It's happening. We're getting smart glasses with
displays in them, full color displays
even. And they might replace the smartphone, they
might replace your whole family. After a couple years of Meta having these, you
know, glasses with a with cameras in them and and a microphone and speakers,
they have finally added a display. Uh they revealed it uh in late September
and they have actually just launched. It was like a reveal and then launch. $800
and they're here. These are the glasses with the display, the Meta Ray-Ban
display, which is actually reversed from the normal ones without the display,
those are called Ray-Ban Metas keep up. And you're going to control them with
this, the Meta neural band. Wow, it's blossoming open. This seems to be a
theme with like the good packaged glasses. Wow, look at that. Kind of a
leather style material. The glasses
themselves. The first challenge is getting them out.
They slide up. Okay, we got these covers on the
frames, which are kind of like thick. I feel like it's just thick enough that it
gives sort of like a designer glasses look and not so much like we tried to
make glasses and stuck a bunch of tech inside. This is a charging case and it
folds up, right? Is this Does that How does it Other people did this much
better. Yeah, look at that. And you can just stick that in your pocket.
Don't put it in your back pocket cuz you will sit on it. Actually, maybe
that'd be fine.
Just kidding, I feel it there. But you just love when a product comes out and
you know, the focus is the the glasses themselves, but then like there's
something else included with it that is like a no-brainer innovation that it's
like why didn't we have this before? And this is one of those times. Oh, look at that It just like pops up. It's like
spring loaded. Choo. I love it. Safety and warranty guide. Let's read through.
We got a USB-C charging cord that's that
long and a cleaning cloth and that's it for the main box. We got the distinctive
camera and capture LED. This is actually the LED and this is the camera, although
when you look at it, it's kind of hard to tell. You get mesmerized. On the top
of the glasses, we have a capture button on this side. And over here, we've got
the speaker vent and another one on the other side. On the bottom there is where
the actual audio from the speakers will go into your ear holes, not the other
parts of your ear. And it's kind of hard to see here, but we have five
microphones, two on this arm, two on this arm and another one at the nose. So
just under the left hinge of the glasses is the power button. It's like a toggle.
And then kind of the star of the show here is the actual wave guide display.
You can kind of see the elements of it here on the left side. Sort of. You see
those little lines? You'll notice that that's only on one of
the lenses. That's because the display is actually in that lens only. They're
not trying to completely take over your whole vision. They're just trying to
help. And lastly, on this side, there's
a touchpad. It's actually an XY touchpad, so you can swipe up and down
and back and forth. And this is there so that you have another option to control
the glasses because the primary way that you're supposed to control them is with
this, the Meta neural band. The Meta
neural band is something that Meta has been doing research on for a while and
they've kind of given updates on occasionally. The idea is it's a
wristband or bracelet with sensors
inside that can tell what you're doing with your fingies. This uses
electromyography, which basically will sense the neural signals being sent by
your brain to your muscles. It's not detecting the changes in your muscles
themselves, it's kind of like catching them on their way and being like, "Oh,
okay. I see what you're doing there. You want to turn the volume up." It's
apparently supposed to be snug on your actual skin so that it can detect those
signals. If it's a if it's loose and it's flopping around, it's not going to
detect anything. And then there's also a charging cable in there that doesn't
appear to have a port on it. It just goes on forever. So it's a charging pad,
the USB-C to a magnetic charging pad. I should have put
that I can do it. It's not worth it. Oh, there it is. Oh, I didn't even see that
there's there's like a little button on this. There's a button, maybe for pairing,
maybe just for fun. Start with your glasses first.
They're like, "What are you doing here?" Not yet. To use hand gestures, slide the
band onto your writing hand because one
of the things you can do, apparently, is handwriting, but not yet. That feature
is coming in a little bit. All right, I'm hooked in. I'm ready to jack into
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with by checking out our link in the video description. First off, seeing
that they flex out a little bit is very nice to see. Some of those like early
kind of early adopter display glasses
kind of forgot to give it some of the nice-to-haves
of just regular glasses and it's nice to see that we have that here. Okay. Oh,
and there it is. Continue setup in the mobile app.
I can see the display. It's right there. It's about I mean, I actually don't know
what the borders are. Could be infinite. It's not infinite.
Tour is in progress. Oh. I might need to do that part again.
The music is still going. The music is playing. Okay, swipe down to the photos
app. Swipe. Swipe. Okay, this is crazy.
Is that something else now? And now it's playing in here. Okay, so the system got a little
confused because as I was like pressing the primary kind of activation thing,
tapping the the glasses, tapping your finger, it was playing music. But now
we've closed the music app. We're by ourselves now. It's it's a safe space
and we're going to redo the tutorial. Here we go. Hey everybody.
Let's learn how to properly wear the band for gestures. Select your writing
hand, right? Yes. Wear the band correctly. Done. You got
to make sure the line is facing you and I was like, "Where's the line?" It's like, "Oh, it's hiding. Okay." And now
capture life's best moments. And this is
one of the really cool things. You get a viewfinder. So
with the other glasses, you know, you're just kind of trusting that the frame is
okay, but this is like showing you what you're actually capturing.
That looked normal, probably. Tapping your index finger like this is
like a left click on a mouse. Tapping your middle finger is like a go back
button almost. Double tapping is going to send it to sleep or wake it up. And
then you have your touchpad is this. You
swipe to the left and swipe to the right. I got to say, the fact that it
I'm using my hand as a control surface.
And then of course, my favorite thing, pinching and and
turning down and up. That can change your volume. It feels a little bit like I'm
giving someone a purple nurple. Uh which I feel like I don't know. I
don't know what they could do about that. What else would it be?
Like they can't make it this cuz that's not enough like neural signals.
Maybe maybe eventually, but is this better? Little bit. So now that I
understand the gestures, I can navigate the interface here, which basically
consists of three main screens. You got
your kind of central main screen. If you
swipe to the left, you got your control center. It's like your quick settings
menu in Android. Uh you got a music shortcut, camera captions shortcuts, a
volume display, brightness.
And then you can set things to be audio only so you don't use the display.
There's a do not disturb option and then you can go to the settings from here.
And on the other side, you got your app list. WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger,
and messages. Those are going to be the actual integrations you can use with
this thing if you want to use it as like an extension of your smartphone. Now,
I'm interested in the captions thing. Right off the bat, I'm going to jump
into that because I just love that. I am someone who struggles to pay attention
and if I have a way to kind of double-check what someone just said,
that would get me out of 90% of the problems I find myself in. But it's also
a great accessibility feature for people who may be hard of hearing. For the best
results, face the person who is talking.
Hey Riley, really excited for our trip to Portugal together. I think the wives will have a blast and we're going to
have a great time just hanging on the beach, having some uh mai tais.
I just just hanging on the beach, I was in mai tais. But everything else it got
it got uh just perfectly. It got a little confused. Hey Riley, it's me
talking again. I'm just speaking and I'm going to keep speaking and you can't
stop me from speaking because I love to do it. I love to yap. And you know what?
Oh, basketball season starts today. Okay, that's interesting. So even as I
turned away from you, it's saying, "Okay, the voice isn't coming from that
direction anymore." But it knows that it's a continuous sentence. It knows
that someone is still talking, the same person who was just talking. And then
when you paused, it was like, "All right. Now I'm not going to pick up on what's
in There's no one in front of you now. So that's probably just background noise." I honestly like the way that
that function. That that's seems to be how it's supposed to operate.
The only issue I can think of is that if you're like walking beside someone and
they're talking and you want to see what they're saying,
you kind of have to like face them the whole time. So you're like walking down
the street and be like, "Really? Interesting." You know? That might be a
little awkward. Live translation, French to English.
Bonjour Riley. Uh je m'appelle Jake Bellavance. Uh comment ça va?
It you said killer ideal and it said killer ideal.
So true. But I'm I'm in live translation. Boom.
Can I go to the bathroom? Hello Riley.
R A L L I E. My name is Jake Bellavance.
That's cool. When you started speaking English, it just started transcribing in English.
So I think that's why I was confused whether it was in the translation mode or the English mode.
Cuz I think it was like, "Yeah, we're doing French to English, but now someone's speaking English. So I'm not
just going to like not transcribe that, you know? That would be rude." What I
like about the display though is I like that it's down here. So
this is about it's taking up like this much of my field of view.
And I like that it's not like up or something. There's been some of the
glasses that where you have to like look up to see the display and I feel like
when you're talking to someone and it's like, "Yes, I'm listening to you. I care
what you're saying." What? I feel like this is better if I'm
like, "I'm listening to you." And I'm just looking over there for Oh, I just saw something interesting over there.
And now I'm looking back at you. But there's nothing interesting up here.
Okay, captions are cool. Live translation is cool. That's I can say
without a doubt that yes, there were there's some hiccups with kind of like
learning how to use it, but that was the smoothest experience that I've ever had
with one of these smart glasses that do live translation. We've done a few of
them now on ShortCircuit. That was smooth. There's a little bit of
confusion sometimes if you move too fast and you're like doing one gesture and
then another gesture right away. We're not really at Minority Report kind of
levels yet where you can go like super super fast. You kind of have to reset
and then pinch and then zoom out and then
tap middle finger to go back. One thing to note about the camera is that the
resolution of photos and videos are slightly lower than on the non-display
equipped version of these which again
has the name reversed. So if you are getting these primarily for its ability
to take photos and videos and you want the highest resolution,
that's just something to be aware of. The next coolest thing to me about these
is maps. It knows
which way I'm facing. This is not Google Maps. It's their own thing. So all of
the niceties of Google Maps might not be there, but I'm going to see what it says
if I say, "Directions to
Shoppers Drug Mart." That's a Canadian thing. Oh, there it is.
Okay. Click it.
And then it's giving me directions. And I'll be right back.
Okay, so we're opening Instagram. This is not my account, BT dubs.
So these are DMs for whatever account we're logged
into right now. So if I open this reel sent by Jake, I'm
sure it's hilarious. Can I open the post
you sent? Yes, I can. Can't display on glasses.
I don't know why it didn't play the first one the first time, but will it play now? It can't play this
one. There's something wrong with that reel. Meta Ray-Ban display
does not like that reel. But it played the next one. So
apparently you can watch reels on your Meta Ray-Ban display glasses, which is
horrible news to me. Jake,
I send you photos all the time and we hang out every day after work. Please
please say my photos are good. Send.
Thank you for being a friend >> Oops. even more friendly than anyone
else. That was the mic quality as interpreted through these mics and being
sent over Instagram and then played through Jake's phone speaker. The and
that sounded pretty good. But we'll play the we'll play the actual sample. Hey,
I'm talking to you so you can see what this looks like, but it's not really what Riley sees.
I hope that's okay. Well, that experience is pretty cool. I feel like
if I was out and about and I got a message cuz this is Instagram, but it's
also, you know, with WhatsApp Messenger as well. The the interface is going to
be the same. You can dictate or send a voice message or call or or attach a
photo. And that was all pretty easy. I did that in a matter of in a matter of
seconds. So the one thing that's really missing for me from this kind of
messaging app interface here is that handwriting feature that they demoed
when they first announced this thing. That looked super super cool. And the
way that was supposed to work is that you put your hand on a surface and you
handwrite like hello and you can write a message to
somebody without actually speaking, which I feel like would be super super
useful if you're in a public setting and you don't feel like being like, "Hey,
what are you doing tonight? Text me back." Like, "Oh my gosh." So like the
other Meta smart glasses, uh it'll play
it it basically acts like a Bluetooth headset. It'll play any audio from your phone, but apparently there is a
integration with Spotify. So you can ask Meta AI to specifically play something
from Spotify. Now normally we play the YouTube video first for Crab Rave, but
this thing does not play YouTube. Again,
I feel like it's a positive, but let's go back up. Do it What is it What does
it look like when I'm like doing the stuff with my hands? Are you are you feeling jealous? Are you like, "Ooh, I
wish I could It is a little bit. Now it's playing. Volume. This is max.
I believe it. I'm going to blow my eardrums out.
Not the worst. There's bass.
At the max volume, there's a like a little bit of distortion happening
because it's like really really trying. But then if you turn it down to like, you know, 80% then the distortion goes
away. Overall, speaker quality is pretty good. Quick thing about the hand
gestures. As I was saying, you know, it kind of like it looks cool that I'm
doing these and I've gotten used to using them even by now. It's only been a little bit. But if the band doesn't
work, it comes with the band and this is the primary way that I think that that
like the vision is for you to use the band, but if the band's not working for
whatever reason, there are controls on the touchpad here. So two fingers
forward is volume up. Two fingers back is volume down. I won't go through every
single gesture, but for whatever reason if the band doesn't work, there are
backup options. With any pair of display glasses, a concern may be that okay, you
go outside and now you can't see anything because this dang old sun is
still up in the sky. Well, these actually come with transition lenses. So
it'll darken a little bit as you go outside, but the waveguide display also
goes up to 5,000 nits, which is pretty
bright. As for battery life, Meta says that you can expect up to 6 hours of
continuous charge of like mixed use, I guess, with the glasses themselves and
then the case has another 24 hours. So 30 hours total of charge. And then the
neural band has an 18-hour battery life
estimate. Now I didn't really test the Meta AI that much because what we're
dealing with here is more or less similar situation to the non-display
equipped glasses with the exception of course is that you can see, you know, a
feed of your interactions with the chatbot there. And it'll be easier for
you to kind of like say, "All right, I'm going to I'm going to ask Meta what I'm looking
at and it the photo pops up and you can see,
"Okay, I I framed it properly." Or like, you know, something that's not there.
Hey Meta. Oh right, it's already listening. Can you generate me a picture
of a laptop? Okay. So that's
that's one benefit uh over the non-display glasses. You can tell it to
show you a picture of something and you will actually see a picture generated by
AI and that is definitely a laptop. So wow.
After many many many years of this situation being teased, here we are. We
have smart glasses with cameras and
microphones and touch controls and
Minority Report gestures and a display.
We're entering into cyborg territory here basically. This is made me think
that especially with the neural band, it had made it and and neural interfaces
coming along. It'll it made me think of a future where like this stuff is just
going to be kind of baked into our biology in some way. I know that's the
we're not quite there yet, but this is like the first it feels like the first
step towards that future. And you have to ask yourself
if you want to use a product like this, you know, it's being made by Meta.
Apple is apparently also working on products like this. Google is it wants
to get things to market as well.
And it's like, are we going to be okay with kind of just continually being a
source of data for these companies? I don't know. That's a question you're
going to have to ask yourself. Um or you can ask me and I will tell
you, but not in this video. In this video, all I'm here to say is these are
800 bucks and they're available now and it feels like the future even if we're
not exactly sure whether we want it. It's coming. And you're going to come
back here to watch another video. I bet you. I bet you will. Uh you should watch
the previous video I did on what are
they? Rokid? The Rokid glasses, which I at that time were the first display
glasses of smart glasses. Not really.
You get it. Go watch it. Subscribe. Quick anecdote. I would took my car into
the shop the other day and there's a younger kid and he was wearing uh
Ray-Ban Metas. And I was like, "This is the first time that I've seen these in
the wild and he was like yeah they don't let me wear airpods in the shop so I
wear these and I did not think that at the time but
now I'm thinking wow your co-workers which is must be a little annoyed
but in other situations where you know maybe there's not people around you who
will be annoyed by you playing music that's like clearly audible