Meta launched a new smart glasses line starting at $299 without the Ray-Ban name on the frame, undercutting the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 by roughly $80 and ending three years of exclusive co-branding with EssilorLuxottica's flagship label. The lineup includes three styles — the Fury, the Adventurer, and a Kylie Jenner collaboration called Meta Glasses by Kylie — across seven colors. EssilorLuxottica still designed and manufactures the frames, with its name stamped on the inside temple in small print.
The pricing move is the news. Smart glasses have struggled to clear the impulse-buy threshold, and the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2's higher entry point left a gap below it. Meta is now filling that gap with hardware that, on paper, carries the same internals as the recently released Ray-Ban Meta Optics Styles plus slightly longer battery life.
Meta VP of wearables Alex Himel said EssilorLuxottica's cheaper sub-brands didn't carry the recognition needed to anchor a value-tier launch, so the company opted to drop the Ray-Ban name entirely rather than dilute it. The Fury is a thicker, square frame closer in profile to the Meta Ray-Ban Display. The Adventurer is slimmer and ships in standard and large sizes. The Kylie model has a Y2K-inflected silhouette designed to sit lower on the nose and ships with a mirrored case.
“We just feel like we need to have a pair of glasses at a lower price point, and we were trying to figure out what could work there.”— Alex Himel, Meta VP of Wearables
Key facts
- 01Meta Glasses start at $299, roughly $80 cheaper than the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2's starting price.
- 02The lineup spans three styles — Fury, Adventurer, and a Kylie Jenner collab — across seven colors.
- 03All units ship with Muse Spark, the first model out of Meta Superintelligence Labs, with 14 new languages including Mandarin, Hindi, Japanese, Arabic, and Korean.
- 04Frames support prescriptions from -12 to +2.25 diopters, though anything stronger than -6 requires an optician visit.
- 05EssilorLuxottica co-designed and manufactures the frames; its name is stamped on the inside temple even without Ray-Ban branding.
Hardware refinements target glasses-wearers directly. Adjustable nose pads click into three positions, temple tips bend via internal wire, and overextension hinges handle wider faces. Prescription support runs from -12 to +2.25 diopters, with anything stronger than -6 requiring an optician fitting. The camera module is physically smaller than on earlier Ray-Ban Meta units, a change Meta quietly introduced back in March with the Optics Styles.
The software story is Muse Spark, the first model out of Meta Superintelligence Labs. It ships on the new Meta Glasses and rolls out to existing Ray-Ban and Oakley Meta glasses in the US and Canada via software update. Meta AI now supports 14 additional languages including Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin, Hindi, and Korean, gains pedestrian turn-by-turn navigation on the displayless models, and adds a dynamic photo feature later this month that captures multiple frames and surfaces the best one.
Privacy is the open question. Reporting in recent weeks has detailed Meta's work on a facial recognition feature for the glasses, and incidents of bad actors using earlier Ray-Ban Meta units to harass strangers have piled up. Himel acknowledged the tampering problem directly and said updates addressing it are imminent, though he did not detail what those updates will be.
“If people aren't comfortable with you wearing the glasses, not only do we personally think that's bad, but we wouldn't have a business anymore. You should see some updates from us really soon, where we're looking to address it directly.”— Alex Himel, Meta VP of Wearables
Regulation is the other open question. Some venues and jurisdictions are starting to ban recording-capable eyewear outright, and AI rules differ state by state and country by country. Himel framed the patchwork as a product problem as much as a policy one — Meta cannot ship a single global behavior if every market enforces different rules.
The company is lobbying for consistency. Himel said Meta is trying to steer those conversations toward uniform standards that let users get value from the hardware without running into surprise prohibitions.
“If there are different rules in different states or places you go, that just becomes hard for people. It's hard for us too, because then we can't build one thing.”— Alex Himel, Meta VP of Wearables
Competitively, the $299 floor pressures Google, Samsung, and Gentle Monster's joint glasses effort, all of which are expected to launch at higher price points. It also gives Meta a wider top-of-funnel for the Muse Spark rollout, which matters because the company is betting that ambient AI assistance — translation, navigation, recommendations — is the killer use case that justifies wearing a camera on your face.
That bet is unproven. The hands-on demos showed Muse Spark handling live Mandarin translation with mild latency and conversational queries with a still-chatty cadence, useful but not yet indispensable. Meta is comparing the moment to the early smartphone era, when privacy concerns gave way once the utility became obvious. Smart glasses do not yet have that anchor application.
The strategic read is that Meta is racing to win the form factor before the utility question is settled. Pushing the entry price to $299, shipping a Superintelligence Labs model on day one, and broadening the style range from one Ray-Ban silhouette to three distinct lines are all moves aimed at volume — getting enough glasses on enough faces that developers, advertisers, and Meta's own AI team have a real install base to build against. Whether buyers tolerate the privacy overhang long enough for Muse Spark to mature into something they cannot live without is the wager underneath every spec on the sheet.
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