Horizon

The best new tech heading your way

1 META RAY-BAN DISPLAY

From $799 (around £600), meta.com

Meta’s collaboration with Ray-Ban, which thus far has stuck to audio-only smart specs, has now crested the inevitable wave: we have a screen. Unlike what remains the most famously dorky entry in the smart glasses canon, Google Glass, Meta’s engineers have made its integrated display reasonably discreet by integrating it into the right lens, though we still think you’ll be able to see these chunky frames coming a mile off.

While connectivity issues famously derailed Mark Zuckerberg’s initial demo at the MetaConnect 2025 keynote, they didn’t hurt ours. The Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses are highly impressive in practice. The display is crisp, clear and colourful, disappearing after 25 seconds so as not to provide a constant distraction from the real world. The Neural Band accessory, which goes around your wrist, is intuitive, reliably translating hand gestures into navigation functions and removing the potential embarrassment of using the similarly clever voice functions in a crowded space.

These specs do what they set out to do, integrating audio and visual AI with cameras which tie their data gathering into the real world; they’re the most practical take on AR glasses we’ve yet seen. Whether they remain that way once Google re-enters the space is another matter altogether, but we’re grateful that Meta volunteered as tribute to get the ball rolling. This is truly next-gen technology, whether you can see yourself wearing a pair or not.

SPECS APPEAL

The glasses themselves are Wayfarer-style frames with Transitions lenses, meaning they’ll adapt to the light level of your environment. Weighing just 69g, they’re surprisingly svelte given the speakers, 12MP cameras, and batteries crammed into each rather bulky arm.