Meta officially confirmed the expansion of its EssilorLuxottica partnership to include a pair of Oakley smart glasses—possibly arriving soon.

Update (June 17th, 2025): An official Oakley Meta Instagram page now claims “[t]he next evolution is coming on June 20.”

Earlier this year, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Meta was looking to expand its line of smart glasses beyond Ray-Ban Meta, which would include two possible new devices: a sportier Oakley-branded model, and a high-end model with built-in display—the latter has yet to be announced.

Now, Meta CTO Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth confirmed that ‘Oakley Meta’ smart glasses are coming in an X post, showing a graphic of both brands merging and linking to a new @oakleymeta profile.

Details remain scarce, however Gurman’s January report maintained the Oakley smart glasses would be designed for athletes and could launch sometime this year.

Meta’s EssilorLuxottica partnership has been growing steadily since the release of the first-gen Facebook Ray-Ban Stories in 2021, prompting the company to offer a second-gen version in 2023, Ray-Ban Meta, which which introduced updated styles, improved audio and cameras, and on-board AI features.

SEE ALSO
Flat2VR Goes Behind the Scenes on 'Roboquest VR', Its Next Big VR Port

In late 2024, Meta announced it was expanding its smart glasses partnership with EssilorLuxottica into 2030. At the time, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described its long-term roadmap as giving the companies “the opportunity to turn glasses into the next major technology platform, and make it fashionable in the process.”

In addition to Ray-Ban and Oakley, the French-Italian luxury eyewear company owns other major brands, including Persol, Oliver Peoples, and Vogue Eyewear, along with eyewear retailers LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, and Sunglass Hut.

Newsletter graphic

This article may contain affiliate links. If you click an affiliate link and buy a product we may receive a small commission which helps support the publication. More information.

Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Nevets

    Until they have a display, they're of little interest to many. I'm most interested in Snap at.

    • Ondrej

      A display that can rival a 30 years old laptop or 20 years old mobile phone, which means it needs to be able to display a black color, something that none of the multimillion dollar lab prototypes can do.

      Not gonna happen this decade.

      • Nevets

        It will probably happen via pass through video.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          It is very unlikely that smart glasses will ever use passthrough, simply because the mass market acceptance for these is almost zero, both due to inevitable bulk and reduction of visual quality. Meta got a significantly better reaction from the general public to their Ray-Ban glasses even without any display, than they ever got for Quest, which remained in a gaming niche.

          So it is much more likely that smart glasses will simply stick to rather simple notification displays until one day true see-through XR becomes possible, while passthrough devices like Quest or AVP will remain dedicated XR devices rarely worn outside.

          • Nevets

            What’s your take on the Snap specs supposedly releasing next year?

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            Technically their current Specs are probably the most capable smart glasses intended for consumer use, but the form factor is basically "unacceptable" compared to Meta's Ray-Ban/Oakley glasses, only slightly less strange looking than bird bath style glasses that look mostly normal from the front, and not at all normal from the side.

            The 2026 version is supposed to be much smaller/lighter, but they are bound by the same technical limits, available SoCs and battery tech as everyone else, so I expect them to be "better", but not "good". And I'm still unsure why Snap is even working on them. www_roadtovr_com/snap-consumer-ar-glasses-spectacles-release-date/#comment-6720756657

            A lot of the non-minimalistic see-through AR-/smart glasses already allow for a number of practical use cases, but barely anyone would wear them in public for anything except special industrial applications. And if you don't wear them in public, sticking to indoor use, passthrough MX HMDs are way more power-/useful. Maybe public acceptance for bulkier smart glasses will change if they prove to be either much more useful or convenient than the smartphones people currently use, but I kind of expect that the only smart glasses that will see some widespread use will be those that could actually pass for a pair of thick sunglasses.

            So their functionality will remain limited to whatever tech can be squeezed into that form factor, with everything else remaining niche devices. Meta's saying that they hope they can turn their Orion prototype into an actual product by 2030 at laptop prices was probably a realistic estimate of how fast things will progress.

          • Nevets

            Thanks, that’s a good viewpoint

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        TL;DR: Monochrome 640*200 smart glasses displays are already available in actually useful and affordable products, and work well for low FoV, low refresh information display like notifications etc. These aren't see-through like the Magic Leap that show virtual objects in front of real objects and therefore need to block light ("display a black color"), the current displays just outshine the environment.

        30 years would be 1995, when a lot of laptops had color SVGA displays at 800*600, which is still difficult. But phones from 20 years ago usually had at most 320*240, my 2004 Palm Tungsten T5 was a hires PDA at 480*320, the same resolution the first iPhone used in 2007, and that is actually available in smart glasses.

        The Even Realities G1 smart classes are probably the most regular glasses looking ones, and project a 640*200 monochrome (green) image generated by microLED and waveguides at 20Hz about 2m in front of the users, with a 25° FoV. They achieve 1000nits brightness, usually considered the required brightness for a laptop screen to allow using it outside in bright daylight. www_evenrealities_com/g1

        AFAIK they are based on Qualcomm's XR1 SoCs for smart glasses, are less smart than the Meta glasses and more intended as an invisible information display connected to a phone, mostly for notifications and things like auto-translation. Palmer Luckey wore a pair during his TED talk in April 2025, as do a lot of other presenters there, using them as teleprompters that allow them to freely roam the stage.

        They are available for USD 600 (USD 750 with prescription glasses), and still priced like an expensive low volume niche product, and a number of other companies offer very similar models. So it should be feasible for Meta to integrate a similar monochrome VGA display into the Oakley smart glasses for (significantly) less than USD 300 on top of the price of the display-less Ray Ban smart glasses.

        youtu_be/bckifBIPlHI Even Realities G1 review from ShortCircruit/Linus Tech Tips from late 2024, incl. a through the glasses view, a realistic user perspective of the display, a demonstration of Chinese/French to English shown as live translation inside the glasses, and the teleprompter function. Which is pretty much everything the glasses currently do. Similar displays should make Meta smart glasses a lot more versatile with mostly text and some simple graphics, so that's very likely what we will see first, long before true MR capable smart glasses merging virtual objects with reality.
        https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/71a3521476315f9d31717066c2aeac1200ce05c5ac1385ceab032cd03e7c1a71.jpg

  • Mymymy ….

    Meta's some busy beavers this year, hmm …?

    []^ )