The Meta Ray-ban Display’s Most Interesting Tech Might Be The Glass

The Meta Rab-Ban Display has immoderate earnestly fancy glass.

iFixit has broken down Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses, revealing that nan tech wrong isn’t what makes them typical — it’s nan glassmaking. iFixit explains that nan solid lenses usage a reflective geometric waveguide strategy that bounces immoderate of nan ray retired to nan wearer’s eyes astatine circumstantial angles via partially reflective mirrors, which helps forestall different group from getting a glimpse of nan surface erstwhile they look astatine you.

This useful alongside nan micro-projector successful nan correct arm, a liquid crystal connected silicon (LCoS) instrumentality that bounces ray from 3 LEDs to supply a 600×600-pixel grid image. The geometric waveguide lenses disagree from older “diffractive” systems utilized successful different AR glasses, which crook and divided ray instead, sometimes causing nan personification to spot small rainbow artifacts aliases flash “eye glow” ray astatine onlookers. The downside is that nan solid utilized successful nan Ray-Ban Display is costly to manufacture, pinch iFixit speculating that Meta whitethorn beryllium trading nan glasses astatine a loss. 

iFixit had to divided nan arms and framework successful half to behaviour nan teardown, noting that Meta didn’t supply a intends to clip them backmost together again for situations for illustration artillery replacements. “Any repairs present are going to request specialized skills and specialized tools,” iFixit teardown tech  Shahram Mokhtari said successful nan video, adding that it’s “very clear that nan first iterations of these smartglasses are going to beryllium unrepairable.”