Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses turned one year old at Connect 2026, and the company marked the occasion with the kind of update that matters more than a spec bump: new software, better navigation, an easier way to find apps, and a launch in five more countries. The headline addition is a photorealistic holographic avatar that stands in for your face during calls — a fix for one of the stranger quirks of talking to someone through a pair of glasses.
A hologram instead of your face on calls
If you take a video call while wearing smart glasses, the person on the other end sees whatever your camera is pointed at — not you. Meta’s answer is a hologram built in the Meta AI app that appears in your place. According to Meta, the avatar is driven entirely by your voice, with the model inferring your expression from what you say and how you say it. There’s no face tracking involved, which is both the clever part and the obvious limitation: your hologram is guessing at your mood rather than mirroring it.
The feature starts as early access later this fall, limited to WhatsApp users in the US. That’s a narrow rollout, and it’s worth treating as a preview rather than a finished experience. Whether people on the receiving end find a synthetic stand-in reassuring or unsettling is the open question here, and Meta hasn’t said when it will expand beyond WhatsApp or the US.
Navigation that talks like a person
The more practical upgrade is navigation. The heads-up directions now cover cycling and public transit, callable by voice, starting in the US and Canada later this month. More interesting is a change in how directions are phrased: instead of leaning on street names, the glasses can reference things you can actually see — “turn left at the yellow house” rather than “turn left on Third Street.”
Anyone who has squinted at a street sign from half a block away will understand why this matters. Landmark-based guidance is how humans give directions to each other, and it plays to the strength of a device that is already looking at the world alongside you. For cyclists in particular, not having to glance down at a phone mount is a genuine safety argument for wearing a display on your face.
Meta is finally addressing the app problem
When Engadget’s Karissa Bell reviewed the Ray-Ban Display last year, the thin selection of apps was one of her main complaints. Meta’s response is a new Explore app, arriving on both the glasses and the Meta AI phone app, designed to help you browse what actually runs on the hardware. Discovery is not the same as supply, of course — a better storefront doesn’t create developers — but it at least makes the existing catalog visible, which is a reasonable first step.
The rest of the update is incremental housekeeping: Dolby Atmos for capture and playback, photo editing on the Display screen itself, a more detailed calendar view, mirrored phone notifications, and Threads support in Community Feeds. None of these will sell a pair of glasses on their own, but collectively they close gaps that made the first year feel like an early-adopter product.
Where you can buy them, and for how much
The Ray-Ban Display is expanding beyond the US to the UK, Canada, France, Italy and Germany, with online ordering in all of those regions. In the UK, it’s available starting today from £749, and in Canada from CA$1,149. France, Italy and Germany open pre-orders today at a base price of €899, with availability on October 13.
Those are premium prices for a first-generation category, and the conversion isn’t especially kind to European buyers. If you’re on the fence, the sensible approach is to wait and see how the hologram feature and landmark navigation perform in the wild before committing — both are rolling out gradually, and neither is available everywhere the glasses now are.
The bottom line
This is a maturing update rather than a reinvention. Landmark-based directions and transit routing make the display genuinely useful day to day, the Explore app acknowledges a real weakness, and the hologram is an intriguing experiment with a very limited launch. If you already own a pair, you’re getting a better product for free. If you don’t, the wider availability is the bigger news — just go in knowing that some of the most interesting features are still US-only early access.
Source: Engadget
Where to buy
- Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses: check price on Amazon
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- Compact USB-C power bank: check price on Amazon
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