Meta Ray-Ban Display glossary

A reference for the terms you'll meet building for the Meta Ray-Ban Display platform. Skim it once and the rest of the docs read faster.

Meta Ray-Ban Display

Meta's AR glasses with a full-color monocular display built into the right lens. It ships paired with the Meta Neural Band. It is the first mainstream consumer device to put a genuine heads-up display into an everyday glasses form factor, and the first one third-party developers can build for, with public publishing opening in phases.

Meta Neural Band

The EMG wristband that ships with every Meta Ray-Ban Display. It uses surface electromyography (reading the electrical signals your muscles produce) to detect finger gestures at the wrist. All raw signal processing happens on the band; only discrete events (the equivalent of a click) are sent to the glasses. For developers, the Neural Band is your input device: it produces D-pad and pinch events.

Web Apps

One of the two ways to build for the Meta Ray-Ban Display. A Web App is a standard HTML / CSS / JavaScript app, hosted at a public HTTPS URL and loaded onto the glasses by URL. No native code, no app store, no proprietary framework. It's the fastest path for most developers and the one GlassKit is built around. See also: Meta Wearables Device Access Toolkit.

Meta Wearables Device Access Toolkit

The other build path (often shortened to "Device Access Toolkit" or DAT): a native mobile SDK (Swift for iOS, Kotlin for Android) that extends an existing mobile app onto the glasses display. Unlike Web Apps, it has camera and audio access. Choose it when you need the camera; choose Web Apps for everything else. Docs at wearables.developer.meta.com.

Additive display

The Meta Ray-Ban Display is an additive display: it adds light to what you already see. The practical consequence: black renders as transparent. You design apps on a dark base with bright, high-contrast foreground elements that float in the wearer's view. There is no "white background."

600 × 600 viewport

The fixed size of a Meta Ray-Ban Display Web App: a single 600×600 pixel square. Your whole app lives inside it. There's no scrolling page and no browser chrome: design one focused screen, not a website.

D-pad navigation

The Meta Ray-Ban Display has no touchscreen and no pointer. Input from the Neural Band is translated into directional-pad input: swipe left / right / up / down to move focus, pinch to select. Your app receives these as standard Arrow-key + Enter events (there is no raw gesture API for Web Apps), which is also how you simulate it in a desktop browser.

.focusable

A convention (not a platform API) for D-pad navigation: you mark each interactive element as focusable, and the app moves focus between those elements as the user swipes. GlassKit ships a typed focus system so you don't manage focus state by hand.

Publishing phase

Where the Meta Ray-Ban Display developer platform is as of mid-2026: a developer preview (opened May 14, 2026). You can build apps, test them on real hardware, and share a Web App with anyone who has its HTTPS URL and developer mode enabled. There is no public app store yet; Meta says broad publishing is planned for 2026.

GlassViewport

A GlassKit primitive: the 600×600 root container for a glasses app, pre-configured for the additive display and D-pad focus. It's the component you build your app inside.

Companion site

In GlassKit's architecture, the Next.js app that runs alongside the glasses app, handling sign-up, billing, and account management on a full keyboard-and-screen surface, because you can't type a credit card with a D-pad. The glasses app and the companion site share one backend.

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