Meta's Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses ship with open-ear audio only, dropping the cameras. The $349 price is $100 below the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3, and Meta claims 12 hours of battery per charge. Removing cameras sacrifices the visual context Mark Zuckerberg says makes smart glasses the future of wearable AI.
Meta releases Ray-Ban Meta Audio, a camera-free version of its smart glasses, on Thursday. Head of product Ankit Brahmbhatt says the product spent two years in development, and Meta denies it answers the privacy backlash. Camera-enabled models stay on sale; EssilorLuxottica reported selling seven million pairs last year.
XREAL opened reservations for AURA, spatial computing glasses plus a compute puck running Android XR and Gemini, priced at $1,279 for 12GB/256GB and $1,499 for 16GB/512GB. The company says launch is expected in Fall 2026 in the US, Canada, Japan, and South Korea. Reservations cost $99 and are refundable.
Meta releases its Meta VR Glasses, a 100-gram headset with gesture and eye tracking plus a 5K Micro-OLED display rated at 37 pixels per degree. Reviewer Sabrina Ortiz calls them front-heavy and says the pocket-sized computing puck hurts portability. Meta prices them at $1,299, against $2,195 for Snap Specs.
Tony Fadell, the iPod and Nest founder, says the Rabbit R1, Humane Ai pin and Limitless pendant failed because they met no real need. Speaking at MIT Future Fest, he says fewer than 0.01% of people have had an assistant, and predicts successful agents will run on-device. He names Apple as best placed.
Xreal opens pre-orders for its Aura Android XR smartglasses at $1,279 for the 12GB RAM, 256GB model, with a 16GB, 512GB version at $1,499. Reservation-deposit holders order first. The 95-gram glasses tether to a puck running Android XR, with a 70-degree field of view. Shipping starts soon in the US, Canada, Japan and South Korea.
Neilson K-S launches image-blaster, a Claude skillset that converts a single image into a sound-enabled 3D world in under five minutes, producing GLB/OBJ object models, an SPZ Gaussian-splat environment, and MP3 ambient and physics effects.
Qualcomm launches the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, a mobile chip designed to run 30-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts AI models directly on phones, targeting next year’s Android flagships alongside Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2 wearables hardware.
Meta unveils its first audio-only AI glasses, the $349 Ray-Ban Meta Audio, shipping October 13 with 12-hour battery life, alongside $449 Gen 3 camera glasses with 3K video and a customizable Meta AI button.
Meta unveils the Charm AI pendant and expands its Muse assistant with voice, interactive avatars, Mac control, email and AI-glasses access, while Mark Zuckerberg says the 2-inch-display wearable packs 5G, dual cameras and a fingerprint sensor.