Meta launches its own smart glasses brand at $299, breaking from the Ray-Ban name

Meta has launched smart glasses under its own brand for the first time, pricing the Adventurer and Fury models at $299 each. The glasses match the hardware specifications of the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2, which starts at $359, but ship without the Ray-Ban branding and licensing premium. A third model called Starfire, designed in collaboration with Kylie Jenner, costs $399 and adds a distinctive angular frame.

The move is significant because Meta has until now relied entirely on EssilorLuxottica’s Ray-Ban brand to sell its smart glasses. EssilorLuxottica remains the manufacturing partner for the new lineup, but the Meta-branded models give the company direct control over pricing, distribution, and product identity. The glasses are available immediately at Meta’s website, Best Buy, Amazon, LensCrafters, and Sunglass Hut.

All three models carry the same core hardware: a 12-megapixel ultrawide camera, 3K video recording, and a five-microphone array for voice commands and calls. Battery life is rated at more than eight hours of mixed use, with a charging case that extends total runtime to roughly 40 hours. The glasses come in 26 colour and lens combinations across the three frame styles.

Meta’s AI features run on Muse Spark, the company’s new on-device model for its glasses lineup. Muse Spark handles voice queries, visual identification of objects in the camera’s field of view, and real-time translation across 20 languages after adding 14 new ones. Pedestrian navigation is coming in a future update, with the glasses providing turn-by-turn audio directions.

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The pricing positions Meta’s glasses as a direct contrast to Snap’s Specs, which launched on June 16 at $2,195. Snap’s device is a full augmented reality headset with a colour display and a 51-degree field of view, making the comparison imperfect. But the price gap underscores how differently the two companies are approaching the wearables category, with Meta betting on accessibility and Snap betting on capability.

The smart glasses market has grown rapidly under Meta’s dominance. EssilorLuxottica sold seven million AI-enabled glasses in 2025, up from roughly two million combined across 2023 and 2024. Meta and EssilorLuxottica together hold approximately 82 percent of the global smart glasses market, according to Counterpoint Research data from the second half of 2025.

The partnership between the two companies began with Ray-Ban Stories in 2021, a first-generation device that offered basic photo and video capture without AI features. The Gen 2 Ray-Ban Meta glasses, launched in late 2023, added Meta AI integration and became the product that established the category as commercially viable.

Launching a Meta-branded line creates a two-tier strategy. The Ray-Ban Meta glasses retain the fashion credibility and premium positioning of the Ray-Ban name, while the Meta Glasses offer a lower entry point for buyers who want the technology without paying for the brand. Whether this cannibalises Ray-Ban Meta sales or expands the total market is the central question for both Meta and EssilorLuxottica.

Meta has been expanding its wearables ambitions beyond glasses, with a leaked memo confirming an AI pendant in development and plans for an enterprise subscription called Wearables for Work. The company’s Reality Labs division, which builds all of its hardware products, lost four billion dollars in the first quarter of 2026 alone. The glasses line is one of the few Reality Labs products that has demonstrated consistent consumer demand.

The Kylie Jenner collaboration on the Starfire model reflects Meta’s effort to position smart glasses as a fashion accessory rather than a tech gadget. Jenner’s involvement mirrors the influencer-driven marketing strategy that helped Ray-Ban Meta reach mainstream buyers who might not have considered a Facebook-branded wearable. The $399 Starfire is the most expensive Meta-branded model but still undercuts the base Ray-Ban Meta by $60 when accounting for the Jenner design premium.

No major technical upgrades separate the Meta Glasses from the existing Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 hardware. The camera sensor, video resolution, microphone array, and battery specifications are identical. The differentiation is entirely in branding, frame design, and price, a signal that Meta believes the technology is mature enough to sell on value rather than novelty.

The glasses ship globally starting today, though availability of specific frame and lens combinations varies by retailer. Meta has not disclosed production volume targets or sales projections for the new line.