These $600 Viewing Glasses Do Some Things That the New $800 Meta Glasses Can’t Do

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

This is it Smart glassesSure, but it’s nothing new in meta Ray-Ban sunglasses for displaywhich I’ve also been wearing for the past week. Instead it is manufactured by a company called Rokid. available Via Kickstarter Currently for $479 (down from $599 that will go on sale when it ships later this fall), it offers many of the same features. Expect the price to increase when the glasses reach full retail price, unlike the Meta glasses, however, these glasses actually have prescription lenses that work with my eyes. With Ray-Ban screens, I have to wear contacts for now. I don’t have to do that with Rockade.

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

Rokid’s smart magnetic lens solution

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

It depends on the strength of your prescription. Meta Ray-Ban Displays only support prescriptions ranging from minus 4 to plus 4, something my -8 eyes won’t do. But Rokid replaces prescriptions such as prescriptions with magnetic lenses. I’ve been wearing them around my neighborhood, and I appreciate that I can wear them while working, reading, and doing normal activities. When I use Meta’s viewing glasses, I need to wear contact lenses.

Rokid lenses, which fit my high prescription and need for progressive lenses for reading, have a small magnet on the edge. When I bring them inside the glasses, they attach relatively easily. And when I look through the glasses, I cannot see that these entries exist.

Side charging is smart too

Another clever idea for these glasses is a magnetic charging dongle that attaches directly to the right arm of the glasses, similar to Viture’s recent display glasses. This means you can charge the Rokid glasses when they are away from your face, or while they are on.

I wonder about safety when charging glasses while wearing them. Mine got noticeably warmer when charging. But offering a way to charge smart glasses without removing them from your face is something Meta has wanted to do for years, and they still don’t do it. All new Meta glasses available this fall must ship in a special eyeglass case.

Another embarrassment, though

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

They’re about the size of a regular pair of everyday glasses — and smaller than Ray-Ban’s chunky screens — but they don’t feel as polished as the Meta glasses in my tests so far. They use different types of artificial intelligence, lenses, and display technology. These lenses have dual monochrome green LED displays that appear in both eyes like dialog boxes, and are projected via reflective waveguides in the middle of each lens.

Worse still, they reflect a lot of everyday light, and at certain angles, the waveguide squares and even the green hints of what I see through the displays are visible to the people around me. The glasses also sit at a bit of an odd angle relative to my face.

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

Although Rokid promises support for other large AI-based language models, as well as Google Maps and map-based navigation, I have yet to see these features in the early models I’ve been trying out.

It also has to be controlled via the side-stick touchpad for app selection and swiping, as opposed to the Meta’s wrist-worn Neuroband method of gesture control. I also had moments where the glasses lost connection with the app, something I don’t get very often in the Meta.

But Rokid’s explanation of where glasses are headed is a sign that plenty of new variations on the theme of what we wear on our faces are coming. I just love that these actually work for my eyes.

Meta, add a set of mount lenses to your advanced Ray-Bans, please?