“The promise of glasses is to preserve this sense of presence that you have with other people,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the Meta Connect 2025 keynote. “I think that we’ve lost it a little bit with phones, and we have the opportunity to get it back with glasses.”

In reality, Meta wants its own hardware to eat into the marketshare of Apple and Google so that it doesn’t have to keep siphoning profits to them via app stores. But nevertheless, this is the angle Meta is taking to sell its most sophisticated smart glasses yet, the Meta Ray-Ban Display, which the company hopes could one day eclipse the market share of smartphones.

Meta’s Reality Labs division burns cash at an alarming rate, which has concerned investors over the years. But Wednesday’s event finally showed us a glimpse of what the division’s $70 billion in losses since 2020 have gone toward.

Meta has had its fair share of flops, like the entire promise of its social metaverse. (Remember when they announced that metaverse avatars would finally get legs?) But with the Meta Ray-Ban Display, Meta has created a remarkable piece of technology, unlike any other consumer-facing product on the market — we have yet to test it ourselves, so we can’t quite say just how groundbreaking this really is, but it looks promising.

Like Meta’s existing smart glasses, which have sold millions of pairs, the new model has cameras, speakers, microphones, and an on-board AI assistant. The display on the glasses, which is offset so as not to obstruct one’s sightline, can display Meta apps like Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook, as well as directions and live translations.

What most sets the Meta Ray-Ban Display apart is the Meta Neural Band, a wristband that uses surface electromyography (sEMG) to pick up on signals sent between your brain and your hand when performing a gesture.

Meta’s keynote didn’t get into the specifics of how Zuckerberg was writing these texts, but according to Reality Labs’ research on sEMG, users can write out messages like this by holding their fingers together as if they were gripping a pen and “writing” out the text.

While some live AI demos at the keynote failed — Zuckerberg blamed the Wi-Fi — we at least got to see the wristband in action, which is more novel. Zuckerberg quickly wrote out text messages, then sent them on his Ray-Bans.

“I’m up to about 30 words a minute on this,” Zuckerberg said onstage at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters. “You can get pretty fast.”

On a touchscreen smartphone like an iPhone, research has estimated that people text at about 36 words per minute, making Zuckerberg’s claim impressive. Reality Labs’ research participants averaged closer to 21 words per minute.

Unlike past Meta Ray-Bans, this technology allows people to actually use the glasses without speaking aloud, which isn’t always natural in public settings. While Apple Watch users can send texts without voice prompting, the process is so tedious and slow that it’s only useful as a last resort.

Other gesture controls on the wristband seem more similar to technology that consumers have used before, like Nintendo Joy-Cons and Apple Watches. But if the voiceless texting interface is as good as it seems, then the wristband will likely be capable of more complex gestures than we’re used to.

Image Credits:Meta

Meta has invested heavily in research on sEMG since 2021, even showing us a prototype of a heftier product called Orion. Like Apple and Google, Meta is preparing for a not-so-impossible future where these smart glasses could potentially eclipse the smartphone.

But as is the risk with any massive hardware investment, there’s no way to know if this will actually feel more natural to people in their day-to-day lives than pulling a sleek aluminum rectangle out of their pocket to tap out messages to their friends.

This might be Meta’s biggest bet — perhaps a bigger bet than its subpar metaverse. That’s why it’s so striking that Zuckerberg is unveiling this technology as not just a fascinating innovation, but something that he wants to portray as more prosocial than the smartphone. It’s a way for him to capitalize on our growing malaise with our ever-increasing screen time, even though he’s the one making the apps that demand our attention.

“The technology needs to get out of the way,” Zuckerberg said.

Will the smartphone become an obsolete relic like a Nokia with a T9 keyboard? That depends on whether there’s truth to Zuckerberg’s narrative that these glasses will help us feel more present. But Meta and its competitors are betting big on the cultural shift from smartphones to smart glasses, and the Ray-Ban Display will give consumers their first taste of this possible future.