These Smart Glasses Are Better And Cheaper Than Ray Ban Meta Audio!

Today, I'll be testing five different smart glasses designed for privacy to see if any of them are better and cheaper than the Ray-Ban Meta audio glasses. We'll start at the cheapest and work our way up to the most expensive to see if any of these is a hidden gem in the smart glasses world. But first, smash that subscribe button because it's giveaway week part nine. That's right, we're giving away one more pair of AOC Air Mega AR glasses because who doesn't want to watch movies, play games, and do all their favorite things with an enormous movie theater size screen wherever they go. So, to enter, number one, subscribe to the channel. Number two, comment on this video giveaway week part nine. And number three, fill out the giveaway form in the description if you haven't already. Now, it's time to see if any of these is better and cheaper. Starting with these. If you're looking for the cheapest smart glasses from a good brand, this might be it. $19.99 on sale right now, the DPV R G2. Inside of this white box, you'll find a black cleaning cloth, a USB A to dual magnetic charger, and inside the black pouch is a DPV R G2 in transparent brown with amber lenses. You can see the touchpad visible on the right. These are really elegant glasses. They look crazy. You're getting transparent frames where you can see all the tech. There's actually two touchpad buttons, one on the bottom of each side here. They're pretty small, a little hard to press, which I honestly don't like. You also can activate Siri with these, so you can send text messages, start maps navigation, or even use the new Siri AI function like searching through your text messages. There's also a pretty interesting feature that none of the other glasses have in this video that let you initiate the shutter on your phone's camera remotely with these. Now, at first this might seem a little useless because your hand ends up being on the actual glasses in the picture. But if you set your phone to a short timer, then use the touchpad to activate the shutter, then you can take your hand off, and then you can get a normal picture from really far away rather than having to buy a separate Bluetooth remote, which is pretty handy. You can also listen to music with these, and they sound decent enough. You get different functions like double tapping the side to go to the next song, turning up and down the volume, playing, pausing, all that stuff. The glasses are also really comfortable to wear. The nose pads are sort of more like Ray-Ban meta style where there aren't actually protruding adjustable nose pads, but these are way bigger than Ray-Ban meta. So, that's actually better. Now, if you remember the DPVR G1 which had cameras for 54 bucks that I showed in a recent smart glasses comparison, you would know those also had AI. So, I was kind of expecting with these, but unfortunately, they do not unless you obviously use Siri or Gemini or some sort of shortcut to get it. You don't actually get ChatGPT or any AI built into the glasses via voice activation like you do with those for 54 bucks. But, these are only $19.99 right now. So, you have an extra 20 bucks to spend and you want some cool smart glasses that come in a variety of different styles, it could be a good option. But, if you're looking to spend a little bit more on a couple things from $32 to $45, you can get these aviator transition smart glasses. Inside this black box, you're going to find a gray soft case, a USB-A to dual magnetic cord yet again, a gray cleaning cloth, and inside the gray pouch is going to be the glasses themselves with shiny black frames here, a blue cast in the lenses which likely just means they're blue light blocking, a metal style accent on the top, really good transition lenses. Honestly, I already tested them. It also has way better nose pads than the $20 smart glasses from before. As for style and comfort, they feel great. They're extremely light, they transition well, the style looks incredible with the wire accent and the aviator style of frames. Now, for some reason, you think since they're AI transition glasses, just like the last pair, they would have voice activated AI. Interestingly enough, these have the exact same features as the DPVR G2 even though it's a completely separate brand. I do think these look way better, the nose pads are way more functional, it's way more comfortable, but there is one enormous problem and that is that the speakers in both of these arms refuse to connect. On the G2s, it does it automatically the first time, you never have to do it again. Doesn't matter how many times I reset these, turn them off on, and I literally tried for 30 to 45 minutes to get these working. So, for instance, it would just play out of the right side of the glasses. And then if you try to connect the left side, it will disconnect the right side and there's no way to fix it. So, these are basically defective. So, I just would not get these. For some reason, it's really hard to find good smart glasses under $50 unless you shop on Temu. Check out that video. But, if you prefer real AI options and responses including models like Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, and Gemini with better sounding bigger speakers from a big sports brand collaboration, you might want to check out the Reebok Lucid Octane smart glasses for 113 to 150 bucks. Honestly, this is a pretty prime unboxing experience. So, inside you get a very stylish bright red Reebok case with a lifted logo, manual, cleaning cloth, magnetic charger, and yeah, the glasses which look sick. The style is very sporty and no cameras. So, besides a little bit thicker frames, most people won't even know these are smart glasses at all. So, I guess that's the point of all the glasses in this video. You can also get these with a transition lens variant, which I did, so that you can use them both indoors and outdoors and it transitions pretty well. But, honestly, even the standard sunglass styles look amazing. the different reflective colors on here. Also getting some very secure storage with this bright red Reebok hard case and a soft pouch case on the inside with an extra integrated pouch to store things like the wired charger or anything else you'd want to bring. Now, despite the appearance, they actually only weigh around 50 g. They have 8 hours of battery life, a manual on-off switch activated by press and hold, a volume rocker for volume and other functions, and you can completely customize the home screen in the Lucid app with the mini apps that you find the most useful. Now, out of all these mini apps, my favorite is honestly the daily newscast. And you can put in any topics you want, not just the default ones. So, I put smart glasses. >> This is your personalized Lucid news briefing for Sunday. Smart glasses are moving rapidly from novelty to mainstream wearable technology. New industry data shows display-free smart glass shipments surged 167% year-over-year in the first quarter. >> And it's such a cool thing to be able to hear news about the actual things you care about rather than having to choose between four generic categories that isn't really that in-depth. I wish that feature would come to display glass. You're also getting tons of AI options. With additional models within the larger ones, like Claude, you have three different options as far as how good you want the AI to be. And yeah, ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini. Now, an enormous con with these is that using anything higher than the basic flash model of each AI actually costs extra, to the tune of $6 to $8 a month depending on your plan. So, otherwise, you're stuck with the worst models like GPT Nano instead of GPT 5 or Claude Haiku, Grok 4.3 instead of the actual latest best most in-depth models. Another really annoying bug that I found with the hands-free AI mini app here is that when you exit out of the menu, it doesn't save your model choice. So, every time I come in here to look at the chats, it defaulted back to the original AI that was selected, which was extremely annoying. On top of that, when you actually use the AI and listen to it, it is way more robotic-sounding than even the original Siri more than a decade ago. It's that bad, to the point where it's hard to even understand what it's saying and mispronounces basic things like well-known country names like Costa Rica. >> For nature and adventure, New Zealand, Iceland, Switzerland, Patagonia, Costa Rica for city exploration. >> But none of that comes close to the biggest problem I have with Lucid Reebok hands-free smart glasses, which is that the hands-free AI is basically completely falsely advertised in these. For paying up to $150, reading the full manual, and even downloading the app, which gives you instructions for this, they all basically say you can have hands-free AI just by saying, "Hey Lucid." It literally tells you that in the app for these glasses when you connect them. And that would be super cool if you could just voice activate Claude or Grok or other AIs that we haven't really been able to voice activate in smart glasses yet. But, it doesn't actually let you. And no, you can't activate it with a button press either. Tried that as well. Tried a bunch of troubleshooting. Hey Lucid. Hey Lucid. Nope. No hands-free AI. I had to actually go to an obscure article review to even find out that this feature didn't exist cuz everything else said that it did. AI said that it did. The manual, the app, everything said that it had it. It doesn't actually have it. So, here's how you actually hear AI answers in these glasses. And I'll put the amount of steps on the screen as I'm saying that. Open the Lucid app. Click on hands-free AI, ironically enough. Press the microphone button down at the bottom, recite your question out loud, press the check mark and send button after you've spoken the question, and then you're not done. It won't say anything even after it answers the whole thing. You actually have to press the speak aloud button after that. I don't know if you're counting, but that's six or more literal steps not including unlocking your phone and finding the app. That's unacceptable. And for that reason, for AI, I do not recommend Lucid Rebok Octane smart glasses at all. I mean, for more than $100, you're still not getting voice activated AI? You can get the G1s for 54 bucks with transition lenses, transparent frames, and working hands-free ChatGPT AI, and an 8-megapixel camera with a long recording limit, too, and good speakers and microphones. Like, why would you get these? It's not good. And if you want to know what glasses I'm referring to, just check out my better than Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 video. It's in there. But so far, that's three glasses that are not better and cheaper than the Ray-Ban Meta audio. Usually, we find a hidden gem by now. It's interesting. But if you want AI glasses that actually seem to be worth more than their price and have the best photo and video quality I've ever seen anywhere near their price point, you'll have to look at these. For 199 bucks, the Inmo Magic AI Glasses. You're still getting a magnetic charger, a huge cleaning cloth, a smart glasses pouch, and inside the glasses themselves. These are actually Inmo's first-ever non-display glasses available in Western markets like America. If you remember before, they've made the Inmo Go 3 and the Inmo Air 3, which you can literally watch YouTube on. So, they're taking a pretty huge bet here by making non-display glasses in collaboration with Jackson Wang, who is a rapper, singer-songwriter from Hong Kong turned designer, apparently, and K-pop star. These are also super light, weighing in at just 40 g. They have a 265 mA hour battery. They do have a camera, so you can take pictures, record videos up to 10 minutes each, and even record audio recordings. You're also getting real-time translation in the most languages so far in this video. You have audio navigation that you can even initiate in the app. And you can actually use voice commands to activate the AI to record videos, take pictures, answer calls. So, they're actually useful. What is the best place to travel in the world right now? >> Based on the latest travel rankings and trends for 2026, Melbourne, Australia, recently named one of the best travel destinations by National Geographic. >> So, I mentioned before that the photo and video quality was insane, and I am not lying. Look at these. Both the photo and video are extremely high quality, and it even has depth of field. Unlike all other smart glasses, which are infinity focus, maybe they don't look so great. Gives you like a nostalgic vibe, but also looks like an actual camera took it instead of a tiny sensor in smart glasses. You're also getting a horizontal 4x3 aspect ratio, which is great. 10 minutes of recording I mentioned earlier, phenomenal. Honestly, I wish the Inmo Go 3s had the camera in these, and those are like 5-600 bucks. That's how good the camera in this is, and that would make the Inmo Go 3s perfect if they did. Hands-down the best camera I've used in smart glasses ever at this price point or anywhere near this price point, to be honest. But, you do have to be careful because it's like a real camera. If you take a picture really up close, what's next to you is going to be out of focus. So, just keep that in mind. But, honestly, I love the camera quality. It's insanely good. It's really, really good. Now, there are cons to these glasses. The first big one that I noticed is that there's no customization of the AI voice's speed. The AI responses just seem a little bit too slow. I like to put them at a faster speed, so if they could add that software-wise, that would be great. Second, the frame is matte black, which is very smudge-proof, but I honestly am starting to very much prefer the either metal bodies, like the Inmo Go 3s, or the transparent frames, like the DBVR G2s earlier in this video. Third, I wish these had transition lenses because that would make them even cooler and more usable inside. Cuz as we've seen, you can get transition lenses for really cheap, the $32-45 earlier, and the AI is still not as good in this as it will be in Meta with the new Muse agent, which is coming in the coming months. So, I don't want to just say that most of these glasses suck. These are really good for a camera, and then you have the audio. And remember the Ray-Ban Meta audio is 349 bucks. So, I've actually included an extra secret product in this video that only costs an extra $50 that is insanely good. But first, it actually looks like four pairs of smart glasses without a camera, the cheapest best option you can get is these, the Ray-Ban Meta Audio, which is a first in this entire video series. So, for 349 bucks, you're getting the cleaning cloth, the beautiful color charging case, and the glasses even come with nose pads this time around if you get the Clubmaster, which I think look great. I've done a full review of these glasses already, so check it out if you haven't seen it. But you're also getting a bunch of other styles. And the Clubmaster has these gold accents on the bottom, which I really like. Phenomenal transition lenses that work great, but I mean, so do the other transitions in this video. Spatial audio is amazing, incredible sound quality. You're also getting 12 hours of battery life, which is amazing for Meta. It's easy to get prescription lenses with these, too. Meta AI is okay, but we're going to get Muse agent soon enough. I did a bunch of tests with Muse agent in that last video, but I've been testing it even more since then. And one of my favorite new features I discovered is that it actually works in the background after you've asked everything you want to ask. And if it finds new answers to questions you asked like a week ago, it will bring them up. Like, it gave me a pre-tour checklist on the day of the tours that it's scheduled for me to look at some houses. Then the day after that, it gave me a list of five new houses that exactly matched my criteria that you can't even filter for on Zillow, just in case I didn't like any of the ones I toured on that day. Meta's Muse agent is actually extremely useful, and I can't wait until it comes to their actual glasses. And it seems like it's the first to market with this AI agent stuff in glasses, but it turns out it's not. So, if you're eager for something truly better than the Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses for privacy, more agentic AI options, full working memory that benefits your life, tons of new features that they've released in the last couple months that people barely even know about, and even a dual lens display screen so you can see your to-do's, calendar, use maps navigation, all you have to do is spend an extra $50 for this crazy returner that's now available to buy immediately. You don't have to wait on Kickstarter anymore. For 399 bucks, just 50 more than the Ray-Ban Meta audio, the Memo mind smart glasses. And there is a link in the description. I know the last video kind of ended with you not being able to buy them anymore, but now you can buy them again, so you can check them out. But oh my gosh, wait until I show you the new features. It's crazy. Now, I've owned these for a while, so I think I've found the best configuration. First off, the style. So, you get three different frames to choose from. One is rectangular, one is circular, and one is more like a square. Like Wayfarers, but a little taller. They all look great. I've tried all of them. They're all built with premium metal materials instead of plastic like most other smart glasses, not even just in this video. They're super light, lighter than the Ray-Ban Metas without a display. And yes, you can get prescription pretty easily in these also. If you spend an extra $10 at 409, you can actually get custom colors on the front of the glasses, so that your glasses won't look like anyone else around you. Now, for the fit and comfort, you're getting that super lightweight weight of the glasses. You're also getting extremely premium build quality. This feels really nice. The metal is nice and cool on your face. It just feels like much more expensive glasses than anything in this video, even though it's only 50 bucks more than Meta. It feels way more expensive. You're also getting amazing nose pads, which allows the glasses to sit perfectly on your face, and you can adjust these very minutely. It's great. Next is outdoor customization. You can get clip-on lenses first-party, but I actually recommend going third-party. Like with this pair here that came in a set from Amazon. I'll try to remember to put the link down in the description for those, too. Now, the reason you're going to want these is the dual lens display in like sort of a monochrome fallout green is great. And it does work outside. It's 2,000 nits, definitely visible, but you're not getting any sun protection, number one. And number two, you can get even better visibility in even the most bright circumstances you could possibly imagine outside if you get clip-on sunshades. And these aren't like the cheap ones from Ray-Ban Meta glasses. These are actually like metal construction. The lenses are a lot higher quality. They're just generally way better than clip-ons you can get from Ray-Ban Metas, also. And they're really easy to put on. And then number three, it allows your glasses to have even more style. You can try a bunch of different colors. I liked the black ones in the set the most, but the gold and the blue were also really cool. Okay, great. So, now you have amazing style glasses inside and out, even with a prescription. Next is the case. Right off the bat, you're getting a pretty small form factor with these, comparable volume to the Ray-Ban Meta case, but this one's more of a square, whereas the Meta is a little bit taller and more rounded. But, more importantly, these have a really protective hard shell, so your glasses don't get damaged. Now, with the clip-ons, your glasses will still fit in the case perfectly inside. And the other thing, it's not going to wiggle around at all. My glasses aren't going to hit the side walls. There's no looseness in here, which even better prevents it from getting damaged. Now, if you come indoors and you don't want your sunshades anymore, you can just slip them back in the same case. If you don't want to do that, they're also thin enough to put in your pocket as well, and you'll barely even notice them. The reason I'm sharing all this advice is because I've had these for like half a year, and so this is just all the things that works great. But, we're not done yet, because inside of this case, there is a little sleeve here. This is where I recommend putting the charging attachment that comes with the glasses. It has a USB-C female port on the back, attaches to your glasses to charge them, and by putting this in the pouch, you will always have a charger for your glasses on the go. Super small, and by putting it in here, you won't ever lose it. And you can plug it into the end of any phone charger that's USB-C, which is basically what everyone has on the entire planet. So, you're never not going to be able to charge these. You can charge them car with your seat charger in there, at your house by your bed, at your friend's house, literally anywhere on the planet, basically. And it all just comes in this really small case. But, the funny thing is, you probably won't even need to charge these that much, because the advertised use is 16 to 17 hours of battery life, which as long as you don't go to sleep with your glasses on, is about 2 days of full use. It's lasted me more than that multiple times. So, every 2 to 3 days, you just charge it with that little attachment in the case on a USB-C cord for less than an hour, and then it's fully charged, ready to go for another 2 days. Great. So, now you have an awesome configuration for these, a little kit. But, how are they actually better than Ray-Ban Meta audio in all those ways I mentioned? And what are those crazy new features that they added that no one's talking about? Well, first, they're better because of the usefulness. You're still getting all the core features that you would get in Meta glasses. And they just work really well, unlike the previous products in this video. You can activate AI with your voice or with a tap and hold of the button on the bottom. The AI will actually bring up a little 3D screen that comes in front of the heads-up display you're looking at, letting you know exactly when it's listening instead of having to guess like with audio glasses. You ask your question, it answers it. Also, the display is in both eyes. It's 640 by 350 resolution. It has a 25° field of view. Specs that are all better than the Meta Ray-Ban display, which is double the price. And we're not even at the most useful parts of these glasses yet. The first of those is the heads-up display. You can set it to activate when you tilt your head up to a certain degrees or by just single pressing the button if you want to wake it that way. And then you see everything that you specifically want because this HUD is fully customizable. You can even choose different HUD layout styles for the info you want. So, like different fonts and vibes for that. So, for my four preset screens, I also have notifications, which is essentially all the notifications I get from my phone. So, you can see some of my recent notifications here. I have my to-do's to know what I actually need to accomplish each day, which by the way, you can add these and check them off fully with your voice, which is amazing. And then I have stocks to see how those are doing. You can also add calendar onto here, idea notes, and lyrics for songs that you're currently listening to. And those aren't all the features, by the way. That's just the heads-up display ones that come up immediately. Among the other useful glasses mini apps are a teleprompter, so you don't forget what to say, which I've used countless times. A voice recorder for meetings and notes. Live captions for subtitles in real life. And you can actually change the speed that it captions things, like I did here, and it's really fast now. Love that. Live translation in 53 languages, which by the way, they just added these five new languages in their most recent update. And my second favorite feature, maps navigation to give you augmented display directions to wherever you want to go. And you have three different options for how minimal or big you want that HUD to be for your directions, which is nice. Still not done yet, by the way. I mentioned they have speakers, which are professionally tuned by Harman audio. They sound really great, and yeah, you can listen to music and take calls with these, which you can't do in a pair of display glasses like the Even G2s for $600, since those don't have speakers. But, the next feature is even crazier. And this is the only one that cost extra. So, by all means, you don't need this, but wow, let me show you. It's full memory. So, in the privacy settings, you can enable voice print ID, so it only listens to your words. You can set times of the day that it does or doesn't listen, and what topics it should completely ignore, like bank info or romance, if you don't want it to listen to that. It takes all this and gives you back your memories and logs your wishes and dreams even. You get daily summaries, weekly summaries, monthly summaries, and even this big calendar to look at any day specifically that you want. It generates a picture for you and gives you a bunch of info about what happened, so you can actually remember your life. And I think a lot of us, honestly, these days kind of struggle with memory because of all of this short-term stuff that's being thrown in our faces, all the social media, everything. This actually is really, really helpful. But, let's be honest, that memory thing was already here a couple months ago. What's new? Well, even with Kickstarter shutting down all the money that they had raised, which I don't remember the exact amount, I feel like it was more than a million dollars, they didn't stop updating these. They kept going. So, here's some of that crazy new stuff that they added even in the midst of all this. First off, for your memories, you can actually do this cool thing now where you can change how it sort of narrates them. Right now, you have two options. You can do warm narrative, which is what I have, so it kind of like gives you a nostalgic description of what happened on specific days of your life that it listens to and tells more of a story of it, or you can set it to rational analysis, if you want your glasses to hold you accountable more, look at things logically, and give you clear next steps and solutions to your problem. You can also turn automatic meeting extraction on. You can set to-do's to automatically be generated from your meetings and thrown into your to-do list on your home screen. You can turn on the call memory assistant. During your phone calls, generate summaries from snippets, so you can quickly pick up the conversation later. You get good morning memo now that you can toggle on or off so that every morning memo organizes the weather, today's schedule, and yesterday's items so you can start the day better and more focused. You can also customize that with a couple additional settings right below it. There's also a couple different battery saving options like turning off voice wake up or turning on or off continuous listening after a question, which you'd want on if you want to have sort of longer conversations with the AI. You can change the reply length of the AI, which just seems like such a simple thing that every smart glasses pair should have and basically none of them do. But, you can change it from concise, which is short, medium, or detailed, which is longer. You can turn on and off voice replies as I mentioned earlier if you just want text responses, which honestly I kind of like. You change the voice from male to female. And as I mentioned, you can change the speed of the subtitles that come on the screen during live captions. I like to have this on fast. It's so nice. You can also turn off the wear detections. And then, still not the craziest stuff. So, if you click on this, this is basically hidden in the app by the way. It's really hard to find this. But, if you click on this little glasses screenshot picture in the app, you can see all of these hidden features from configuring open claw for agentic AI. You can fine-tune your display if your eyes happen to be different, you know, like most people's are. You can play new mini games now like Tetris, Brick Breaker, or Jet Runner, which is basically Flappy Bird. You can connect to a third-party AJoGP device. And you can even add other agentic AI right now like Claude Code and ChatGPT's Codex. They added all of that. That's three different agentic AIs by the way in a couple months despite all the challenges that you might have heard of from my last video on them. And yes, the point of all this is these glasses are insane and they continue to get more and more insane at a very fast rate even despite money struggles because they actually want to improve your life, give you good memory, all this stuff. And everything in them is so seamless. They work really easy, keeps your life more organized with the to-do's and everything. You You're getting maps navigation like you don't get with some display smart glasses. Honestly, they feel like they should be a lot more expensive than they are and that's because they were planning to be. These were supposed to retail at 600 bucks, but they're still $399 right now with no wait, by the way, because this is honestly still early on for them. They're likely going to raise the price later. I love these glasses and they still blow me away and it's crazy they added all this stuff. Three agentic AI options is crazy in a pair of display glasses for $399 with maps navigation. Like the style is so good, the comfort is so good and I don't understand they had so much money just like ripped from them because Kickstarter closed it on the last day of their campaign and they still were able to do all this, make all these updates. Maybe it's because they're owned by the like the biggest projector company in the world, but it's crazy. And yeah, they're still doing stuff. They even invited me to New York a couple weeks ago to an event, but I wasn't able to make it because I'm behind on videos, so I didn't even see that email. But yeah, right now these glasses are still really cheap. $399, only 50 bucks more than the Ray-Ban Meta Audios. In my opinion, they're way, way, way cooler. They're so cool. And another added benefit of these clip-ons is you can't see like the wave guides anymore. That's one thing with display smart glasses, if from different angles, you can see the wave guides more. If you put clip-ons on them, you can't see them from the outside. It's crazy. And they just look even more like normal glasses. I love that they have speakers unlike the Evie G2s. They're just they're so good. So, based on all the stuff in this video, guys, I think you probably know my opinion. Those first three glasses sucked. They weren't that useful. Honestly, the G2 is probably the most well-rounded out of all of them and it was the $19 one. The Magic AI glasses have an insane camera. It's my favorite camera in any smart glasses I've ever used. I love that there's actual depth of field. The colors look great. It just looks like a real camera. Those are amazing. I can't believe they're $199. I guess they're increasing to $299 soon, but those are crazy. And then these Memo lines for just 50 bucks more than the Ray-Ban Meta Audios are amazing. If you like Meta a lot, of course, like Ray-Ban Meta Audios are still really, really good glasses. They are. I mean, they came out after these. It kind of looks a little similar. Yeah, they're still really good glasses, but I mean, 50 bucks more for dual lens display, augmented maps navigation, and memory, and three agentic AI already instead of the one that Meta has that still isn't out yet for for Yeah, those are my three recommendations. This is still my favorite, but let me know what you guys think down in the comments. Let me know what other smart glasses you want me to review or what other videos you want me to make. Don't forget to enter that giveaway. Thank you so much for watching. Till next