Buy the Meta Ray-Ban Display for $799? These glasses are even geekier — and they’re $120 off until October 10th

If you’re interested in purchasing a pair of the Meta Ray-Ban Display Smart Glasses, good luck. They are only available in the US, are back-ordered for weeks or months in many places, and are meta Allegedly Only 150,000 to 200,000 units are planned to be produced over the next two years. This is less sales than the Apple Vision Pro.

However, through 2025, ZDNET sees much greater interest in smart glasses than XR headsets from our audience of professionals and technology enthusiasts. With that in mind, I wanted to flag an alternative to the $799 Meta Ray-Ban Display that you can get outside the US, has unique features you won’t find in Meta’s future glasses, and costs $200 less.

I am talking rokid glassesWhich I have been testing for the last few weeks.

Too: I tried smart glasses with a built-in display, and they beat my Meta Rays in major ways

And while they’re going to retail for $599 when they release in November, they’re available $479 in a pre-order marketing campaign on Kickstarter It ends on 10 October. The Kickstarter campaign has eclipsed $3M in orders and Rokid tells ZDNet it’s already pre-ordered more than 300,000 pairs of Rokid glasses worldwide.

I’ve tried the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses—and I’ll be testing them thoroughly starting next week—but I found a lot of things that the Rokid glasses can do that I can’t do with Meta’s new flagship smart glasses. Conversely, there are areas where the Meta Next-Gen Glass has some advantages.

So I thought it would be helpful to break down both lists, based on my experience with both products.

where rocid glasses are better

• Lighter and more comfortable to wear – Rokid Glass weighs 49 grams while Meta Ray-Ban weighs 69 grams. Rokids also have NosePads that allow the glasses to sit slightly higher on your nose, while the Meta Ray-Bans sit right on your nose. This has the effect of making the Rockids feel lighter and more comfortable.
• live translation Rokid can do live translation in 89 languages, powered by Microsoft’s translation software, while the Meta Ray-Ban Display can do five languages ​​(English, Spanish, French, Italian and German), with Portuguese and Japanese coming at a later date. In my tests, Rokid Glasses were helpful (if not perfect) when translating from different languages. They were usually clear enough to understand the main points when I didn’t understand anything.
• horizontal photos and videos – One of the biggest complaints with photos and video on Meta’s AI glasses has always been that they only shoot in 4×3 vertical mode; Meanwhile, in addition to 4×3 vertical, Rokid also offers 9×16 vertical and 3×4 horizontal photos and videos. I loved it in my tests and found myself using the horizontal mode most often.
• Chat as your AI engine – While Meta Glasses is limited to using Meta’s own Llama AI model, Rokid’s AI is powered by a much more capable chat. That said, there are still software bugs in the implementation of CHATGPT that need to be worked out based on my testing of an early production unit, as you can’t ask follow-up questions and at times there were bugs in the audio vocalization of text from chat responses.
• bright display – While the Meta Glasses have a 5,000 nit color display in one eye, the Rokids have a 1,500 nit monochrome green display in both eyes. In real-world use, the Rokid glasses are actually much brighter and easier to see through. Rokid settings also allow you to move the position of the text and change the brightness. As a result, the screen is ultimately more functional on the Rokids, even if it isn’t quite as pleasant to look at as the color screen on the Meta’s glasses.
• teleprompter – The bright display in Rokid Glasses comes in very handy for live translation and visual presentation of Chatgit reactions, but it has another use, too. Even similar to the Realme G1 glasses, the Rokid glasses have a built-in teleprompter and it worked great in my testing. For content creators, public speakers, and meeting leaders, this feature has significant value, and I found that the built-in AI that automatically advances text as you read works well enough to be functional as an everyday tool. However, the display may at times be very noticeable to those watching you.
• Better support for prescription lenses -Meta glasses are limited to +4 to -4 prescription, while Rokid can handle +16 to -16. But beyond that, one of the most innovative features of Rokid glasses is that they handle prescription by magnetizing the corrective lenses so that they simply snap into the frame along with the main lens where the display rests. It makes it much easier to swap out lenses if your prescription changes, or to remove prescription lenses if you want to wear contacts and still benefit from the utility of smart glasses.

Where Meta Ray-Ban Display Glasses are Better

• Captioning Live Protection -Meta One of the best features of the Ray-Ban display is the ability to turn on live captioning of in-person conversations so you can better understand the people you’re having a live conversation with, even in a loud room.
• Previewing photos and videos – While the Rokid glasses do a good job of giving you a visual guide to the center of your photo or video when you first click record, the Meta glasses take the glasses’ photography and video capabilities to the next level by having a full-color preview and viewfinder.
• clear and deep sound – The Rokid Glass has solid sound and mic quality, but the Meta Glass has surprisingly excellent sound and mic capabilities that deliver a level of clarity and depth that is far beyond what you get on the Rokid.
• People around you can’t see the display – One of the more amazing breakthroughs on Meta’s glasses is that according to Meta, there is only 2% light leakage. When I tried the Meta Ray-Ban Display, I was amazed that you can essentially never tell when someone is using the screen on the glasses. On the Rokid glasses, it’s much more obvious that the green light runs across the glasses when a person is using them. With the Rokids, it’s clear that these are technical glasses, even when you don’t have a screen, due to the way the prisms on the lenses reflect light.
• transition lens – Meta says all of the Meta Ray-Ban Display models will include transition lenses that switch from clear lenses inside to shades when you go outside so you can wear them and get use out of them at any time. Rokid does not currently offer an option for sunglasses.
• Ray-Ban Style – The Meta Ray-Ban Display Glasses are significantly more stylish to wear than the Rokid glasses. Rokid partnered with Bolon Eyewear to create the frames for the Rokid glasses (Bolon is owned by Essilorluxotica, the same parent company as Ray-Ban) and the glasses themselves look very similar to the classic Ray-Ban Wayfarer style. Still, they have some style disadvantages compared to the Meta Ray-Ban Display. First off, they’re only offered in one style, glossy black frames, while the Meta’s glasses also offer a translucent brown color which is great and is likely to be the most popular color once released (black is the only color available at launch). Second, the small metal arms and nosepad cause the Rokid glasses to sit on your nose and this makes them look a little awkward at times, whereas the bridge of the Meta Ray-Ban Display sits directly on your nose and makes them look and feel like normal glasses. Finally, the display and prisms on the Rokid glasses are very noticeable to people looking at them and so they are clearly a pair of tech-infused glasses, whereas the Meta Ray-Ban Display Glasses have very little light-looking glasses and the only way to tell that they are tech glasses is from the cameras in the corners and the little lines on the side of the waving.
• neural interface – One of the things you get with the Meta Ray-Ban display is the Neural Band, and it even has the Meta’s CTO said The wristband may be the product’s biggest success. Worn on your writing hand, the wristband allows you to use a range of gestures from pinch to swipe to wrist-turn so you can control the software in the Meta’s glasses without having to fiddle with the glasses themselves. This opens up the product to a lot more functionality, and in my testing I was able to quickly memorize the 5-8 most common gestures within a few minutes. So it’s very comfortable. Nevertheless, I still don’t like the idea of ​​wearing a wristband that doesn’t do anything else but control my smartglasses. So I expect the band will eventually double as a watch or fitness tracker and can be used to control other tech like smart home devices.

buying advice

Neither the Rockid glasses nor the Meta Ray-Ban Display are products that are designed to be used by everyday consumers. These are for tech enthusiasts who want to live on the bleeding edge and get an early feel for the technology of tomorrow. They’re not really useful enough to be indispensable tools yet.

CNET: Meta’s Bosworth hints that neural bands may eventually evolve into a watch

But I will put an asterisk by that statement, and it only applies to the Rokid glasses for one scenario – and that’s the live translation feature. If you were traveling in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language or find it difficult to communicate with someone who speaks a different language to your own community, the Rokid Glasses would be an incredible tool that could provide a better translation experience than you can get today on Android and iPhone—especially for languages ​​beyond the 4-5 most common ones.

So while the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses are more futuristic and stylish, the Rokid glasses are more functional and more useful for more things today. And let’s not forget that the Rokid glasses retail for $200 compared to the $799 Meta Ray-Ban Display. And if you jump in you can get Rokids for even less Pre-order marketing campaign on Kickstarter – $479 before October 10th.