A New Wave of Smart Glasses Are Coming, but Will They Get Better Fast Enough?

Meta Ray-Bans are one of the most fascinating new pieces of lifestyle tech I've encountered in years -- when I'm wearing them, that is. I don't always have my black Meta Ray-Bans on my face, and there's a good reason for that. Battery life isn't good enough, and it's getting worse over time. On a recent trip to the UK, I wore them to the beach and got a low-battery warning after just one long walk in the tide pools. As impressive as smart glasses are, the battery issues are just some of the problems the tech will have to solve. All signs indicate that increased functions, like built-in displays and gesture-controlling wristbands, will open up new possibilities but also increase price and complexity. Meta's glasses-focused Connect 2025 conference is just a few weeks away on Sept 17-18. What should we expect? What needs to be addressed? Here's what's on my mind as a wave of new AR products appears ready to arrive. CNET's Patrick Holland testing out a display-enabled pair of Google glasses at the company's May developer conference. James Martin/CNET What will embedded displays inside smart glasses do? While bulkier and less practical AR glasses have existed for years without a clear-cut focus (Magic Leap, Magic Leap 2 and Snap's Spectacles), the current wave of AI-enabled smart glasses, pioneered by Meta Ray-Bans, has left out displays entirely. Instead of displays in the lenses, onboard audio and cameras have provided enough features at a lower price and smaller size, making Meta Ray-Bans feel truly wearable. But display-enabled smart glasses are on their way. A few outliers, like Even Realities, have already been there. New entries like Rokid Glasses and RayNeo X3 Pro are getting smaller, too. Google and Samsung are expected to eventually have their own smart glasses with displays. I tried a prototype demo late last year, and Google's recent developer conference showed off some demos. Meta's going to be the big next-on-deck player. An anticipated pair of display-enabled smart glasses code-named "Hypernova" could cost around $800 and may be packaged with a gesture-sensing wristband (I tried it last year with a concept pair of Meta Orion glasses). Meta is expected to also have a developer toolkit for its next-gen glasses, which makes sense. What exactly will the display or displays be used for? Most smart glass manufacturers are still trying to answer this question. Notifications and AI chat results, translation captions and pop-up navigation for music apps or maps are some display uses I've seen in demos already. It reminds me of the old Google Glass days. Unlike USB-C-tethered display glasses like the Xreal One and Viture Luma Pro, which can deliver high-quality video, wireless display smart glasses are likely to have lower-quality displays that don't stay on all the time. And smart glasses makers aren't just going to have to manage function and battery life. They're also going to have to be careful about distractions. Having a pop-up display in everyday glasses could pose a safety challenge, especially when you're driving. It could also make daily activities and interactions weirder by adding a display layer that gets in the way of your personal life. The ball is in their court. We just need the tech giants to prove how early displays will work and what value they'll add to more expensive products. Meta's newest Oakley HSTN glasses improve battery life. Will others follow? Scott Stein/CNET Battery life: How will it get better (and not degrade)? Meta's second-gen Ray-Bans debuted almost two years ago, and I expect the company to announce an upgrade. But the problem is that the battery life on the pair I've been using has degraded over time. The glasses never lasted all that long on a charge before, maybe several hours, half a day at most. Now, I find that moderate use can drain the battery in a little over an hour. Batteries on consumer tech wear out over time as you use up charge cycles. I'd love to replace or repair the batteries in my Ray-Bans, but that's not possible. I even asked Meta's head of wearables, Alex Himel, about it earlier this year. He said: "It's definitely something we want to address, but we don't have a great solution right now." The assumption with smart glasses is that you'll upgrade them every few years. I want to be able to keep a frame I like and service it, too. Many glasses owners probably feel the same way. In the meantime, future smart glasses could see some improvements in battery life. Meta's latest Oakley smart glasses promise a boost in battery life over the previous Meta Ray-Bans, although they're still only expected to last about 8 hours or so on a charge. And, if more features like displays are being added to next-gen smart glasses, that could reduce battery life even further. Prescription support: It needs to improve There's a question mark around prescriptions in smart glasses. I thought the issues were getting solved, but I overlooked the fact that the lenses in my Ray-Bans are custom-made. Meta's own storefront only supports prescriptions up to -6.00, which is well below my own -8.00 vision. Snap's Spectacles -- full-fledged AR glasses currently in developer form with plans to release a mainstream version next year -- still don't support prescription inserts that fit my eyes. I've had more success with VR headsets lately, which often support third-party lens inserts along a wide range. Though Meta's Ray-Bans currently work with standard glasses lenses, that's likely to change soon. An expected pair of higher-end "Hypernova" glasses from Meta, which could be announced in a few weeks, will have at least one display in the lens. That could mean that prescription support will come in the form of inserts, much like with VR and AR glasses. An early sign of that future is Rokid Glasses, a pair of upcoming display-enabled AI glasses that I got my first look at a week ago. Rokid's $600 solution looks about as small as Meta Ray-Bans while adding a monochrome display projected onto etched waveguides on the lenses. The prescription support comes with magnetic snap-in inserts that can be ordered separately and look relatively easy to pop in (and small enough not to affect how the glasses look cosmetically). Those prescription inserts give me some hope, since dealing with lenses for Meta Ray-Bans isn't as easy as I expected. Until opticians smooth out the process, it might be a better plan for the smart glasses industry to get the lens inserts done via an outside source. These Rokid Glasses, arriving later this year, have built-in displays and cameras and audio, and also connect with OpenAI. Their pop-in magnetic prescription inserts also offer an alternative to servicing lenses in-store. Scott Stein/CNET I also want better AI, cameras and audio Besides all this, it would be great if the next smart glasses do what the current ones do, but better. Meta's Ray-Bans only hook into Meta AI, which allows only a few connections to music apps and calendars. To truly be useful, AI glasses should be as deeply connected with our apps and lives as our phones are. That kind of syncing requires trust in allowing hook-ins to give AI access to data, or letting these glasses work with more AI platforms. If someone does everything on ChatGPT or Gemini, how will that work with Meta Ray-Bans? I'm impressed with the audio on Ray-Bans, but a lot of the outside world's noise can drown out conversations. I'm not sure how noise canceling could work on open-ear audio glasses, but maybe there's a way. Apple developed noise canceling on the more open-ear AirPods 4, after all. Cameras could still be improved, too. Right now, Ray-Bans only shoot in wide-angle vertical mode. I want to zoom in and have landscape shots. Zoom would be a challenge, but landscape mode shots would be a welcome addition -- or, at least, a way to not shoot everything in such wide angles. And it would be fun to add a second camera for true 3D video, something that could work with the Quest headsets or Apple Vision Pro. And what's going to happen with privacy? Wearing AI glasses with cameras on them is already a big red flag for some folks. It triggers concerns about stealth recordings or fuels panic about the conversations and images that AI services could suck up via your glasses. Meta's not a company that anyone looks to for good privacy answers. As glasses start to develop more always-on functions, the questions will grow. Meta already removed a setting on its phone app that used to let you opt out of the cloud storing your voice recordings. If glasses really are, as Mark Zuckerberg and others have said, the perfect AI devices, then how will they help us manage privacy better? Or will glasses just accelerate a free flow of always-collected data? Meta uses camera shutter sounds and a white LED light to indicate when its smart glasses are taking photos or recording video, but those indicators are subtle and not enough to help ease anxiety. The glasses flood is coming I'd recommend holding off on buying any new smart glasses until the next few months wrap up, particularly until the Meta Connect conference concludes. A lot of new glasses should be on their way, and even more in 2026. We'll see how quickly the industry improves on a formula that suddenly proves surprisingly good or whether the growing pains are harder than we thought.