# Meta’s Smart Glasses Can Now Beam a Hologram of You Into a Call By Rafiqul Islam Rabbi · Technology · Published Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:36:37 GMT Source: The Current Tribune — https://currenttribune.com/article/meta-ray-ban-display-hologram-calls-navigation-international Meta just gave its smart glasses a feature that sounds like it belongs in a decade-old sci-fi pitch deck: a photorealistic hologram of your face and body, generated in real time from nothing but your voice, beamed into a phone call so the person on the other end sees you instead of hearing you. ## How the Hologram Feature Actually Works The new capability, rolling out through WhatsApp in early access this fall for US users, doesn’t rely on a camera capturing your movements. Meta’s own description is direct about that: “Your hologram is driven entirely by your voice, and the hologram model infers your expression from what you’re saying.” In practice, that means the system is generating a plausible, animated representation of you based on speech patterns and inferred emotional tone, not tracking your actual face through a lens. That’s a meaningfully different approach from video calling as most people know it. Instead of transmitting a video feed, which requires bandwidth, decent lighting, and a camera pointed at your face, the system appears to be synthesizing a visual performance from audio alone. Whether that produces something that reads as a faithful likeness of the caller, or something closer to an animated avatar performing loosely synced expressions, will likely depend heavily on the underlying model’s quality and is exactly the kind of thing that early access testers are about to find out. ### Navigation That Talks Like a Person, Not a GPS Unit The hologram feature is the headline-grabber, but the more immediately useful update might be the navigation overhaul. Meta Ray-Ban Display users can now request cycling and public transit directions through voice commands, expanding beyond the driving and walking directions the glasses already supported. That rollout is starting this month in the US and Canada. More interesting than the added transit modes is how the directions themselves are changing. Rather than reciting street names the way a typical GPS app does, the system is moving toward conversational landmark-based guidance, the kind of directions a local friend might give you: turn left at the yellow house instead of turn left on Maple Street. For anyone who’s ever missed a turn because a street sign was obscured or a road had two names, that’s a genuinely practical shift, not just a gimmick. ## The Rest of the Update Beyond the two marquee features, Meta bundled in a handful of smaller but useful additions. Dolby Atmos audio support upgrades the sound quality for media playback through the glasses. A new Explore app aims to solve one of the more common complaints about the Display line since launch, that there simply weren’t enough compatible apps to make the extra display functionality feel worthwhile; Explore is designed to surface programs that actually work well with the glasses’ capabilities. Built-in photo editing lets users adjust images without pulling out a phone, an enhanced calendar view brings scheduling information directly into the display, phone notifications now mirror onto the glasses themselves, and Threads integration ties the hardware into Meta’s social ecosystem a little more tightly. ### None of This Matters Without Hardware People Actually Buy Feature updates are only half the story this week. Meta also confirmed the Ray-Ban Display is finally expanding beyond its initial US-only launch, into five new markets at once. - United Kingdom: available immediately, priced at £749 - Canada: available immediately, priced at CA$1,149 - France, Italy, and Germany: pre-orders opening now, priced at €899, with units shipping starting October 13 That’s a notably fast international expansion for a product category that’s historically struggled to find its footing. Smart glasses, in various forms, have been a graveyard for consumer tech ambition for close to a decade, going back to the original Google Glass experiment. Meta’s willingness to push the Display line into five new markets simultaneously, rather than trickling out one country at a time, suggests the company is confident enough in early demand signals to bet on faster scale. ## Why the Timing Matters Smart glasses as a category have been stuck in an awkward middle ground for years: capable enough to be interesting, not yet capable enough to replace a phone for most daily tasks. Features like the hologram calling function and landmark-based navigation are Meta’s attempt to give people specific, tangible reasons to keep the glasses on their face rather than defaulting back to a phone screen. A hologram call is a genuine differentiator, nothing else on the market currently offers anything close to it, while better navigation addresses one of the most obvious, practical use cases for a heads-up display in the first place. The international rollout timing also lines up with a broader industry moment. Rival hardware efforts from other major tech companies have been circling the same space, betting that AI-assisted wearables are the next major computing platform after smartphones. Meta getting a genuinely novel feature like voice-driven holograms into real users’ hands, even in early access, gives the company a talking point that’s hard for competitors still in development to match. ### What Early Adopters Should Expect Early access features from any tech company tend to be rough around the edges, and there’s no reason to expect the hologram calling feature to be an exception. Voice-driven animation of a human likeness is a genuinely hard problem, and getting expressions to feel natural rather than uncanny is the kind of thing that usually takes several iterations to get right. Testers should expect a system that’s impressive as a proof of concept before it’s reliable as a daily communication tool. ## What This Means Meta is betting that smart glasses succeed or fail based on having a handful of features nothing else can replicate, and hologram calling is exactly that kind of swing. Pair it with a faster international rollout and more conversational navigation, and the Ray-Ban Display line looks less like a niche accessory and more like a product Meta is actively trying to turn into a mainstream computing platform. Whether the hologram feature holds up outside a controlled demo is the real test, and early access users in the US are about to be the ones who find out first.