Meta Launches ‘Ray-Ban Display’ with LCoS Smart Glasses, Showcases PIC-Based LCoS at SID 2025

At Meta Connect 2025 on Sept. 18 (local 17), Meta announced its first display-bringing consumer smart glasses, the Meta Ray-Ban Display. The product is an intermediate step between the existing Ray-Ban AI glasses and the Orion AR glasses unveiled last year and will be available in the U.S. market later this month.

The new glasses feature a monocular display at the bottom of the right lens, which the company says was designed with practical factors such as price and battery life in mind. The display features OmniVision’s single-panel full-color LCoS, with a 600×600 resolution, 42 PPD, 20° monocular field of view, and up to 5,000 nits of brightness. Combined with Lumus’ Waveguide, it delivers a crisp visual experience even outdoors. These specifications fulfill the requirements of an informational AR device (20-35° FoV, high brightness, low power) and provide excellent visibility, especially in outdoor environments. Meta’s choice of LCoS over green LEDoS was a strategic decision based on technology maturity, power efficiency, and the ability to implement full color.

At SID 2025, Meta Reality Labs also announced its work on a photonic integrated circuit (PIC)-based ultra-compact laser microdisplay. The technology offered the possibility of shrinking AR light engines to less than 1㎤, demonstrating a 50-degree viewing angle and high color uniformity. Despite the advantages of mature technology and competitive pricing, LCoS has been limited by the need for bulky optical modules. PICs replace traditional polarizing beamsplitters (PBSs), focusing lenses, and dichroic mirrors by implementing core optical functions such as light gathering, color separation, and polarization control on a chip. PIC-based laser lighting has great potential to scale as a platform for next-generation display technologies. It remains to be seen if the Meta Ray-Ban Display utilizes PICs.

LEDoS is not expected to be fully competitive until 2028 or later, and until then, full-color LCoS is likely to be the key solution for the AR glasses market. OmniVision, as well as Himax Display, Avegant, and Raontec, are working on the next generation of high-brightness, high-contrast LCoS engines, which will make them even more competitive in the near term.

The significance of this announcement is that Meta simultaneously unveiled OmniVision LCoS in commercial products and PIC-based ultra-compact laser microdisplays in research achievements. This demonstrates that the next generation of AR displays is rapidly evolving around the three pillars of miniaturization, efficiency, and quality, and is expected to accelerate the growth of the AR industry ecosystem.