Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 review: Upgraded glasses and bad feelings

While I was wearing it on one of my walks in San Francisco, on Ocean Beach, I came across a dolphin-like fish that had washed up on the sand. Even though I had my camera glasses close enough to the object that I could smell it, Meta’s AI assistant couldn’t tell me what kind of animal it was. I correctly determined that it was very dead and that I should not touch it. She was then able to direct me to a number to call the city’s animal control services.

Outside of such cases, I tend to avoid voice interaction using AI because I haven’t gotten to the point where it feels natural. Getting her to look for something is usually very quick, but doing so requires you to stop where you are, stare directly at someone else’s wallet or something, and say out loud, “Hey Mita. Hey Mita. Is this a Gucci bag?”

Glasses’ AI features are both their best assets and their biggest weaknesses. Features like live language translation and whispered map directions are very useful. But if you’ve spent any time curating an AI stream from your Facebook feed lately, you’ll know that Meta can’t help packing a wealth of AI features into everything it does.

The software’s features are routed through the same app as Meta’s AI services. This is where photos and videos go by default, and sometimes you have to go into the app to import files from the glasses. There’s a very obvious problem with using the app: bad vibes.

Feelings are off

When you enter the Meta AI app to look at the photos or videos you’ve taken, the first thing you’ll see is Meta’s cool new Vibes service; A constant barrage of sloppy AI-driven videos that Meta imposed in just one day on the app’s users. Vibes is similar to OpenAI’s questionable Sora app, but its quality is somewhat worse.