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 the tech wrong isn’t what makes them peculiar — it’s the glassmaking. iFixit explains that the solid lenses usage a reflective geometric waveguide strategy that bounces immoderate of the airy retired to the wearer’s eyes astatine circumstantial angles via partially reflective mirrors, which helps forestall different radical from getting a glimpse of the surface erstwhile they look astatine you.

This works alongside the micro-projector successful the close arm, a liquid crystal connected silicon (LCoS) instrumentality that bounces airy 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 airy instead, sometimes causing the idiosyncratic to spot small rainbow artifacts oregon flash “eye glow” airy astatine onlookers. The downside is that the solid utilized successful the Ray-Ban Display is costly to manufacture, with iFixit speculating that Meta whitethorn beryllium selling the glasses astatine a loss. 

iFixit had to divided the arms and framework successful fractional to behaviour the teardown, noting that Meta didn’t supply a means to clip them backmost unneurotic again for situations similar artillery replacements. “Any repairs present are going to request specialized skills and specialized tools,” iFixit teardown tech  Shahram Mokhtari said successful the video, adding that it’s “very wide that the archetypal iterations of these smartglasses are going to beryllium unrepairable.”