Meta just dropped the Ray-Ban Gen 2 smart glasses at Connect 2025, doubling battery life to eight hours and adding 3K video recording. Starting at $379 and available today, these upgrades position Meta's wearables to compete directly with premium smart glasses while keeping AI features front and center.
Meta is making its biggest play yet in the smart glasses market. The company unveiled the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 at its Connect event, delivering the kind of substantial hardware improvements that could finally make smart glasses mainstream. The headline feature? Battery life that actually works for daily use.
The Gen 2 glasses run for eight hours on a single charge, exactly double the four-hour limit that plagued the first generation. That's the difference between glasses you can wear for a full workday versus ones that die before lunch. The charging case got substantial upgrades too, now providing 48 hours of additional battery life (up from 32) and juicing the glasses to 50% in just 20 minutes.
[embedded image: Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 glasses being worn]
But Meta didn't stop at battery improvements. The camera system now records 3K video at 30fps, matching the capabilities of Oakley's HSTN smart glasses that currently dominate the premium end of the market. Users can also capture 1440p at 30fps or 1200p at 60fps, all for up to three minutes per clip. Coming later this fall, hyperlapse and slow-motion video features will roll out to all of Meta's AI-powered glasses.
The real innovation comes in the audio department with a feature called "conversation focus." Using the built-in speakers, the glasses will amplify the voice of whoever you're talking with while suppressing background noise. It's the kind of AI-powered enhancement that makes smart glasses useful beyond just recording videos - they actually augment your daily interactions.
Meta is also expanding live translation support to include German and Portuguese, building on the multilingual capabilities that set these apart from competitors like Apple's rumored smart glasses project. The company clearly wants to own the AI wearables space before other tech giants catch up.
According to The Verge's hands-on coverage, the Gen 2 glasses feel like a solid but predictable upgrade. "They're ultimately still Meta Ray-Ban glasses," reporter Jay Peters noted after trying them at Connect. "If you've used the first generation before, you pretty much get the idea."
