Meta's Display Glasses Are Getting Hologram Calls and Better Directions

Meta is adding new software features to its Ray-Ban Display glasses, one year after it first showed them at Meta Connect 2026. Engadget

The update covers calling, directions, apps and sales in more countries.

The glasses show images inside the lenses. You control them with a wristband that reads tiny muscle signals. Meta calls it an EMG band or neural band. The screen adjusts to light, so you can read it indoors and outside.

The glasses first went on sale in the United States on September 30. Early store sales were limited to retailers including Best Buy and LensCrafters. The new announcements add software to that product. The hardware stays the same.

Voice-driven holographic calling

The new calling feature shows a hologram instead of your face. The Meta AI app makes a lifelike digital face that appears during the call.

The hologram moves using only your voice. The system listens to your words and tone, then guesses the expression. No inner cameras are needed to track the face. The hard work shifts to guessing expressions from speech, where delay, tone and keeping the person recognizable are the clear limits.

The feature will be tested in early access in fall 2026 for WhatsApp users in the US. Meta has not shared the picture quality, frame rate or where the computing happens.

Using voice avoids extra sensors that use power and make heat on small glasses. It can bring known problems, such as the wrong emotion, flat expressions and errors with background noise or people talking over each other.

Navigation, audio and system software

The glasses can now give bike and bus and train directions when asked by voice. People in the US and Canada get this first.

Directions can use things you see, such as turn left at the yellow house, not only street names. It is like getting directions from a local person who points out landmarks. The system moves from map steps to guidance tied to the visible world. This matters for biking and transit, where there is little time to look and signs are easy to miss, and it needs accurate location tracking to help.

A new Explore app is coming to both the glasses and the Meta AI phone app. It is for finding apps that work with the glasses. You search on the phone and use them on the face.

Meta is also adding Dolby Atmos, which is sound that feels placed around you, to recording and playback. It adds photo editing on the lens screen, a fuller calendar, phone alerts shown on the glasses and Threads for Community Feeds. The wristband allows fine control without touch, but detailed edits stay hard without a large screen.

Availability and pricing

Ray-Ban Display is expanding to five new markets: the UK, Canada, France, Italy and Germany. People there and in the US can order online.

The starting price is £749 in the UK and CA$1,149 in Canada. In France, Italy and Germany it is €899. Pre-orders start on announcement day, with availability on October 13.

The broader picture here is simple. The first year showed the basic design works, with a screen in the lens plus wrist control as a daily way to give input. The second year is about jobs glasses can do differently from phones and watches, such as call presence, directions tied to surroundings and app discovery. Plain additions such as mirrored alerts and a fuller calendar shape whether people keep wearing the device, since they cut phone checks and add schedule context, social feed access and better sound for clips.

In my view, the hologram call depends less on how real it looks than on whether people accept it. I watched my own kids love video filters and then drop them as soon as they felt false. Voice-guessed expressions will work only if people on the call trust them in serious talks. Starting with WhatsApp in the US lets Meta learn how people react without a wide release.

For developers watching this, the Explore app plus landmark directions point to glasses that outside apps can build for more easily. These always-on displays work best when outside apps can use location, messaging and sound without draining the battery too fast. If spatial sound clips flow back into Meta's apps, creators gain a reason to treat the glasses as both a camera and a screen, which opens more of what people can do with them.