Inside Meta’s display glasses with Zuck

I sat down with Mark Zuckerberg to try Meta’s impressive new Ray-Ban Display glasses and its neural band.

Mark Zuckerberg wearing the new Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses on ACCESS.

Mark Zuckerberg mostly uses the new Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses to send text messages. Lots of them.

He has been wearing the glasses around the office, firing off WhatsApp pings to his execs throughout the day. “I run the company through text messages,” he tells me recently.

“Mark is our number one heaviest user,” Alex Himel, the company’s head of wearables, confirms. Zuckerberg is known for sending lengthy, multi-paragraph missives via text. But when he’s typing on the glasses, Himel can tell because the messages arrive faster and are much shorter.

Zuckerberg claims he’s already at about 30 words per minute. That’s impressive considering how the glasses work. The heads-up display isn’t new; Google Glass tried it more than a decade ago. What’s new is the neural wristband Meta built to control the interface and type via subtle gestures. Instead of tracking your hands visually or forcing you to type out into empty air, the band picks up signals from your arm’s muscular nervous system. “You can have your hand by your side, behind your back, in your jacket pocket; it still works,” Zuckerberg says. After trying it, I can confirm he’s right. It feels like science fiction come to life.