The new Oakley Meta Vanguard smart glasses just elevated your outdoors experience

At the Meta Connect event this month, CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off the Meta Ray-Ban Gen 2, the excellent Meta Ray-Ban Display, and the Oakley Meta Vanguard smart glasses. Vanguard are a continuation of the recently-released Oakley Meta smart glasses, with even better hardware to back them up.

The Oakley Meta Vanguard are designed for people who need a rugged pair of smart glasses that can endure the daily abuse of working out and engaging in sports activities. But, this time around, the glasses aren’t just tougher and more durable along with a better battery, they actually elevate your outdoors experience in other ways.

For starters, the Oakley Meta Vanguard can interface with your Garmin gear, allowing you to keep up with your health tracking and other metrics simply by asking Meta AI. For example, imagine that you’re running a marathon, all you have to do to check on something like your heart rate is ask the glasses out loud.

The Oakley Meta Vanguard let you record POV video in 3K as well, also by simply asking the glasses to do so. During the showcase, athletes were shown performing stunts while asking Meta AI to begin recording, or switch to slow motion video capture, or take a picture, and so on. The glasses also have image stabilization built in, so running or biking across rough terrain doesn’t have to mean a shaky and bumpy video.



Naturally, other excellent features found on Meta’s smart glasses are also found here, including:

• Live translation
• On-demand AI help
• The new Conversation Focus

Conversation Focus is a new feature that Meta introduced at Connect. It uses AI to boost the sound of a person that you’re talking to, so that you can hear them loud and clear over the hustle and bustle of daily life surrounding you.



The Oakley Meta Vanguard also last up to a claimed nine hours on a single charge. These glasses will be available from October 21, and start at $499. Personally, I’d rather spend an extra $300 for the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses mentioned above, but I’m sure that more physically active users will find Vanguard a joy to use.

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