Meta’s High-Tech Oakleys Bring Smart Glasses To A Sportier Crowd

Meta is giving its smart glasses a premium, athletic twist — and a higher price tag.

The new Oakley Meta HSTN glasses start at $399 and climb to $500 for limited-edition gold mirror lenses. While the technology inside is nearly identical to Meta’s $299 Ray-Ban spectacles, the Oakleys offer something different: an iconic, sport-forward style that could help Meta reach an entirely different demographic.

Unlike the Ray-Bans, which have a more classic look, the Oakleys are built for movement, like running, biking and outdoor adventures. With a sportier design, they’re potentially well suited for capturing fast-paced scenes, hands-free, from your point of view.

Meta’s move to launch more premium smart glasses — its first beyond Ray-Ban in the display-free category — is notable. It’s riding high on the momentum of its successful Ray-Bans at a time when the wearables industry is evolving, and Meta is aiming to set the stage for newer technologies like augmented reality and artificial intelligence.

The Oakley Meta HSTN — pronounced How-stun — is thinner, lighter and more comfortable than previous models. The glasses are a result of Meta’s continued partnership with EssilorLuxottica SA, the parent company to the Oakley and Ray-Ban brands.

The limited-edition HSTN model is the first of several color combinations expected this summer, with the cheapest configurations starting at $399. (Pricing varies on the type of lens, such as standard, polarized and transitions.)

As with Meta’s previous smart glasses, the Oakleys come with a charging case that doubles as a portable battery. It’s convenient — just drop the spectacles in to recharge — but it’s noticeably bulkier and heavier than the sleeker Ray-Ban case. Meta says it takes about an hour to charge the frames and 3.5 hours to recharge the case using a USB-C cable.

Video quality gets a solid upgrade, with a new 3K camera providing a bump from the Ray-Bans’ 1080p resolution. You can now capture up to 60 minutes of video and take 12-megapixel photos. The photo quality is decent in good lighting, but it still doesn’t match a smartphone, and low-light shots are mostly unusable.

You can still take photos and videos by tapping the capture button or saying the “Hey Meta” command. But the button placement remains finnicky. After lending the glasses to colleagues, I ended up with a handful of accidental shots. Everything you capture syncs to the Meta View app and is automatically saved to your phone. Delete a file in one, and it disappears from both.

Just like the Ray-Bans, the Oakleys have two small black circles on the front: One is the camera; the other an LED indicator that lights up while recording. A light on the inside of the frame also appears while capturing video, but it’s subtle enough that I found myself recording without noticing.

You can listen to music, take calls and send texts via voice commands, and the audio quality is surprisingly good. I listened to music on the train without drawing attention, but in quiet environments, the voice assistant was audible to some nearby. Volume is still adjusted by swiping along the temple.

Meta’s artificial intelligence technology is, of course, baked in. You can do things like look into your fridge and ask for recipe ideas — though you’ll need to physically move the items out for the camera to recognize them properly. Meta AI can also remember where you parked by taking a reference photo or live-translate conversations.

There are glimpses of real promise, even if the tech still feels like a work in progress. At dinner, I held up the menu and asked the AI to suggest a cocktail that wasn’t too sweet. It responded that it couldn’t assist with product availability or pricing but noted that capability is coming soon.

The glasses are hardly perfect. Nor are they a suitable replacement for your iPhone or Android device. But they’re a fun accessory, especially when your hands are full.