Meta's new Hypernova smart glasses are expected to be announced soon and at a breakthrough price of around $800. Can they succeed where others have failed?
The journey of smart glasses off of the world's tech lab drawing boards and onto being balanced on our noses has not exactly been a smooth one. In fact, headsets as a whole have been tricky to get right when it comes to the mass market. They have either been too early in the tech cycle such as Google Glass, too expensive when the price was announced such as the Oculus Rift, too expensive full stop (hello Apple Vision Pro), too overhyped (Magic Leap), too tethered, or just with not enough compelling software or quality components to make a difference in the market.
2025 feels like the year where all this starts to change, however. Once bitten twice shy, and all that, but we've already seen some impressive products on display such as the ASUS AirVision M1, the Xreal One Pro has done well, and the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses continue to sell by the (comparative) bucketloads.
Indeed, having spent many, many billions trying to jumpstart the metaverse, the latter are one of the few successes Meta can point to from its investment. And now it's looking to make the next leap forward in the market with the forthcoming Hypernova smart glasses.
Expectations around these were light for a long time, but a recent report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has ignited interest in them once more. In a pointed reverse to the introduction of Oculus Rift, where an unexpectedly high price led to a severe damping down of enthusiasm, he suggests that the Hypernovas will come in at around the $800 mark. The industry had been expecting something well over $1000, perhaps even as much as $1400, so this feels like a significant discount already.
Hypernova fits in somewhere between the Ray-Bans and the forthcoming 'moonshot' of Project Orion, and feature a monocular panel which is situated in the lower right quadrant of the right lens. This displays information to the wearer's right eye and is most effective when looking downward. If that doesn't sound too impressive, a binocular dual-screen Hypernova 2 is already in the works, but that doesn't look like it will surface until 2027.
Gurman has already described how the glasses will work, with a Home Screen of app icons located in a dock, plenty of notifications from phone apps, dedicated apps for taking pictures, viewing photos and accessing maps, and more. In the way that they pair with a phone to augment the phone's capabilities rather than being a standalone device themselves, they're rather reminiscent of early generations of watch-like devices. Indeed, they seem to be heavily reliant on the Meta View app rather than having their own capabilities.
Control is via capacitive touch bars on the frames, allowing for swiping and scrolling gestures, though there are reports that Meta is also thinking of integrating a ‘neural wristband’ accessory with the glasses. This will detect motion in the wrist and allow a wearer to control the glasses with gestures such as rotating the hand to scroll, tap to select, and so on.
There is, of course, plenty we don’t know, especially about what can actually be done while wearing them. Given that Meta has also spent billions on AI and is ramping up investment there even further, it would be reasonable to expect services such as realtime translation, voice commands, and object and face recognition (though some of this might well be tied into the companion phone). We also don’t know yet about the pitch. That price point could either lend itself to executive productivity or to the high-end consumer market. And how comfortable will they be to wear? Ergonomics and battery life tend to be significant constraints on many use cases at the moment.
One thing that is likely is that the $800 is a base spec price, with options like prescription lenses ensuring that it ramps up from there. And another is that they will be announced at Meta Connect 2025, which takes place on September 17, with possible availability before the end of the year.