Pros & Cons
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- Waterproof design
- Clear audio quality with good volume
- Fun video recording options
- Customizable action button
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- Expensive
- Unimpressive battery life
- Limited bass on audio playback
- AI assistant can make errors
Oakley Meta Vanguard Specs
| Connection | Wireless |
| Glasses Features | Camera |
| Glasses Features | Microphone |
| Glasses Features | Speakers |
| Input Controls | Voice |
| Voice Assistant Compatibility | Meta |
Meta's lineup of smart glasses keeps evolving, and the Oakley Meta Vanguard (starting at $499) is a prime example. It features the latest software enhancements, such as slow-motion and hyperlapse video capture, upgraded video stabilization, and integration with Garmin and Strava apps. On the hardware front, the Vanguard stands out with the best weather resistance among Meta's offerings, a distinctive action button alongside the regular capture button, and louder, clearer audio thanks to improved speakers. For those on a budget, the Oakley Meta HSTN ($399) offers great value and will receive the same software updates, but the Vanguard is worth the extra cost if you want a sportier design and enhanced audio performance.
Design: Sleek and Sporty
The Oakley Meta Vanguard joins a lineup of Meta smart glasses that includes the $299 Ray-Ban Meta and the $399 Oakley Meta HSTN. It's one of a trio of new entries that includes a second-gen pair of Ray-Bans with 3K video capabilities (starting at $379), and the waveguide-equipped Ray-Ban Meta Display ($799).
The Vanguard glasses are offered with black frames and Prizm 24K (gold) or Prizm Road (purple, pink, and orange) lenses, or white frames with Prizm Black (black) or Prizm Sapphire (blue) lenses. The proprietary Prizm lens coating is meant to enhance both the color and contrast of your field of view. From hinge to hinge, the glasses measure 5.35 by 2.32 inches (WH). They have a 4.72-inch temple length and weigh 2.33 ounces.
Like other Meta models, the Vanguard looks like an ordinary pair of glasses, but includes a camera for taking photos and videos, microphones for making calls and receiving voice commands, and open-ear speakers for listening to music.
(Credit: Andrew Gebhart)The Vanguard's sporty wraparound style sets it apart from the rest of Meta’s lineup. The large, reflective lens wraps around the whole front frame, even covering the front half of the temples.
The sturdy plastic back of the temples juts straight out from the center, with v-shaped divots pointing down in a spot that will roughly line up with the front of your ear. These divots help you find the control buttons underneath the temples. A power switch sits on the front of the divot on the left temple. The right temple’s divot holds both the capture button for snapping photos and a customizable action button that defaults to starting a hyperlapse video. On the side of the right temple, you can swipe a touchpad for volume controls or tap to start or pause media.
Pinhole speakers dot the temples just above and below the divots on the side closer to your ear. Pinhole mics sit just above and below the nose pad on either side, and in the front corners beneath the hinges.
In the front and center of the frames, you can see the camera lens just above the nose rest. This is a departure from other Meta models, which put the lens in the upper right corner. The capture LED sits on top of the Vanguard's frame in the center and shines when recording as a notice to those in front of the camera. A status LED on the inner frame, visible from your peripheral vision when wearing the glasses, illuminates when the glasses are recording or when you’re talking with the embedded Meta AI assistant.
As with the other Meta smart glasses, the smart elements are small and unobtrusive—you won’t really notice them unless you look carefully or know what to look for. Design-wise, the Vanguard glasses are a little too ostentatious for everyday wear, and they're not even offered with prescription lenses (unlike the HSTN glasses), but athletes will appreciate them for outdoor sports like beach volleyball, cycling, and running.
To that end, the Vanguard has the best weather resistance of the line with an IP67 durability rating, meaning it's impervious to dust and can be immersed in shallow water for up to 30 minutes at a time. The Oakley Meta HSTN necessitates more care in the elements with a lesser IPX4 rating, meaning it can withstand splashing water but has no official dust protection.
Features: Extras for Athletes
Unlike the Meta Ray-Ban Display, the Oakley Meta Vanguard doesn't have any AR capabilities or a display. Instead, you can use it to take pictures and videos and share those captures directly to your Instagram or Facebook feeds, listen to music through open-ear speakers, and ask questions to the embedded Meta AI assistant. For photos and videos, it features a 12MP fixed-focus lens with a 122-degree field of view and a resolution of 4,032 by 3,024 pixels.
The Vanguard launches with a few new software features that will roll out the HSTN and the second-gen Ray-Ban Meta through updates this fall. New capture modes allow you to shoot video in slow motion or time-lapse (hyperlapse) mode. You can also sync the glasses to the Garmin and Strava apps for fitness-focused social sharing.
The Garmin app integration allows you to ask the Meta assistant about your stats in the middle of a workout. It can pull info from your Garmin wearable or cycling computer to keep you posted on data like time elapsed or heart rate. You can enable an auto-capture feature to record a hyperlapse video at certain distance milestones. The glasses can even help you monitor your performance against any set intensity goals, lighting up the status LED on the inside of the frame if you’re falling short of your desired pace.
The Strava app can put an overlay of your workout stats on the pictures and videos you captured during your workout, to share with your feeds and brag about your latest mile times.
Otherwise, the Oakley Meta Vanguard offers all the same features as its predecessors. You can livestream directly from the glasses to your social feed, and connect to services like Spotify for listening to music and WhatsApp for sending texts directly from your frames. Meta AI can answer basic search queries and interpret your surroundings for you. By snapping a picture, you can get information on the flower you’re looking at or a translation of a sign in a foreign language, for instance.
The glasses also have accessibility options: The AI can describe what you’re seeing in detail or connect you to a volunteer service for someone to Be My Eyes if you need live guidance.
Setup: Simple and Straightforward
For this review, Meta sent me a pair of Vanguard glasses with black frames and the Prizm 24K lens color. The box includes a large, sturdy oval case to hold and recharge the glasses. A concave bend on the top and bottom makes it easy to grip the roughly 9-ounce case, and a charging port is hidden in the indent on the bottom. The product box doesn’t contain a charging cord or power brick, so you’ll need to supply your own USB-C charger.
(Credit: Andrew Gebhart)Otherwise, the glasses come with a quick start guide with a QR code to download the app, a booklet with safety and warranty information, a small drawstring dust bag, and two additional nose pad sizes so you can find one that’s comfortable and fits snugly. Pull the nose pad firmly to release it from the glasses, then you can install a new one by aligning its indents with the matching extensions on the inside of the frame and sliding it into place.
You’ll want to keep the glasses in the case during the setup and syncing process, which only takes a few minutes. Download the Meta AI app for Android or iOS and log in or create an account to get started. The app will prompt you to add a device, and you'll need to remove the protective tab in the front of the case to put it into pairing mode.
A status light on the front of the case will flash white while it boots up and then blue when it's ready for the next step. The app will then connect to the glasses and install an update. At this point, the app will prompt you to put on the glasses for a tutorial on the basics of how to use them. You’ll then be able to enable Meta AI and pick your preferred voice for it, and then you can sync the glasses to third-party services like Spotify and Garmin.
Controls and Settings: Lots of Options
To use the Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses, press the capture button beneath the right temple to take a picture, or hold it down to start recording video, then press again to end the recording. Tapping the touchpad along the side of the right temple starts playing music from your synced service of choice, and you can swipe forward or back on this pad to control the volume.
In the Meta AI app settings menu, you can customize the action button on the right temple of the glasses to perform one of several different functions. It can trigger Meta AI to listen for your command or start looking through your front lens and offering active feedback on what it sees. You can also have it respond to a custom prompt so it can always tell you about the weather when you tap, for example.
Aside from the Meta AI functions, you can program the action button to provide a real-time stat from your linked Garmin device, such as your distance traveled, elapsed workout time, heart rate, or pace. The button can also be set to make a Be My Eyes call, launch your music service of choice, start slow-motion capture mode, or trigger an AI-based auto-capture mode that snaps pics at key intervals of your workout.
You can separately assign a function for when you press and hold the touchpad on the side of the temple. By default, it launches Meta AI, but you can switch it to launch your preferred music service.
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Otherwise, you can use the Meta AI app to adjust LED brightness, enable wear detection (to have the glasses automatically play or pause media when you put them on and take them off), fine-tune audio settings like adaptive volume, manage your Meta AI voice and settings preferences, update the glasses, and view your gallery of captured pictures and videos. This gallery can automatically back up to your preferred cloud service, but finding it in the app is a little tedious (you need to go to the glasses tab via the icon on the bottom right and scroll down the page).
The app also lets you configure video settings, including the length of clips (one, three, or five minutes), resolution (1080p at 30 frames per second, 1080p at 60fps, or 3K at 30fps), and stabilization level (low, medium, high, or auto-select to have it pick for you). Changing it from the default resolution (1080p at 30fps) comes with some limitations on other settings, locking you into the medium stabilization level with a shorter max video length of three minutes.
For comparison, the Oakley Meta HSTN can record at the same resolutions as the Vanguard, while the older Ray-Ban Meta glasses are limited to 1080p video. The stabilization settings are new to the Oakley Meta Vanguard and will arrive on the HSTN as part of a future software update.
Battery Life: Short of Expectations
The Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses supposedly have increased battery life compared with the Oakley Meta HSTN, but I didn’t find that to be the case in testing. According to Meta, the Vanguard glasses should last 9 hours with ordinary use, or 6 hours for music playback, both slight increases from the estimates given for the HSTN (8 hours of normal use, or 5 hours of playback).
On my playback test, the Vanguard glasses only lasted 3.5 hours at 75% volume, compared with 4 hours on the HSTN. While using the glasses to take photos, interact with Meta AI, and listen to podcasts, they lost a third of their battery in two hours, compared with three hours for the HSTN.
Both improve upon the original Ray-Ban Meta, which only lasted three and a half hours with normal use in testing.
The Vanguard's sturdy case holds four extra charges and tops off the glasses quickly. The case for the HSTN glasses holds five extra charges, for comparison.
Sound Quality: Impressive Volume
The improved speakers in the Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses sound much louder than the ones in the HSTN models. Meta notes that the Vanguard glasses have an extra 6 decibels of output.
At 75% volume, I could still hear my music and podcasts even over somewhat loud background noise. I lost the sound when a train passed on an elevated track directly overhead, but it otherwise came through over farther-away trains as well as nearby highway and crowd noise. For comparison, the HSTN glasses aren't loud enough to overpower nearby highway noise, and the first-gen Ray-Ban Meta glasses are so quiet that I can't hear any audio from them over medium background noise.
I'm pleasantly surprised that the Vanguard's increased volume doesn’t lead to extra sound leakage. I polled a couple of passersby, and they could only make out light background noise with my music at 75%. At 100%, they could recognize what song I was playing. This matches my experience testing the HSTN glasses. The Ray-Ban Meta glasses are worse in terms of sound leakage, as a friend was able to identify what music I was playing even with the volume set to 50%.
As for audio quality, I didn’t notice much of a difference between the HSTN and the Vanguard glasses, though the latter offers a touch more instrument separation. Even the first-gen Ray-Ban Meta glasses are pleasing to listen to, and all three models showcase trebles and mids with distinction and clarity. Like the others, the Vanguard speakers lack bass output, but that’s a limitation of the open-ear form factor.
When playing our bass test track, “Silent Shout” by The Knife, the glasses failed to impress, as the driving kick drum didn’t have enough thump. “The Boxer” by Simon & Garfunkel sounded beautiful, however—the instrumentation was distinct, and the extra volume and stereo separation gave me goosebumps as the song crescendoed. I didn’t notice any distortion even at maximum volume.
Photo and Video Capture: Share Your Wins
The Oakley Meta Vanguard smart glasses are best for snapping pics or taking video from your point of view.
The photo and video capture experience hasn’t changed much since I tested the HSTN. Pictures taken with the 12MP lens look good, and the camera's centered position makes a slight but positive impact on the ability to frame pictures correctly.
The new hyperlapse and slow-motion modes are meant for capturing action, but they sometimes caused me to overthink and miss the moment. I’d see my cats doing something goofy and wonder if I should just capture a normal video or get it in slow motion, and by the time I’d decide, the moment had passed.
Aside from my indecisiveness, the glasses have a logistical limitation in that only one of those new capture modes can be mapped to the action button. Meta AI is smart enough to start recording in a different mode with a voice command, but again, I ended up missing a moment I wanted to capture in slow motion because I had the button set to hyperlapse and took too long to give a command.
These are minor gripes, and all in all, the new modes work well. Slow-motion footage comes out smooth, and hyperlapse mode makes good use of the stabilization to stitch footage together in a way that looks seamless.
As mentioned, through the Garmin integration, you can set the glasses to automatically capture certain moments throughout a workout. You have to bounce back and forth between the Garmin and Meta apps, and then follow a few steps to integrate the glasses into the different workout modes on your Garmin device. Even after following the instructions precisely, I couldn’t get the glasses to recognize my workout or answer questions about it for the first day of my testing, but it started working the next day without issue.
I especially enjoyed using this feature while running. Meta AI accurately told me my elapsed workout time when I asked, as well as my heart rate and pace. I enabled auto-capture and enjoyed watching the hyperlapse recap of my route when I was done.
Meta AI: Mostly Helpful
Meta AI can respond to a wide variety of questions and commands. Just say “Hey Meta” to wake up the assistant, or customize one of the physical inputs in the settings menu to access it. I previously tested the feature on the HSTN glasses during an adventure around Chicago, and found Meta AI to be mostly accurate as a tour guide, so you can check out that review for all the details of my adventure and Meta’s responses.
My experience with Meta AI on the Vanguard was largely the same. When walking around my neighborhood, it answered questions about plants I saw and how to care for them. It correctly identified a Honda Civic I was looking at head-on. I followed up and asked for the year, and it got confused and confidently told me the current date, not realizing I was still asking about the car.
When it couldn’t see the front of the car, it performed worse. It mistook my Mazda 6 for an Infiniti Q50, but acknowledged that it wasn’t sure and said it could also be a similar model (perhaps I'll use this as evidence when negotiating my car's trade-in value).
Otherwise, it fared well on general knowledge questions, sports queries, and inquiries about the weather. Meta AI is a fine virtual assistant that can contextualize your surroundings and be a useful guide, as long as you’re willing to fact-check it on occasion.