bradypsnyder@gmail.com (Brady Snyder)
2025-09-19 13:24:00
www.androidcentral.com
Following Meta Connect 2025, there’s real buzz around the company that we haven’t seen in Silicon Valley in a while. Meta is looking for its iPhone moment with a metaverse strategy involving VR, AR, and smart glasses, and it might just have one. Products like Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta shades are flying off the shelves, and are even starting to get mainstream attention.
A lineup of smart glasses once confined to a few Ray-Ban styles now includes new products such as Oakley Meta HSTN, Oakley Meta Vanguard, and Ray-Ban Meta Display. Meta’s smart glasses product offerings are becoming more varied and attainable in every way but one: accessibility. You can choose to get Meta tech in a growing assortment of eyewear brands, frames, and styles, but if your eye prescription isn’t supported, you might be out of look.
To be clear, Meta is doing amazing things with accessibility for people with low vision and blindness. Be My Eyes support and commands like “Hey Meta, look and describe” use the cameras onboard smart glasses and AI to provide audio descriptions of the real world to people who couldn’t otherwise see them. It’s some of the most exciting accessibility technology available, powered by Meta glasses.
However, there’s a community somewhere in the middle that’s being underserved by Meta and its partner EssilorLuxottica. All of Meta’s smart glasses have low prescription ranges, from the first Ray-Ban Stories to the latest Ray-Ban Meta Display. I fell outside those ranges in 2024, and after a year of waiting for Meta to improve its offerings, I’m taking matters into my own hands and ordering custom lenses elsewhere.
Officially, Meta supports prescription lenses between -6.00 to +4.00 total power on the Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta HSTN. For Meta Ray-Ban Display, the prescription range is even tighter, between -4.00 to +4.00 total power. While this might feel like a step backward, Meta Ray-Ban Display has a screen built into the right lens, presumably adding technical limitations to supporting higher-strength eye prescriptions.
Oakley Meta Vanguard isn’t available with prescription lenses at all; that isn’t surprising because neither are the Oakley Sphaera frames they are based on. However, there are third-party prescription inserts available for Sphaera, so it’ll be interesting to see whether they pop up for Vanguard in the future.
The reason why I’m tough on Meta for its limited support for prescription lenses is that it’s an easy problem to solve. Using high-index lenses, higher prescriptions outside of Meta’s currently-supported range can be made thinner, fitting into frames like Meta Ray-Ban and Meta Oakley HSTN.
Meta competitors, such as Solos, offer a much wider prescription strength range of -15.00 to +10.00 when using these thin lenses. Additionally, third-party sites like GlassesUSA and Lensology are filling the gap by making custom lenses for prescriptions beyond what Meta provides through its own online shop and partner retailers.
I was hoping that, since the prescription lens problem was seemingly solved by third parties, Meta would expand support for a wider variety of prescription needs with its latest round of smart glasses announcements. There were even pre-Connect rumors of Meta glasses designed specifically for prescription lenses. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen — the supported range stayed the same for Meta’s basic smart glasses, and shrunk for the new display version.
I’m not sure what the holdup is for Meta in addressing this key limitation, but after waiting through the Oakley Meta launch and Connect 2025, I’ve decided to stop holding my breath and purchase lenses via a third-party instead.
Android Central reached out to Meta for comment regarding its prescription lens support for smart glasses and its future plans, but the company didn’t immediately respond. We will update this article when we hear back.
Why I’m not waiting, and you shouldn’t either
If smart glasses are truly the future, manufacturers need to do everything they can to make them accessible to everyone. That includes people with vision correction needs who can’t or don’t want to wear contacts. All tech should be accessible, but if smart glasses really are the future of communication and productivity, there’s even more pressure to make the form factor work for everyone.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, said during a 2025 earnings call that people without smart glasses would be at “a pretty significant cognitive disadvantage compared to other people” in the future (via TechCrunch). That kind of language puts smart glasses in the realm of necessity rather than luxury, meaning that people needing glasses for basic sight shouldn’t have to wait for them to become smart.
Instead, I ordered Oakley Meta HSTN and prescription lenses from Lensology separately to get the experience in the here and now. Lensology is a lens crafter based in the U.K. that specializes in “click and fit” service — you order custom lenses online and pop them into your frames when they show up at your door. I uploaded my prescription, picked Transitions lenses, and placed my order.
If all goes well, in a week or two, I’ll have my prescription Oakley Meta HSTN glasses ready to wear — despite my vision-correction needs being unsupported by official Meta retail channels. While I still hope Meta one day expands its prescription lens offerings, people shouldn’t have to wait to experience this essential tech, and they don’t have to thanks to services like Lensology.
Great smart glasses…
…if you don’t need prescription lenses or your needs fall within the supported range. Otherwise, you’ll still get a great experience with Meta AI and 3K video recording, but you’ll need to shop for lenses elsewhere.
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