Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 AI glasses have more flair, battery life, and video power, and I think they look good on me (www.techradar.com)

Meta’s Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 smart glasses are a modest but meaningful iterative upgrade focused on battery, imaging and AI responsiveness. The new frames keep the same look but add limited-edition seasonal colors, a 12MP ultrawide camera that can record up to 3K video (off by default), five microphones, open‑ear stereo speakers, Qualcomm AR CPUs for some on‑device processing, and 32GB of storage — all for $379 / AU$689. Battery life is a standout: roughly eight hours of mixed use, 50% charge in 20 minutes in the case and a full charge in about 75 minutes. The glasses are tightly integrated with the Meta AI app, where much of the heavy lifting still happens. For the AI/ML community the Gen 2 highlights practical tradeoffs between edge and cloud: on‑device AR CPUs enable lower latency and some local inference (e.g., immediate voice/photo triggers), while more advanced AI functions rely on app/cloud processing, benefiting from Meta’s continual model improvements. New features like Live Translation (more languages coming) and Conversation Focus (audio separation to hear a speaker) underline advancements in real‑time speech processing, low‑latency multimodal inference and power-efficient sensing. These updates show how constrained wearable form factors are pushing optimizations across camera efficiency, battery management and hybrid (edge + cloud) AI pipelines.