spatialcomputing.info

Meta’s smart glasses with display, codenamed ‘Hypernova’, are reportedly slated to cost less than initially expected, with Meta allegedly slashing price expectations from the rumored $1,000 – $1,400 range to $800. Now, respected supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says Meta is nearly ready to begin mass production, although sales expectations aren’t very high.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported last week that Hypernova will be cheaper than initially reported, delivering a pair of smart glasses with a single display and a wrist-worn electromyography (EMG) based controller for input at “about $800,” Gurman says.

Notably, a number of recent leaks provided by data miner ‘Luna’ have also seemingly unveiled the glasses in full, suggesting not only is Hypernova (also referred to as ‘Celeste’) real, but it may be a Meta solo launch—i.e. not a partnership with Ray-Ban and Oakley parent company EssilorLuxottica.

Kuo, known for releasing insider info on Apple products, recently posted on X (machine translated from Traditional Chinese) that Hypernova is expected to enter mass production in Q3 2025.

Ostensibly sourcing supply chain info, Kuo says Hypernova will have a two-year product cycle, with shipments over the next two years estimated to be around 150,000 to 200,000 units in total—significantly less than the over two million Ray-Ban Meta units sold since release in 2023.

“Based on Qualcomm chip shipment forecasts, global smart glasses shipments in 2026 are estimated at about 13 to 15 million units, which shows that Hypernova’s market share is negligible, hence it seems more like Meta’s experimental product,” Kuo maintains.

Continuing:

AI will be the most important selling point of Hypernova, but the exploration of applications integrating AI and AR is still in the early stages, and with a selling price of about $800, this should be the main reason Meta is conservatively viewing Hypernova’s shipment volumes. Additionally, to pursue mass production feasibility, it adopts LCoS, but this also brings hardware design challenges such as appearance design, brightness, response time, and battery life.

Kuo posits that Hypernova holds a few strategic implications for Meta: to preempt Apple’s release and build brand image, accumulate ecosystem experience as early as possible, and understand user behavior.

Truly, the addition of a ‘simple’ display to its smart glasses platform changes things from both a user and platform holder perspective. As with early entrants into the ‘smart glasses with display’ segment, such as Rokid’s recently pitched Glasses, users won’t just be snapping photos and video, taking calls and listening to music, or talking with LLMs.

People will expect display-clad smart glasses to do things smart things like turn-by-turn directions, live text and audio capture real-time translation, and more interaction with apps, given Hypernova is supposed launch with more articulated input beyond simple swipes, button presses, and voice input can provide. Getting that right is no small feat, as Kuo suggests Meta may simply not be ready for the sort of wider adoption Ray-Ban Meta has driven.

Meta sees smart glasses as a stepping stone to all-day AR, likely making hesitancy the right move. The company needs to not only feed all of those learnings into a bigger and better AR platform down the line at some point, but also create something that won’t frustrate the glut of consumers with half-baked experiences or hardware limitations that could tarnish the segment before it even gets off the ground.

After all, Meta is banking on owning a sizeable piece of AR as it hopes to eventually generate a return on its multiple billions of dollars spent per year on Reality Labs, its XR research and product division, so rashly jumping into the coming wave of smart glasses may do more harm than good.