The Meta Raybans, no the other ones
Meta announced the release of their smart glasses with an in lens display. They feature a monocle display over the right eye that is transparent when not activated, touch controls on the arm bands similiar to their other non-display smart glasses, and the new "neuro band" bracelet for input as well. They do have a camera, microphones and speakers as well so voice control is of course supported and it talks to meta's AI.
My thoughts
They are pretty cool, but there's some caveats. The first being that the full color display (admittedly super cool that its full color!) is a monocle display. meaning you only have it in one eye. This isn't the AR vision of the future where real world objects can be recognized and an overlay can be applied to them. This is more of a heads up display. That's fine, that's basically the state of the industry for these ultra low profile smart glasses, but it only being in one eye is a bit limiting as far as the screen real estate you have. The even g1s for example use a similar display technology, albeit monochrome and character/vector based instead of color and pixel based, but they have displays on both lenses. The upcoming rokid smart glasses also have dual displays, and an even larger field of view compared to the even g1s. Both the rokids and the even g1s are also more of a heads up display solution then a full AR solution, but in display tech at least they are closer to the AR vision of the future.
The neuro band is super cool. I see things like that being the near future of "hands free" device control.
But there's a big elephant in the room. This is meta. Let's be clear. This is facebook. You're expected to wear these at all times when you're awake. They have a camera and microphone. meta/facebook can data mine everything you look at, everything you say, and any sounds around you in order to build a profile of you to sell. Don't kid yourself, of course they are going to do that. That's their whole business model. This differs from devices like the quest line of VR goggles in a few key ways. First, you're not wearing the VR goggles at all waking hours. You're wearing them to accomplish a task or play a game. Second, The quest devices have decent onboard compute, so you don't lose really any functionality if you DNS blackhole all of meta/facebook's telemetry servers. With these, they rely heavily on servers and your phone to do the compute, especially with the AI features, so if you DNS blackhole meta/facebook's servers they will likely be severely nerfed. That privacy invasion alone is enough to make me pass on getting a pair for myself.
While it hasn't been confirmed, it is likely that these will be locked to specifically meta/facebook's app for them, and Meta/facebook's AI. Compare that to the Even g1s, where you can choose your own AI backend, including self hosted OLLAMA instances, and while they haven't fully opensourced their SDK yet, they did opensource an example application that you can use to build your own apps for the glasses. There's even already and alternate app you can download that's completely opensource called MentraOS, which can talk to the even g1s, and that project has opensourced it's SDK.
So overall my thoughts can be summed up as this: These are super cool. The tech is very impressive, but with more open options, even if they aren't as advanced yet, they don't provide enough to make me give up my entire daily privacy to use.
Side note: I did order a pair of Even G1s, so when those get here I'll for sure make a post about my thoughts while using them, and my process in building my own applications for them. I'm going to look at both an app for MentraOS, and trying to write my own app with the reverse engineered BTLE api that's available on the unofficial EvenReality discord server.
Sources:
https://www.meta.com/ai-glasses/meta-ray-ban-display/
https://www.evenrealities.com/g1
https://github.com/even-realities
https://global.rokid.com/blogs/news/rokid-glasses-blend-ai-ar-and-style-in-a-featherlight-frame