surprising ways Sure, you can hack this by simply turning your head 90 degrees perpendicular to the ground and then clicking the shutter on your glasses. But no one wants to be doing that all the time, and it defeats the purpose of having an unobtrusive camera. No, what the next Meta Ray-Bans need is the option to shoot horizontal photos and videos. That will dramatically increase the usability and usefulness of these smart glasses for capturing content. 3. Add audio note-taking A feature that the Meta Ray-Bans don't currently have but you can find on other smart glasses is the option to record a quick audio note. For example, the Even Realities G1 are a pair of smart glasses that offer this functionality today. It would be terrific to trigger Meta AI to take a note, and then you could speak and have the audio captured while an LLM does speech-to-text conversion and saves both the audio and the text to a note that you can easily access on your phone. Jason Hiner/ZDNET 4. Increase camera quality The camera on the Meta Ray-Bans is 12MP and shoots photos in a 3x4 aspect ratio with a resolution of 3024 x 4032 pixels. It captures video at roughly 1080p quality and a resolution around 1376 x 1840. When they launched in 2023, that camera quality was respectable. However, phone cameras have taken some big leaps forward in the past two years. And those of us who have taken lots of photos and videos on the Meta Ray-Bans have run into the limitations of the older camera sensor. It would be helpful to have a camera that has better low-light capabilities, and higher resolution video would be terrific so that we can crop in. Also: Your Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses just got two significant upgrades for free - what they do Since the Meta Oakley glasses launched recently with 3K video (typically around 2300 x 3100 pixels), that offers hope that the third-gen Meta Ray-Bans will offer at least 3K video as well. Photo resolution remained the same on the Meta Oakley glasses. It would be great to see that upgraded on the Meta Ray-Bans 3.0 -- although that would also make the files larger and slower to transfer, but we'll talk about that next. 5. Improve photo and video transfers One of the most awkward usability challenges with the Meta Ray-Bans has been transferring the photos and videos you capture on the glasses to your phone. You have to have your phone connect to the glasses as your Wi-Fi connection, and then it makes the file transfer and disconnects. The Meta software tries to streamline and automate this, but you still have to do it every time you make a file transfer. This is clunky at best and is also prone to failing occasionally. Also: Meta Ray-Bans vs. Oakley: I tested both smart glasses, there's a clear winner It would be much better if the next-gen Meta Ray-Bans used a technology such as Wi-Fi Direct or a combination of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi 6e, like the Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chip that will power future Samsung/Google glasses. This would allow direct transfers of photos and videos without having to do the awkward Wi-Fi connection dance that the current Meta Ray-Bans have to do. In general, it would simply make the glasses ready to be more of a full-time accessory rather than a device only used occasionally. Final word The are other things I'd love to see in the next version of the audio-only Meta Ray-Bans -- a waterproofing upgrade from IPX4, support for more languages in Live Translation, a charging option for when you're still wearing the glasses, and the option to use a virtual assistant to record calls and meetings and generate notes and summaries. But if Meta were to integrate the five features mentioned above into their next generation of audio smart glasses, then I suspect they'd find a lot more than 10 million people who are interested in wearing them.