Meta Connect 2025 Live: New Ray-Bans Gen 2, Oakley Vanguards, Quest VR

After James Cameron left, Zuckerberg walked onstage to bid adieu to the Connect crowd -- while wearing a running outfit. But the Meta CEO never runs alone apparently, as musical guest Diplo accompanied him in his own jogging duds. Both donned their own pairs of the new Oakley Vanguard sunglasses and trotted out into the sunset with a bunch of other runners headed toward the afterparty.

For us, that's a wrap on Meta Connect 2025 and all the smart glasses news we saw. See everyone at the next one (through our smart glasses, of course).

Filmmaker James Cameron joined the party after Mark Zuckerberg's keynote to talk about how the Meta Quest and other devices present a "whole new distribution model" for "theater-grade 3D basically on your head."

Cameron said the lighting in movie theaters was nowhere near bright enough to properly show 3D films like his Avatar series. When he watched some of his own films through a Meta Quest 3, he saw it much more like how he had envisioned it. "To me, it's like being in my own private movie theater," he said.

It isn't just movies: Cameron said he expects we'll be watching the news and sports in 3D too.

At last year's Meta Connect, we saw Hyperscape -- fully scanned models of real-life rooms and areas. This year, Meta debuted Hyperscape Capture, a tool that lets Quest wearers scan the room they're in to review later -- talk about a vacation souvenir for those who want to remember their favorite hotel rooms. 

Hyperscape Capture is available for Meta Quest 3 and Quest 3S owners and uses Gaussian splats -- a technique for 3D scanning -- to scan still images. As CNET's Scott Stein described, they were "more spatial than Apple's own spatial photos" that Apple's Vision Pro headsets can capture. While users can only review Hyperscape Captures themselves for now, Meta's working on letting them share it with others to experience whenever they don an MR headset.

Meta's next multimedia effort is Horizon TV, a platform to watch movies and shows while wearing Meta Quest mixed reality headsets. It looks like what Apple was doing with its Vision Pro headsets -- virtual screens to watch media from within MR -- but using Meta's far more affordable devices. 

Meta Connect has been mostly about glasses, but now Zuckerberg's sharing some VR love. Meta Horizon Studio, a PC-based game development platform, is getting agentic AI. I saw demos of this in action, but it looks weirdly open-ended for me. It allows chat-based alteration of environments and game details based on prompts with a chat interface. But it doesn't work in headset, not yet.

But Meta's also launching a room-scanning 3D tool called Hyperscape Capture that wowed me in a demo. That's the most exciting VR news I saw at this show.

No presentation is perfect, but there were a few demonstrations that have gone awry already -- and we're only halfway through Meta Connect 2025.

So far, Meta's developer conference has been entirely glasses focused, with not a VR headset in sight. Three new sets of smart glasses are on the way: second-gen Ray-Bans, wraparound Oakley Vanguard sports glasses, and display-enabled Ray-Ban Display glasses with a neural gesture band.

It's clear that Meta's goal is AI and AR integrating on glasses ASAP, but it does raise questions on where the VR stuff fits in the picture. Right now, VR and smart glasses continue to operate on extremely different planes of existence for Meta, and it makes me wonder whether Meta's claim that VR and glasses will live hand in hand will truly come to pass.

Here it is: The Meta Ray-Ban Display, which as the name implies, has a small AR display in the bottom right corner. This functions like a small smartwatch-size collection of apps you can rotate through using the neural wristband controls (as first featured on the Orion concept glasses). 

On the Meta Connect stage, Zuckerberg showed off (some) of what you can do with these new specks. With the screen, you can "put subtitles on the world," as the Meta CEO put it, with the glasses running a live transcription of speech in front of you. You can also take previews of photos from the glasses camera. Meta Ray-Ban Display will be available Sept. 30, cost $800 in a bundle with the glasses and the wristband, and come in two colors: black and sand.

Let's hope Jack Mancuso doesn't need AI to cook everything for the Meta Connect afterparty. To demo the Live AI feature on the Meta Ray-Bans, Mark Zuckerberg threw it to Mancuso, otherwise known as Chef Cuso, who was getting ready to prepare a steak sauce in a kitchen somewhere. 

Mancuso asked the AI for help, it started giving a long, boring explanation, so he interrupted to say, "What do I do first?" That threw the AI off, as it skipped a step and started the next step with "You've already combined the base ingredients..." which, nothing had been combined.

Mancuso tried again, and it started that same step again. He and Zuckerberg blamed it on "the Wi-Fi." 

Zuckerberg said Live AI can run for about an hour right now, but the goal is that you could use it all day. "We're not there yet," he said. 

Earlier this year, Meta launched AI-powered smart glasses in partnership with Oakley, the $499 Oakley HSTN glasses that have a slightly different look than the Meta Ray-Bans. Now there's a new sport-ready version with its own tweaks: the wraparound Oakley Vanguard glasses, which start shipping Oct. 21. 

The Oakley Vanguard have the same $499 price but meant for outdoor action, with water resistance, a centered camera with wider 122-degree field of view, better battery (up to 9 hours, Meta says), audio piped in from the ear stems and more. 

Updated versions of Meta Ray-Bans are going on sale for $379, and they're available now. What do you get in the Meta Ray-Bans Gen 2 for an $80 price hike above the original glasses, which debuted two years ago? Double battery life and better cameras. Check out all the details here.

Last year, Zuckerberg took the stage with a shirt that said "AUT ZUCK AUT NIHIL," which was Latin for (roughly translated) All Zuck or All Nothing. This year, the Meta CEO is wearing a plain black shirt, keeping the focus on the glasses.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg walks up to the stage wearing a pair of unspecified smart glasses -- "More on those later" -- though viewers got a POV livestreamed view of Zuckerberg's walk up.

People are starting to sit down as we hit the 10-minutes-and-counting mark before Meta Connect 2025 officially kicks off.

Myself and CNET Social Producer Faith Chihil are here at Facebook HQ waiting for Meta Connect 2025 to begin. We're going to head into the Museum at MPK 21 on Meta's campus where the event is being held.

No, it's not the next version of the Meta Ray-Bans. Supposedly, Meta has been working on a pair of smart glasses, code name Hypernova, which have an AR display in the right lens. That sounds similar to Google's Android XR tech, which we saw at Google I/O back in May, but those were internally built concept devices. Hypernova, on the other hand, could soon be headed to market -- and may be revealed at Meta Connect.

A Bloomberg report published last month has some early details on Hypernova, including a potential price of $800. That's far above the $300 price tag for the Meta Ray-Bans, and for good reason: The AR display will supposedly show mini apps and alerts. You'll also be able to control the screen through the same neural input wristband used in Meta's Orion glasses. 

We still don't know what Hypernova looks like or whether it'll be sleek like the Meta Ray-Bans or have a bulkier build to accommodate the AR screen. Per the report, Meta is trimming the price down from $1,000 and accepting lower margins to assist adoption. We hope to hear more about the glasses on the Meta Connect stage.

I usually make it around 10 minutes into a tech event before I see someone wearing a pair of Ray-Ban Meta Glasses. Yet even outside enthusiast circles, I'm starting to see them pop up in public. Their increasing presence suggests the design works for people, and they align with the rise of generative AI, especially with AI assistants.

While the Ray-Ban Meta Glasses have rudimentary voice controls, other mixed-reality solutions are exploring the use of onboard AI to comment on and analyze what wearers are looking at. At Google I/O earlier this year, we got to try out some of this Android XR tech. Having Gemini AI engage with whatever is in your line of sight makes the tech feel imminent, not impossible. 

As phone owners start using virtual assistants more, they'll be more open to using them in other contexts, like with smart glasses. Soon enough, tech executives predict, consumers won't even have to bother navigating their phone or glasses to get facts. They'll just ask their devices, and AI assistants will surface the answers.

"Apps will start to mean less and less," Alex Katouzian, Qualcomm's senior vice president and general manager of mobile, computer and XR, told me at the company's Snapdragon Summit last year. 

We've heard a lot about Project Orion's innovations in neural displays, and we'll see if Meta has more to say about how its smart glasses will use AI.

Last year, I tried Meta's future vision for AR glasses: a standalone pair called Project Orion that also had a neural input wristband using surface-based electromyography sensor technology (sEMG). Those glasses were a glimpse at Meta's ideal for future hardware. 

At this week's Meta Connect, we're likely to see an actual step toward that, in a form you can actually buy.

There appear to be leaked videos of the next product, a display-enabled pair of Ray-Bans that feature the same gesture sEMG wristband I tried a year ago. The glasses are going to be expensive, but they may also run a new wave of apps that work with gestures and that single color display. Maps, photos, live translation and (maybe) fitness are likely to be shown off.

Meta's already had success selling its Ray-Ban smart glasses, and now Oakley-branded glasses have hit stores this summer. Partner EssilorLuxottica could announce new brands and designs at Connect.

While what I saw with Orion -- eye tracking, 3D games and experiences that seemed to live in the room around me -- won't be coming right now, Meta's next-gen Ray-Bans look like they're starting to solve some of the challenges this year. 

Will their price and likely battery life limits make sense? We'll find out.

Meta has been the top player in VR for years now, but Mark Zuckerberg's visible pivot to AI-powered smart glasses has made me wonder if Meta's focus will continue to be VR apps and hardware. The divide between glasses and VR seems wide (and weird) right now. All indications ahead of Meta Connect are pointing entirely to the glasses side of the equation.

That said, a year after the budget-focused Quest 3S debut, we could see some VR news debuting at Meta's big event.

One rumor is about a pro-targeted Asus ROG-made VR headset running Horizon OS (the Quest's operating system). This would be the first third-party piece of hardware running Meta's OS, but Meta already said partners like Asus would be part of the equation over a year ago. We're still waiting. Meta did release a limited edition Xbox-branded Quest 3S earlier this year, which could be a sign of further moves too.

A pro headset would also help offer a competitive answer to Apple's Vision Pro (which may have a new version soon) and Samsung/Google's imminent Moohan mixed reality headset, debuting Android XR, which should be coming this fall.

We could see some new games announced, too. I'm also waiting for more AI features to come to VR.

Meta Connect 2025 kicks off with a keynote from company CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday, Sept. 17, starting at 5 p.m. PT / 8 p.m. ET. Viewers can register and watch on Meta's website. The keynote is expected to have all the big news up front, along with a preview of what's to come for Meta, its devices and what's in store for 2026.

The show continues through Thursday, Sept. 18, with a full agenda. The day starts with a developer keynote at 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET and will continue with sessions covering Meta Horizons, generative AI, developer toolkits and more.