Meta Ray Ban Demo Fails in Best Way by Activating Most Attendee's Glasses (mashable.com)

At MetaConnect 2025 Mark Zuckerberg announced the Meta Ray‑Ban Display — billed as the company’s “first AI glasses with high resolution” — arriving Sept. 30 for $799, alongside refreshed Ray‑Ban Meta frames, a new Meta Vanguard Oakley sports model, and an immediately available Meta Ray‑Bans variant priced at $379. Key hardware claims: a bright 5,000‑nit display for outdoor readability and a novel Meta Neural Band wristband that senses small wrist movements to “handwrite” text into the glasses’ UI (Zuckerberg claimed about 30 words per minute). The demo showed features like LiveAI coaching, volume control via the band, and an agentic workflow for designing and ordering parts on the headset. The unveiling’s technical value is twofold: it pushes wearable AR toward higher‑brightness, real‑world usable displays and introduces an unconventional input modality (wrist motion → character recognition), both of which matter to hardware and ML teams building low‑power, low‑latency on‑device models and robust sensor fusion. But the live failures — a LiveAI assistant repeatedly ignoring prompts and an inability to receive a WhatsApp call during the demo (blamed on Wi‑Fi) — highlight fragility in connectivity, online agent orchestration, and UI robustness. For developers and researchers this underscores urgent needs in offline/incremental inference, resilient multimodal pipelines, privacy-aware sensing, and rigorous real‑world UX testing before claiming “agentic” AR experiences.