Among the host of new products that Meta unveiled at its Connect event this week — an AI Tamagotchi, anyone? — we got the Meta Ray-Ban Gen 3 smart glasses. Here we're going to break down all the key specs of the new specs, and in particular how they compare to the model that launched this time last year.

In our Meta Ray-Ban Gen 2 review, we praised the AI-powered glasses for bringing with them improvements in camera quality, battery life, and design, and there are upgrades to talk about with the third-generation too.

Whether you already own a Gen 2 pair and are thinking of making the switch to the new models, or you're considering getting involved in smart glasses for the first time, here's how the 2025 and 2026 versions compare.

Pricing and design

The Meta Ray-Ban Gen 3 are out now and yours for a starting price of $449 / £409 / AU$679, which is a modest price bump over the previous versions. Meta says the overall design is slimmer and more comfortable to wear compared to the Gen 2, though the weights listed on Meta's store suggest there isn't much change there (at least in terms of the Wayfarer, which is the only style carried over).

There are three different styles to choose from. You've got the Wayfarer we saw with Gen 2 (also available in large), and two new additions: the iconic Aviator design, plus the Zena, which Meta describes as "a bold new cat-eye frame that makes a confident statement". A total of 27 lens and color combinations are available across these frame shapes, with colors including Black and Havana (a mix of dark and light brown).

When the Meta Ray-Ban Gen 2 launched, they were available for $379 / £379 / AU$599 and up, and at the time of writing, that price hasn't dropped with the arrival of the Gen 3 models. All three styles are still available to buy too: the Wayfarer (in standard or large), the cat-eye Skyler, and the more rounded Headliner.

At launch time, Meta mentioned 27 lens and color combinations for the Gen 2 glasses, but those combinations aren't exactly the same as they are for the Gen 3, and they changed over time with seasonal offerings — something that's likely for the new models too. So the takeaway is that there's about the same range of design choice, though the specific options are different based on which generation of smart glasses you choose.

Battery life and specs

You don't want your smart specs dying during the day, and Meta says the Ray-Ban Gen 2 are capable of lasting 8 hours between battery charges. Assuming you take a fully charged case out with you as well, you're getting an extra 48 hours (or six full recharge cycles) on top of that before you need to find a power socket.

With the Ray-Ban Gen 3, Meta is promising up to 9 hours of battery life on a single charge, with an extra 50 hours supplied by the charging case. There's also mention of charging the glasses from zero to 50% in a mere two minutes, which is the same claim made with the previous Gen 2 models.

When it comes to the camera, it's all the same: both the Gen 3 and the Gen 2 have a 12MP ultrawide camera capable of shooting up to 3K resolution video (just be respectful of other people's privacy). There is a boost for voice input though, because the Gen 3 has a 6-mic array compared to the 5-mic array of the Gen 2.

The loudness and bass of the speakers is listed as the same between generations — 76.1 dB(C) — so there's no difference there, while the 32GB of internal storage matches as well. The headline upgrades as far as key details go are better battery life and improved mic inputs, though we're basing that on spec sheets rather than any testing.

Features and AI

In terms of what you can actually do with the Gen 3 smart glasses, everything is more or less the same as before. The only exception is an extra 'action' button you get on the new models, alongside the existing photo/video capture button, which can be customized to launch a specific feature: the AI assistant, sending a text to a favorite contact, or activating the on-board translation, for example.

Besides that, you get access to the same Meta AI on your glasses, and it's the same companion Meta AI app running on your phone too. All the core functions are the same, including audio calls, video calls (where the caller sees what you're seeing), live assistance through the AI about anything you're looking at, and audio playback for your music, podcasts, and audiobooks.

The upgrade isn't quite as dramatic as it was from Gen 1 to Gen 2 — you might remember there were significant improvements to video capture quality, and big leaps in battery life too — so if you already own a pair of Meta Ray-Ban Gen 2 smart glasses then you don't really need to upgrade immediately, unless you're a big fan of the new designs.

If you're still on the Gen 1 models or you're looking at smart glasses for the first time, however, the Meta Ray-Ban Gen 3 are a much more compelling proposition. After the latest round of Meta announcements, you've also now got the choice of the Meta VR Glasses and the camera-free Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses as well.

• A new approach could catch 90% of potentially convertible wave energy
• It's based on a array of dozens of connected buoys, designed to handle different types of waves
• Further research is needed to test its viability

There's potentially a lot of clean, renewable energy locked up in waves, but the challenge is getting it converted into power in a viable way. Now researchers from Germany and Australia have come up with a potential method for capturing way more of the energy produced by the undulating oceans.

The solution (via Interesting Engineering) is big buoys, and lots of them. In simulation models, the researchers showed that a fixed array of 60 connected buoys — with some described as being as large as small houses — could convert 90% of potential ocean wave energy, even with significant variability in wave direction.

These buoys would be like flat drums on the surface of the water, connected to spring and generator units on the seabed. Crucially, each one would be individually tuned to match a certain wave rhythm — what's known as the 'resonance frequency' of the buoy, where the maximum amount of power can be produced.

"It's similar to a child on a swing," says Professor Malte Peter, from the University of Augsburg (via Google Translate). "Only if the support comes at the right moment will the child swing higher and higher over time. Similarly, the waves must arrive at the buoy at the appropriate intervals so that its pendulum motion is as strong as possible."

Dealing with unpredictability

Waves are typically rather unpredictable: if a large wave hits a buoy that's already on the up from a previous wave, a lot of the energy is missed. Add in the effects from neighboring buoys deflecting waves and influencing each other's movement, and you can understand the challenge in capturing all of this energy.

The larger arrays proposed by the team here act as a sort of sieve system. Even if a wave gets 'missed' by one buoy, it will hit another that's better tuned to it, meaning very little energy is lost. The researchers detail careful adjustments to buoy positions and resonance to achieve the results.

It's not a completely new idea, and borrows thinking from other fields of science. Some of the same researchers previously came up with a more basic model of the buoy farm, but only in 2D — in their new paper, they've extended into three dimensions, increased the size of the array, and adapted it to a greater variety of wave directions.

All that said, this remains theoretical, and hasn't been tested yet. The team notes that while each individual buoy could power "several hundred households" in this system, installing and maintaining the equipment is going to be expensive, and field tests and further research will need to happen first.

• Another next-gen battery upgrade has been reported
• Zinc-iodine batteries are now more stable
• The tech promises a more sustainable lithium-ion replacement

With so many modern-day devices dependent on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, scientists are hard at work trying to figure out ways of improving the tech — and a team from the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology (KRICT) has just announced a significant breakthrough.

As reported by The Korea Times, the KRICT researchers have succeeded in boosting the power delivery capacity of lithium-ion battery chemistry by adding a small amount of a material called graphitic carbon nitride to the cathode end of the battery.

When a battery is charging, the lithium ions get pushed out of the cathode, through an electrolyte material, to the anode at the other end. When the battery is in use, the ions flow back in the other direction.

One potential way of storing more energy in a battery of the same physical size and weight is to make the cathode thicker, but there's a problem: this also makes it harder for the lithium ions to move and deliver all of the energy held in the battery. The new innovation that was successfully tested here could solve that problem.

Capacity boosting

The researchers have reported some impressive numbers from their tests, though the tech is still at an early stage. Adding the graphitic carbon nitride to the cathode resulted in a 166% increase in capacity during high-rate discharge, and an increase in power density of up to 2.85 times.

Those figures don't mean a bigger capacity in mAh terms, but delivering more of a charge under heavy load, and for longer. In lithium-ion batteries, using a lot of energy quickly reduces how much total capacity you'll get from the battery compared to if you used the same amount of energy but more slowly.

In an EV, for example, this would mean that the vehicle could accelerate harder and sustain that high performance for longer without impacting total range as much. It would allow home batteries to better sustain their capacity if you use them with appliances that drain a lot of energy quickly, such as washing machines.

But smaller applications can benefit from it as well — drones can draw a lot of power suddenly to life themselves, or gaming and workstation laptops might suddenly draw a lot of power depending on the workload — they'd all benefit from tech that handles the power flow's effect on capacity better.

The tech could, in turn, result in batteries with thicker cathodes that do give you more mAh capacity in the same space, the researchers say — but that wasn't tested in this study. The next challenge is to try and scale up and expand the technology.

According to KRICT President Shin Seok-min, this alternative approach to lithium-ion batteries could potentially be used across electric vehicles, energy storage systems, and robotics — so it's very broadly applicable, especially for devices and systems that can take batteries that are physically larger.

• Look out for the small blue 'hello' signs in Apple Stores
• They're to help test the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max cameras
• The new phones are now available to purchase in retail stores

The next time you head into an Apple Store, you should be able to spot a small blue 'hello' sign somewhere, as per reports on social media — and the appearance of these little signs is apparently connected to the launch of the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max.

As per MacRumors, the signs are there to help customers test out the optical zoom capabilities of the new handsets. Both models offer up to 8x optical zoom, so having something specific to zoom in on is going to be helpful.

While the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max have a variable aperture feature on one of their three rear cameras now, the optical zoom capabilities are actually the same as the iPhone 17 equivalents that launched in September of last year.

There are also new Pro controls on the latest handsets, so settings for lens aperture, shutter speed, and white balance can be tweaked shot by shot — something else you might want to test out in an Apple Store.

Now available

The iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max arrived in Apple's retail stores on Friday, September 18, six days after preorders started. Prices for the handsets start at $1,199 / £1,199 / AU$2,099 and $1,299 / £1,299 / AU$2,299 respectively (for 256GB of storage).

New Apple CEO John Ternus made an appearance at the Apple Store in New York to help celebrate the wider availability of the flagship iPhones — as well as the Apple Watch Series 12, the Apple Watch Ultra 4, and the AirPods 5.

He didn't mention anything about the new 'hello' signs in stores, but they've been spotted by customers nevertheless. They look to be located on higher shelves and fixtures, perhaps to put off anyone wanting one as a souvenir.

And if you're wondering where the iPhone 18 is and when you'll be able to test that out, don't panic — it's rumored to be showing up around March time, alongside the iPhone 18e and the iPhone Air 2.

• New and improved solar panel materials have been analyzed
• Two key physics effects combine to create the improvements
• It could help panels break through the 33% energy conversion rate

There's a long-standing physics theory that suggests solar panels will only ever be able to convert a maximum of 33% of the sunlight that comes their way, but a team from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands has detailed a way to harvest extra energy from 'hot' electrons that could push through this limit.

Solar panels work by using the photons from sunshine to jump-start electrons. With the most energetic photons, the result is super-charged, so-called hot electrons, that have the potential to generate significantly more electricity — but the problem is they cool down too quickly and lose the energy as heat before it can be captured.

This new research builds on previous studies reporting a promising new tin-based solar panel material. The material has demonstrated it can keep the heat from hot electrons trapped for around 1,000 times longer — but there have been competing ideas about the mechanism making that possible.

Trying to clarify what was going on, though a series of computer simulations and experimental measurements, was the purpose of the new research: understanding the material's key properties will help scientists build on the potential of the material and potentially scale it up into something that's viable commercially.

Ultra-long cooling

The analysis carried out by the researchers determined that there were two different actions at work. First, an effect called a hot phonon bottleneck creates a heat trap: as the environment around the buzzing electrons warms up so quickly, the electrons end up reabsorbing the thermal energy again, keeping their heat for longer.

Second, what's known as the Burstein-Moss effect creates an atomic traffic jam. As hot electrons cool, they quickly fill up the lowest available energy states in the material, which means other hot electrons can't lose their heat as quickly — it's like an airplane filling up from the front, with passengers arriving later having to walk all the way to the back.

These two effects were already known about, but now we know they're the reason that these special solar panel materials work — and that in combination they provide the extended hot electron cooling that might help to nudge future solar panels above that crucial 33% ceiling, and create clean energy more efficiently.

"It is the simultaneous satisfaction of these electronic, phononic, and chemical criteria, operating under high-injection conditions, that enables the ultra-long cooling times necessary for practical devices," write the researchers in their published paper, which appears in the journal ACS Energy Letters.