The 5 biggest takeaways from Meta Connect 2025, from AI glasses to WiFi issues (www.businessinsider.com)

Meta used Connect 2025 to position AI-powered wearables as the next mainstream interface, unveiling upgraded Ray‑Ban Meta glasses with a full‑color in‑lens display, cameras, audio and roughly six hours of battery life, plus a complementary neural wristband that uses surface electromyography (sEMG) to sense subtle muscle/finger motions for discreet typing and control. The new Ray‑Ban set (launching Sept. 30 at select U.S. retailers) is priced at $799 and follows over 2 million earlier Ray‑Ban Meta units; Meta also previewed Oakley‑branded Vanguard sport glasses (3K hands‑free video, high water resistance, Garmin sensor integration) and an improved Quest room‑scanning VR feature for creating realistic, physics‑aware virtual environments. Technically and strategically, the announcements signal Meta’s push to combine sensor fusion (cameras + sEMG), on‑device and cloud AI, and familiar form factors as a lower‑cost stepping stone toward its high‑end Orion AR ambitions (Zuckerberg has previously cited ~$10k build cost for Orion). But the launch was marred by live demo failures—AI instructions skipping and the wristband not responding—blamed on poor Wi‑Fi, underscoring real‑world connectivity and reliability challenges for interactive, latency‑sensitive wearables. For AI/ML practitioners this highlights fertile work areas: robust edge/ML inference, multimodal gesture decoding from sEMG, low‑power sensor fusion, and resilient UX design when networks are degraded.