All the news from Meta Connect 2025

I want to preface this hands-on by saying that I’ve been a smart glasses skeptic for many years. In 2019, I even made a two-part mini documentary with a thesis that consumer smart glasses couldn’t happen without massive societal and technological shifts. Well, color me pink and let me find a shoe to eat. After getting a demo of the $799 Meta Ray-Ban Display, I’m convinced this is the closest we’ve ever gotten to what Google Glass promised over 10 years ago.

The glasses look just like a chunky pair of Ray-Bans. But put them on, pinch your middle finger twice, and a display will appear in front of your right eye, hovering in front of your vision. It’s not augmented reality overlaid on the real world so much as on-demand, all-purpose menu with a handful of apps. You can use it to see text messages, Instagram Reels, maps, or previews of your photos, letting you do all kinds of things without having to pull out your phone. In fact, since it pairs to your phone, it sort of functions like a pop-up extension of it.

​​On Wednesday evening, I had a profound sense of déjà vu. When I watched Mark Zuckerberg open his Meta Connect keynote by giving the world a live backstage tour from his new glasses, I was transported back to 2012.

I was in the live audience at Google I/O when Sergey Brin introduced the world to some friends about to jump out of an airship, high above the event. I watched, agape, as athletes dove through the sky, launched bikes across the roof, rappelled down the side of the Moscone Center in San Francisco, then strode onto the stage right in front of me — all while streaming the whole thing live from their Google Glass headsets.

Meta is going to let apps access the vision and audio capabilities of its smart glasses thanks to a new Wearable Device Access Toolkit for developers.

“Our first version of the toolkit will open up access to a suite of on-device sensors— empowering you to start building features within your mobile apps that leverage the hands-free benefits of AI glasses,” Meta says. “With our toolkit, you’ll be able to leverage the natural perspective of the wearer and the clarity of open-ear audio and mic access.”

Meta just showed off all the latest in wearable technology, virtual reality, augmented reality, and more at its annual Connect keynote. In addition to the long-awaited reveal of Meta’s updated Ray-Ban smart glasses, the company had some other exciting surprises to share, too.

Here’s a roundup of all the new tech and software updates announced by Meta.

Meta is making it easier to stream movies and TV shows on your Quest headset. During its Meta Connect keynote on Wednesday, the company announced that it’s rolling out a Horizon TV hub with access to streaming apps like Prime Video, Peacock, Twitch, and — finally — Disney Plus with Hulu and ESPN.

The image shared by Meta shows content recommendations and streaming apps lined up on the homepage, along with tabs to switch between movies, TV shows, “immersive” experiences, sports, music, and your watchlist. It’s unclear whether the tabs will show content from all of these platforms, or just the ones you subscribe to.

Meta is making improvements to its Roblox-like social platform Horizon Worlds, with the biggest upgrades being the introduction of a new game engine with better graphics as well as the Meta Horizon Studio to help creators to make custom in-game experiences.

Meta Horizon Studio is an editor that lets creators make VR worlds. Creators can already use generative AI tools to create things like textures and audio, and Meta will bring an AI assistant to the editor later this year to help creators with development. In a demo I saw at Connect 2025, a developer had a conversation with an AI chatbot to request changes like a new environment and tweaks to the personality of an AI-driven NPC.

Meta is rolling out tech that lets you capture a real-world space with a Quest VR headset so you can create a digital, photorealistic VR replica. The company calls the tech “Hyperscape,” and as part of a gradual rollout beginning today, users will be able to use the beta Hyperscape Capture app with their Quest 3 or Quest 3S to make the virtual copies. Initially, you’ll only be able to visit the rooms you’ve scanned by yourself, but Meta says that users will be able to visit rooms together by sharing a private link sometime “soon.”

Meta showed off Hyperscape as part of a demo introduced at Connect 2024 last year, and while it seems like the tech is still somewhat early, it’s clear that the company sees virtual recreations of real environments as a potentially notable use case for VR and its metaverse ambitions. (Though those ambitions have seemingly taken a back seat to AI as of late.) You can see a Meta-provided example of Hyperscape in the GIF below that recreates Gordon Ramsay’s home kitchen.

This is Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

Mark Zuckerberg mostly uses the new Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses to send text messages. Lots of them.

When the Oakley Meta HSTN arrived earlier this year, it wasn’t what I thought Oakley-branded smart glasses would be. Sure, they had Oakley’s famous PRIZM lenses, but where was the wraparound design? Where were the athlete-focused features like stronger water and sweat resistance? Confusingly, it felt like the HSTN glasses were just Ray-Ban Meta glasses by another name. But that’s because Meta had the real athlete-focused glasses in its back pocket. Today, the company unveiled the new $499 Oakley Meta Vanguard — and it has everything outdoorsy athletes could want and then some.

“When we started building HSTN, it was an easier process of developing because most of the things we wanted for low-impact sports, like skating, don’t require a lot of technology in the eyewear from a performance standpoint,” says Oakley global president Caio Amato. Conversely, Amato says, the Vanguards were envisiond as a “revolution” not just for elite sports stars, but weekend warriors and everyday athletes.

Meta has announced a new generation of its Ray-Ban smart glasses, featuring significantly improved battery life and the ability to record 3K video, which brings them up to par with the Oakley HSTN smart glasses. The new glasses, technically called the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2, are available to order today and start at $379.

Let’s dig in on battery, which is better on a few fronts. You can use the new Ray-Bans for up to eight hours on a single charge, which is twice the four-hour battery life of the previous generation. The charging case can charge the glasses to 50 percent in 20 minutes — a slight improvement over the 22 minutes to 50 percent for the first generation. The case for the Gen 2 glasses offers an additional 48 hours of battery life, up from 32 hours.