EngadgetModify

2025-09-18 09:12:16

After revealing his company's latest augmented reality and smart glasses at Meta Connect this year, Mark Zuckerberg has introduced a new entertainment hub for its Quest headsets called Horizon TV. Zuckerberg said Meta believes watching video content is going to be a huge category for both virtual reality headsets and glasses in the future. Meta has already teamed up with several major streaming services to provide shows and movies you can enjoy in VR. One of those partners is Disney+, which will give users access to the Marvel Cinematic Universe on their headsets, as well as to content from ESPN and Hulu. 

Based on the interface Zuckerberg showed on the event, which had a lineup of streaming apps that will be available on the hub, Meta also teamed up with Prime Video, Spotify, Peacock and Twitch. That will allow you to watch shows, such as The Boys and Fallout on your virtual reality devices. Meta also partnered with Universal Pictures and iconic horror company Blumhouse, so that you can watch horror flicks like M3GAN and The Black Phone on your Quest "with immersive special effects you won’t find anywhere else."

The Horizon TV hub supports Dolby Atmos for immersive sounds, with Dolby Vision arriving later this year for richer colors and crisper details. For a limited time, you'll be able to watch an exclusive 3D clip of Avatar: Fire and Ash on Horizon TV, as well, as part of Meta's partnership with James Cameron’s Lightstorm Vision.

2025-09-18 08:29:21

The rumors were true. Meta's first pair of AR glasses with a built-in screen is the Meta Ray-Ban Display. They'll cost $799 and will come to a limited number of brick-and-mortar stores in the United States on September 30. Those retailers include Best Buy, LensCrafters, Ray-Ban and Verizon, and availability will expand to Canada, France, Italy and the United Kingdom in early 2026.

The Ray-Ban Displays have a camera, audio functionality, and a translucent heads-up display that shows and allows the wearer to respond to text chats, AI prompts, directions and video calls. You're able to use gestures to interact with the HUD, including small actions like swiping your fingers to type out a chat reply. Each pair requires and comes with a dedicated EMG wristband, the Meta Neural Band, which enables these interactions.

At least, that's what Meta promises. The glasses failed to receive a phone call in a live demo during their announcement at the Connect 2025 conference, but they did perform other actions just fine. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg opened Spotify and played a song, took and viewed photos, and successfully demonstrated a real-time subtitle feature that looks legitimately useful. As outlined by Meta, the HUD supports Meta AI with visuals, messaging and video calling, previewing and zooming in on photos, turn-by-turn pedestrian navigation, live captions and translations, and music playback.

Connect 2025 kicked off with Zuckerberg streaming his POV from a pair of Ray-Ban Displays, including a HUD on the right side showing Spotify, calendar reminders, text chats and incoming images with options to respond by dictating a message, dropping an emoji or selecting a typed phrase. The glasses and wristband come in two colors, black and sand, and two sizes, standard and large. All pairs have Transitions lenses that automatically adjust to light conditions.

The glasses' display is "extremely high resolution," Zuckerberg was stoked to report. The HUD is full-color and supports 42 pixels per each degree of the field of view — compare that with the Meta Quest 3S, which has 20 pixels per degree. The glasses boast "six hours of mixed-use battery life and up to 30 hours of battery life total," while the Meta Neural Band has 18 hours of battery life and an IPX7 water rating.

The Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses join a lineup of smart spectacles revealed at Connect 2025, including the second generation of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses (which also hilariously failed during a live demo of their AI assistant capabilities), and the sporty Oakley Meta Vanguard.

A leak earlier this week spoiled the Meta Ray-Ban Display surprise, capping off a year of rumors around Meta's HUD-based efforts.

2025-09-18 08:15:11

When Meta announced its first pair of Oakley-branded sunglasses, the HSTN frames, earlier this year, it called them "performance AI" glasses even though they only came with modest upgrades compared with Meta's Ray-Ban lineup. But the new Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses, which were just unveiled at Connect, are much more clearly aimed at serious athletes and they have the features to back it up.

The $499 sunglasses feature Oakley's familiar wraparound frames and shiny (swappable) lenses. They are the first of Meta's smart glasses to change the placement of the camera, which is now in the center of the frames above the nose. According to Meta, this should make it harder for a hat or a helmet to ruin your shots, which was a consistent issue for me with the HSTN glasses.

Meta is making other camera adjustments that should make the glasses more reliable for capturing first-person action cam-style footage. The 12 megapixel camera now has a wider, 122-degree angle lens and adjustable video stabilization. There are also now dedicated modes for capturing slow motion videos as well as Instagram-ready hyperlapse slips.

There are other spec upgrades too. Battery life has been improved to six hours of continuous music playback and nine hours of "mixed use". The charging case can provide another 36 hours of battery life. Meta also told me the glasses have been optimized for a wider range of temperatures, so the battery should hold up better in very cold or very hot environments.

Meta

The onboard speakers are more powerful. Mark Zuckerberg said during the Connect presentation that the open-ear speakers are 6 decibels louder than before. He said he took a call on a jet ski "a few weeks ago... it was great." 

When I cranked up the volume during my demo, I had to pause the music in order to hear the person next to me speaking. The glasses are also much more water resistant than their predecessors, with an IP67 rating that means they can be fully submerged.

Meta has also changed up the button placement on the glasses, putting the capture button on the bottom right side of the glasses instead of the top. There's also a new "action button" that's particularly intriguing. This is a customizable button that users can program to trigger specific actions. For example, it could start playing a specific Spotify playlist or it could trigger a hyperlapse video. It can also be mapped to actions that take advantage of Meta AI, like providing a surf report or identifying what you're looking at. I'm not sure what I would use this button for, but I'm looking forward to trying it out when I get my hands on a pair for more than a few minutes.

The Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses will come with integrations for Strava and Garmin. In my demo, I walked on a treadmill while wearing a Garmin watch and the Vanguard glasses. This meant I could ask Meta AI for info about my heart rate and my pace. If you're a Strava user, you can overlay photos and videos from your run onto the stats you get at the end of your run.

Like the HSTN glasses, I have a feeling the Vanguard frames could be a bit… polarizing. Most people do not want to wear big wraparound sunglasses for daily activities. I definitely don't! But Meta has added enough new features that the $499 sunglasses might actually make sense for athletes. I've been wearing Oakley ski goggles for years and I suspect a pair of Vanguard glasses could easily replace them in most conditions.

The Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses are available now for pre-order. They officially go on sale October 21.

2025-09-18 08:14:56

As expected, Meta has introduced new smart glasses during its Connect conference today. The announcements included a “Gen 2” of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which retail starting at $379.

There are a bunch of upgrades over the $299 Ray-Ban Meta set that the duo released in 2023. Meta highlighted improvements to battery life, which it says now lasts up to eight hours with "typical use." The included charging case now provides an additional 48 hours of juice, versus 32 hours for the current one. The glasses can also charge to 50 percent battery in 20 minutes. 

The second-gen glasses are equipped with a 12-megapixel camera and offer 3K Ultra HD video capture, with “up to 60 frames per second” and HDR support. Meta says it will release updates that add hyperlapse and slow-motion video capture to all of its AI glasses later in the fall. The second-gen Ray-Ban Meta has 32GB of storage and is IPX-4 rated for water resistance.

On stage at Meta Connect, Mark Zuckerberg spoke about “conversation focus,” a new feature that will help you hear voices better in live environments. This feature will also be coming to the first-gen Ray-Ban Meta glasses. There was also a demo of “live AI” that… did not go well. It was supposed to show Meta’s AI looking at ingredients on a table and helping to prepare a dish, but it appeared to skip forward a few steps and the demo ended unsuccesfully with a “bad Wi-Fi” excuse.

On the style side, the Gen 2 Ray-Bans be available with the same three base frames as the originals: Wayfarer, Skyler and Headliner. All three will be available with a range of lenses, including regular, polarized, transitions and prescription. Polarized lenses will cost an additional $30, while transitions add $80 to the bill. There’s no set price for prescription lenses due to the innumerable ways our eyes can suck.

The second-gen Ray-Ban Meta glasses are available to purchase now in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Belgium, Australia, UAE, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Mexico, India and Brazil will have access to the new glasses "soon." At least for now, it seems as though Ray-Ban and Meta will continue to sell its Gen 1 wearable at the same $299 price alongside the new model.

2025-09-18 06:55:00

Yesterday, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into Tesla following a report by Bloomberg that its electric door handles could stop working when a vehicle's low-voltage battery fails. That created a safety hazard that the publication found could trap passengers when a Tesla car was in an emergency situation, such as a crash. Now, Bloomberg is back with the news that Tesla plans to redesign those problematic handles. 

Tesla design head Franz von Holzhausen appeared on Bloomberg's Hot Pursuit! podcast and said the company is considering a new approach that combines the electric and manual release mechanisms. "The idea of combining the electronic one and the manual one together into one button, I think, makes a lot of sense," he said. "That’s something that we’re working on." He didn't specify why Tesla was working on a redesign, but it's hard to imagine the timing of the federal probe isn't relevant. 

The company has already been in the NHTSA's sights this year. Last month, the regulator opened an investigation into how Tesla was reporting crashes with its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems. Although Tesla claimed the inconsistencies in reports were due to a system error that it has fixed, the NHTSA said it would continue the probe.

2025-09-18 06:45:22

Dalia is a death cleaner.

Death cleaning, as we know it, is the process of sanitizing and tidying the spaces where people take their final breaths, sometimes long after their bodies have begun to decompose. It’s a job here on Earth in the year 2025, but Dalia’s version of death cleaning takes place on the rings of Saturn in a distant future filled with space travel, interplanetary colonization and devastating disease outbreaks. In this scenario, death cleaning involves spraying chemicals over bulging piles of otherworldly contamination and avoiding their defense mechanisms, which can cause fires, explosions and electrical interference. Dalia learns from the alien material as she cleans, harvesting fruit from fungal mounds to create new options for her sprayer. She also listens to the last words of the dead.

Ambrosia Sky is the first game from independent studio Soft Rains and its story trailer landed on Wednesday. In Ambrosia Sky, Dalia is cleaning the Cluster, an agricultural outpost on Saturn’s rings that collapsed when a mysterious biological force subsumed the colony and its people. It's also Dalia’s former home.

As a Scarab with The Ambrosia Project, her job is to clear out the alien fungus, research its origins and perform Death Rites on the corpses she encounters. Scarabs operate in the shadowy spaces between science and mysticism, and The Ambrosia Project’s goal is to discover a cure for mortality among the stars. Death Rites involve hearing the deceased person’s Last Will and cremating their body with specialized spores, adding their DNA to The Ambrosia Project for further research. It’s a ritualistic acknowledgement of a person’s life as much as their death, and these small ceremonies are just as critical in Ambrosia Sky as the game’s first-person cleaning mechanics.

“I really let myself and our team explore more mythological or fantastical elements, or even folkloric elements, because I think there's only so much we can know about outer space,” Soft Rains narrative director Kaitlin Tremblay told Engadget. “[Also] there are things that we know concretely about death, but there's so much about it we don't know. I think it's the same kind of interesting liminal space. What don’t we know, and how do we tell stories and try to comfort ourselves and contend with that? That actually makes my brand of sci-fi and my approach on death really similar.”

Ambrosia Sky is an investigation of the universe and mortality alike, in the form of a first-person, speculative-fiction cleaning sim on Saturn’s rings. It features zero-gravity scenes, crafting, equipment upgrades and classic FPS play, underpinned by a slowly unfurling story of lethal disaster. 

Soft Rains has been quietly working on Ambrosia Sky since late 2022 and formally announced the game in March 2025. The studio was founded by Tremblay — who was narrative designer on Watch Dogs Legion and Grindstone, and lead writer of A Mortician’s Tale and Seasonala Cemetery — and other industry veterans from Bethesda, Ubisoft and indie teams.

Ambrosia Sky's story trailer features a staticky, disembodied voice saying, “Hey, Dalia. It’s me. When I die, I want a Scarab called in. And I want it to be you.” It’s surprisingly heart-wrenching, for a two-minute teaser of a sci-fi clean-em-up.

Soft Rains

“It's just honest, right?” Tremblay said. “We have a lot of emotions about death, and our own death and everything around it. Some of those emotions contain brightness and some of them contain darkness, and both are equally valid. Both can exist at the same time.”

Death is a regular visitor in Tremblay’s writing. In particular, A Mortician’s Tale is an acclaimed presentation of the business of mortality, and Seasonala Cemetery is a meditative experience about spending time in a graveyard. In a devlog entry on June 10, Tremblay compared the mortality angle in Ambrosia Sky to that of A Mortician’s Tale, writing, “With Ambrosia Sky, we wanted to have the opportunity to explore how we feel about our own death, rather than the death of our loved ones.”

I was struck by this distinction when I first read it, and because I'm also consumed by thoughts of my own inescapable expiration, I asked Tremblay for more. They said the following:

“That is particularly the approach I'm taking for the Death Rituals. The Death Rituals are when you find those individuals in the world and you sample their DNA for the project, but you're also listening to their recorded Last Wills. I really wanted those to be a moment to let the characters talk authentically about what their death actually means to them. Because I feel like in my work and in so many other games, it's often about how we feel about death, or our grief or our mourning process.

“I think this is probably a symptom of post-pandemic brain and getting older, but I’m thinking a lot more about what does my death actually mean to me, and trying to sit with it in a way that doesn't keep me up until 4AM. So I think this is really that kind of approach. We all probably think about our own death and people have a lot of feelings on their own potential death, and so I wanted to give voice to that, and have this space to talk through and work through some of those emotions.”

And clean up giant tendrils of neon fungus, of course.

Ambrosia Sky is being developed and published by Soft Rains, and it's due to come out "soon." A demo is available now on Steam.