Meta Connect 2025: Zuckerberg Bets Big on Smart Glasses as the Next Computing Era by 2030

At Meta Connect 2025, CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage with a bold proclamation: the smartphone’s days are numbered, and smart glasses will be the device that defines the next decade of personal computing.

The Big Reveal: Ray-Ban Meta Display Glasses

The star of this year’s keynote was the long-rumored Ray-Ban Meta Display glasses. Unlike previous Ray-Ban smart shades, these feature a tiny built-in display on the right lens, capable of showing navigation prompts, real-time translations, recipe instructions, and contextual notifications. Paired with Meta’s experimental sEMG (electromyography) wristband, users can type or interact via subtle finger gestures, giving the glasses an input system that doesn’t rely on voice or bulky controllers.

Zuckerberg framed them as “a step toward replacing the smartphone by 2030,” describing a world where instead of pulling a phone out of your pocket hundreds of times a day, information simply appears in your field of view — seamlessly and socially acceptable.

The event also unveiled Oakley Meta Sphaera, a sport-focused line designed for athletes and outdoor use, and a refresh of the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 glasses, bringing sharper cameras, improved audio, and longer battery life for those who want stylish AI wearables without a display lens.

By diversifying styles, Meta is signaling that smart glasses aren’t just a niche gadget — they’re aiming for mass-market adoption across fashion, sports, and everyday life.

Why Glasses Over Headsets?

While speculation swirled about a potential Meta Quest 4, the headset was a no-show at Connect 2025. Instead, Meta emphasized lightweight, socially acceptable devices as the gateway into the mixed-reality future. Zuckerberg described VR headsets as “immersive companions” but made it clear that AR-and-AI-infused glasses are the main course.

Asus’ rumored ROG Tairus high-performance headset made a minor cameo, but positioned more as a nod to power users and gamers, not Meta’s long-term mainstream strategy.

The Bigger Vision: From Social Media to Personal AI

Zuckerberg’s keynotes increasingly sound less like social media pitches and more like computing manifestos. At Connect 2025, he doubled down on the idea that contextual AI — assistants that understand where you are, what you’re doing, and adapt in real time — will be the glue between the glasses and their users.

The goal is clear: make glasses the default way people interact with digital information, just as the smartphone has been since the 2000s.

XR + Ai

Meta envisions a future where anyone, anywhere, can effortlessly imagine and create compelling 3D characters, scenes, or entire worlds—from scratch—as easily as asking Meta AI a question. This capability promises to transform not only the imagery and videos on platforms like Instagram and Facebook but also the entire landscape of VR and AR experiences. Central to this vision is the Meta Horizon Engine, a ground-up rebuild optimized to power the metaverse with superior graphics, faster performance, and vast, interconnected spaces featuring realistic physics and interactions. It can load and render worlds four times faster and support over 100 simultaneous users in a single space—five times more than before—enabling vibrant shared experiences like concerts or social meetups. Alongside it, Meta Horizon Studio provides a creative hub with generative AI tools that let creators build meshes, textures, audio, skyboxes, and TypeScript using simple text prompts, slashing development time. An agentic AI assistant will soon integrate these tools to make creation even faster and simpler. Powered by Horizon Engine, Meta’s new Immersive Home for VR allows users to customize spaces with pinned apps and jump instantly into interconnected worlds. In photorealistic advances, Meta’s Hyperscape technology leverages Gaussian Splatting, cloud rendering, and streaming to bring real-world spaces into VR, with Hyperscape Capture enabling Quest 3 and 3S users to scan rooms in minutes and turn them into immersive, photorealistic digital worlds. Together, these technologies showcase Meta’s momentum in making the metaverse more accessible, interconnected, and vivid than ever

2030: The Post-Smartphone Timeline

If Meta’s roadmap plays out as Zuckerberg imagines, by 2030 glasses won’t just complement smartphones — they could replace them altogether. Messaging, navigation, video calls, and even lightweight gaming could all be handled through sleek lenses, supported by AI that feels less like a tool and more like a companion.

It’s an ambitious bet, but one aligned with Meta’s relentless pursuit of blending the digital and physical worlds. For Zuckerberg, Meta Connect 2025 wasn’t just a product reveal — it was a stake in the ground that the era after the smartphone starts now.