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These $600 Display Glasses Do Some Things Meta’s New $800 Glasses Can’t

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I’m sitting here, writing this on my laptop, music playing through my glasses. I ask my glasses about the weather and a green text display appears, floats in front of my eyes. 

These are smart glasses, sure, but they aren’t Meta’s new Ray-Ban Display Glasses, which I’ve also been wearing for the past week. Instead they’re made by a company named Rokid. Available via Kickstarter right now for $479 (less than the $599 they’ll go on sale for when they ship later this fall), they offer a lot of the same features. The price is expected to go up when the glasses hit a full retail price of Unlike Meta’s glasses, however, these actually have prescription lens inserts that work with my eyes. With Ray-Ban Displays, I have to wear contacts for now. I don’t have to do that with Rokid.

Why don’t more glasses take an approach like this, I wonder?

Rokid Glasses with my prescription lens inserts added. You can’t tell they’re in there.

Scott Stein/CNET

Rokid’s clever magnetic lens solution

It’s early days for smart glasses, and very early days for glasses with displays — which float in your vision and overlay your world — built into them. Besides the obvious question of whether you’d even want to wear a pair of AI-enabled, augmented reality camera/audio glasses on your face all day, there’s the question of whether they’ll  even work with your eyes.

It depends on the strength of your prescription. The Meta Ray-Ban Displays glasses only support prescription ranges from minus 4 to positive 4, something my minus-8 level eyes won’t work with. But Rokid solves for prescriptions like mine with magnetic lens inserts. I’ve been wearing them around my neighborhood, and I appreciate that I can actually wear them while working, reading and doing normal activities. When I use Meta’s display glasses, I need to wear contacts.

Dropping the magnetic lens inserts into the glasses is pretty easy.

Scott Stein/CNET

Rokid’s lenses, which match both my high prescription and need for progressives for reading, have small magnets on the edge. When I bring them to the inside of the glasses, they snap in relatively easily. And when I look at the glasses, I can’t make out that these inserts are there.

Side charging is smart, too

Another clever idea on these glasses is a magnetic pin charge dongle that attaches directly to the right arm of the glasses, similar to Viture’s recent display glasses. This means you could charge up the Rokid Glasses when they’re off your face, or while they’re still on.

These glasses charge via the arms. You could wear them while charging.

Scott Stein/CNET

I do wonder about safety when charging glasses while you’re still wearing them. Mine got notably warmer when charging. But offering a way to charge smart glasses without removing them from your face is something I’ve wanted Meta to do for years, and they still haven’t. All the new Meta glasses available this fall need to be charged in a special glasses case.

Other awkwardness, though

The Rokid Glasses themselves, while being almost as compact as a regular pair of glasses, stand out awkwardly in other ways.

They’re roughly the size of a regular pair of everyday glasses — and smaller than the chunky Ray-Ban Displays — but don’t feel as polished as Meta’s glasses in my tests so far. They use  different types of AI, lens and display tech. They have dual monochromatic green micro-LED displays that pop up in both eyes like dialogue boxes, projected via reflective waveguides in the middle of each lens.

You don’t see the displays through the Rokid Glasses all the time, but it happens a lot more than on Meta Ray-Ban Displays.

Scott Stein/CNET

Worse, they reflect back a lot of everyday light, and at certain angles, the waveguide squares and even green hints of what I’m seeing via the displays are visible to people around me. The glasses also rest at a somewhat strange angle for my face.

Rokid uses its own AI service, based on ChatGPT 5, according to the company, and a phone app to connect to glasses. I can play music, take photos and videos, and ask Rokid AI questions about things. There’s a teleprompter app, too, which reels off text in front of my eyes. There’s also live translation. On Android phones, there are transcription and memo features that I haven’t tested. Overall, the audio doesn’t sound as loud or as good as Meta’s glasses.

Rokid Glasses (left) vs Meta Ray-Ban Displays (right). The Rokid glasses are smaller.

Scott Stein/CNET

While Rokid is promising support for other AI large language models, as well as Google Maps and map-based navigation, I haven’t seen those features yet on the early models I’ve been trying. 

They also need to be controlled via a side-arm touchpad to select apps and scroll, unlike Meta’s wrist-worn neural band method of gesture control. I’ve also had moments where the glasses have lost connection with the app, something I don’t get as much on Meta’s.

But Rokid’s demonstration of where glasses are heading is a sign that lots of new variations on a theme for what we wear on our face are coming. I just love that these actually work with my eyes. 

Meta, add a clip-on set of insert lenses to your advanced Ray-Bans, pretty please?

These $600 Display Glasses Do Some Things Meta’s New $800 Glasses Can’t
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