It takes time to realize you don’t have to hold your hand out in front of you for these gestures to be recognized, but a surprisingly short amount of time to find yourself using them with very little second thought.

Of course talking to Meta AI remains a key way of interacting with the glasses, but Meta hopes that adding the visual elements will enhance the chatbot experience. For example, live speech captioning and language translation is still switched on by voice—but with Meta Ray-Ban Display, you can see the translations and captions appearing in real time on the glasses rather than on your phone’s screen. This is the same with commands like “Hey Meta, what am I looking at,” which can now offer more visually rich information about whatever the front-facing cameras are pointing at. Asking Meta to navigate to a local attraction results in the glasses displaying turn-by-turn directions directly on top of the real world as you walk.

For times when talking might be difficult, Meta also showed off a feature that tracks handwriting input as an alternative to voice commands. Aimed at quick messages, the user can “draw” letters with an outstretched finger on a flat service (or your leg), and the Neural Band will turn it into text. Though the feature was part of the demo we received, Meta says it won’t be available to users at launch, but will arrive soon. Who knows, maybe this will be the thing that helps save handwriting.

Meta has acknowledged some limitations with features at launch. For example, the built-in Spotify integration is only able to show what’s playing on your phone and give you basic playback controls, and Instagram is currently limited to just Reels and messages. Meta intends to broaden out the capabilities soon.

Also notable: The Orion prototype we saw last year required an external puck to power its most computing-intensive capabilities. But that prototype design provides a full range of augmented reality features. The AR feature set of this new Display model is more limited, so the puck isn’t needed. Also, this means the Display’s frames are slimmer. Meta does eventually plan to offer a full slate of wearable options to consumers: smart glasses, display glasses, and full AR glasses.

The Ray-Ban Displays will be available in either black or sand colors starting on September 30 for $799 and will initially only be available as in-store purchases in the US. Meta says you need to buy them in person because the wristband has to be fitted correctly to the wrist of your dominant hand. Also, the folks selling you the system will show you the hand gestures that control the glasses—though there will be a tutorial walkthrough when you first power on the glasses too.

Be ready to move quickly if you want them though. Meta says there are limited quantities available, and other countries won’t get them until early 2026.

Oakley Meta Vanguard

The Vanguard.

Photograph: Meta

Louder speakers are built into the arms.

Photograph: Meta

The ultrawide camera is right in the middle.

Photograph: Meta

Following on from the Oakley Meta HSTN glasses announced earlier this year, Meta’s newest Oakley collaboration evokes the timeless look of a pair of wrap-around Oakley Sphaera Glasses—but with a twist. That twist of course is a 12-megapixel ultrawide camera with a 122-degree field of view that’s positioned smack in the middle of the lens, right on the bridge of your nose. This is the optimum placement for recording POV action sports videos at up to 3K, as well as for capturing scenes in the glasses’ new slow-mo and hyperlapse modes.

The Vanguards are very much being marketed to sports enthusiasts—those who might be inclined to choose the Meta glasses over a GoPro, for instance. To that end, the Vanguards have an IP67 waterproof rating, the best waterproofing on any pair of Meta glasses. The speakers built into the arms of the frames are 6 decibels louder to make up for any loss of clarity caused by wind noise, and a new 5-mic array lets your commands be clearly heard even when an arctic gale is blasting you in the face while you careen down the slopes.

The popularity of these conspiracies may also be on the rise in right-wing spaces. Some MAHA figureheads, including Nicole Shanahan, have shared geoengineering content promoting conspiracy theories, while Marla Maples, Donald Trump’s ex-wife, told Fox News in July that she helped Florida’s anti-weather modification bill pass. (Bill Gates’ track record of funding solar geoengineering research has undoubtedly helped fan some of these flames.)

Doricko, the Rainmaker CEO, has spent much of the past year testifying in state legislatures that were considering vague anti-geoengineering bills that would have also banned cloud seeding. In May, he told WIRED that he and his team had spoken in front of 31 state legislatures. Education, he says, is key to getting people on board with the technology.

“I think there’s some cohort of people that believe that, you know, Joe Biden is actually a lizard person,” he says. “I think that a lot of people aren’t quite that far along, but are very concerned about chemtrails, probably. Showing them farms that are greener than they otherwise would have been with testimonies from those farmers—that’s probably the way that we’re gonna win hearts and minds.” (Doricko told WIRED last week that in recent months, his company has had “interest, curiosity, and excitement” from various state governments, both Democratic and Republican, in using cloud seeding to enhance water supply. “The education that we had the opportunity to do ultimately I think assuaged a lot of reasonable people’s concerns.”)

There is one additional type of human-caused shift in the world’s weather that played an outsize role in the hearing: climate change. Greene and other Republican lawmakers repeated many climate denial talking points and bad framing around climate science, including the idea that carbon dioxide is good for the planet because it is plant food. There were multiple mentions of beach houses owned by Barack Obama and Al Gore as a way of illustrating supposed hypocrisy about sea level rise. One of the witnesses called by the House majority works at an organization with a long history of questioning established climate science; he claimed in his testimony that there is “uncertainty as to exactly how much influence humans have exerted” over the global rise in temperature—a take that is out of line with mainstream science.

“My view is that this is mainly a way of saying there are secret forces at work that are making your life miserable, and everything bad is due to these secret forces,” says Dessler. “When in reality, it’s not secret forces, it’s climate change and it’s these other things that are hurting people.”

But even a whole hearing dedicated to a conspiracy theory grab bag may not be enough for some. On X, a popular anti-geoengineering community was alight with posts about the hearing—including many critical of the experts and their findings. “This was a scripted show to protect the government’s weather control agenda,” one moderator’s post reads. “Why no independent voices?”

All-solid-state batteries are safe, powerful ways to power EVs and electronics and store electricity from the energy grid, but the lithium used to build them is rare, expensive and can be environmentally devastating to extract.

Sodium is an inexpensive, plentiful, less-destructive alternative, but the all-solid-state batteries they create currently don’t work as well at room temperature.

“It’s not a matter of sodium versus lithium. We need both. When we think about tomorrow’s energy storage solutions, we should imagine the same gigafactory can produce products based on both lithium and sodium chemistries,” said Y. Shirley Meng, Liew Family Professor in Molecular Engineering at the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME). “This new research gets us closer to that ultimate goal while advancing basic science along the way.”

A paper from Meng’s lab, published this week in Joule, helps rectify that problem. Their research raises the benchmark for sodium-based all-solid-state batteries, demonstrating thick cathodes that retain performance at room temperature down to subzero conditions.

The research helps put sodium on a more equal playing field with lithium for electrochemical performance, said first author Sam Oh of the A*STAR Institute of Materials Research and Engineering in Singapore, a visiting scholar at Meng’s Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion during the research.

How they accomplished that goal represents an advance in pure science.

“The breakthrough that we have is that we are actually stabilizing a metastable structure that has not been reported,” Oh said. “This metastable structure of sodium hydridoborate has a very high ionic conductivity, at least one order of magnitude higher than the one reported in the literature, and three to four orders of magnitude higher than the precursor itself.”

Established technique, new field

The team heated a metastable form of sodium hydridoborate up to the point it starts to crystallize, then rapidly cooled it to kinetically stabilize the crystal structure. It’s a well-established technique, but one that has not previously been applied to solid electrolytes, Oh said.

That familiarity could, down the road, help turn this lab innovation into a real-world product.

“Since this technique is established, we are better able to scale up in the future,” Oh said. “If you are proposing something new or if there’s a need to change or establish processes, then industry will be more reluctant to accept it.”

Pairing that metastable phase with an O₃-type cathode that has been coated with a chloride-based solid electrolyte can create thick, high-areal-loading cathodes that put this new design beyond previous sodium batteries. Unlike design strategies with a thin cathode, this thick cathode would pack less of the inactive materials and more cathode “meat.”

“The thicker the cathode is, the theoretical energy density of the battery—the amount of energy being held within a specific area—improves,” Oh said.

The current research advances sodium as a viable alternative for batteries, a vital step to combat the rarity and environmental damage of lithium. It’s one of many steps ahead.

“It’s still a long journey, but what we have done with this research will help open up this opportunity,” Oh said.