Meta’s Screenless Ray-Bans Now Do Turn-by-Turn Walking Directions

You know the corner. Unfamiliar city, phone in your hand, thumb hovering over a map, and you still walk half a block the wrong way before the blue arrow catches up with you. Meta's smart glasses have been sitting on your face this whole time doing nothing about it. Firmware v128 changes that, and it does it on the pair without a screen.

The update adds turn-by-turn walking directions you launch with your voice. Say "Hey Meta, navigate to Times Square" and the turns come through the open-ear speakers. Until now you couldn't start navigation from the glasses at all. You started a route in a third-party app on your phone and let the audio ride over Bluetooth, or you asked Siri or Google Assistant to do it for you. Both work. Neither keeps the phone in your pocket, which is most of the reason to wear the things.

The screenless version is the interesting one

Meta Ray-Ban Display, the only pair with an actual screen in it, could already do this, though only in cities where the feature was switched on. Version 128 takes the same idea and hands it to the plain Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta frames, which have been on sale far longer than the Display has.

Audio suits walking better than a display does anyway. Reading a screen, even one floating in your lens, pulls your eyes off the crosswalk. Hearing "turn left" does not. Walking is the one way of getting around where you have spare ears and no spare attention, and a voice in your temple is a reasonable answer to that.

Where it works, which is the catch

Meta says v128 brings walking directions to the U.S., Puerto Rico, Canada, and "select cities." What "select cities" means is anyone's guess, because Meta hasn't published a list. Its own navigation help page is blunt about the state of the feature: real-time pedestrian navigation is in beta, available only in select cities, and driving routes aren't supported at all.

The glasses aren't doing the hard part, either. Meta's documentation splits the work. Simple requests run on the glasses, while anything like plotting a route goes through your paired phone and the Meta AI app. The glasses are a nicer front end for that phone, not a replacement for it. You are still carrying it.

And directions without a display have failure modes you will find fast. There is no map to glance at when you mishear a street name, no way to see that the route wants the left fork of a five-way intersection, no visual confirmation that you are still on the path after you stopped to look at something. A screen is bad at competing for your attention and very good at answering "wait, what did it just say."

Spatial audio, and you have to go turn it on

The other addition in v128 is spatial audio, which uses AI to add a sense of 3D space to stereo you already have. It ships off. Go to settings, then audio, then flip the toggle.

Upmixing has a mixed record. Done well, it opens up a mix and gives the instruments somewhere to sit. Done badly, it smears everything into a wash and leaves the track sounding slightly worse than the stereo you started with. Meta's audio tuning on these glasses has been better than tiny open-ear speakers have any right to be, so it is worth a listen before you decide. That it arrives switched off says something about how confident Meta is.

Whether you have it yet

Meta hasn't said whether v128 lands for everyone at once, and there is no rollout schedule in what it has published. Its recent glasses firmware has gone out in stages. The December 2025 update that added conversation focus started with Early Access Program users in the U.S. and Canada before widening out. If your glasses don't have v128, check for a firmware update in the Meta AI app and then wait.

For once, the more useful version of a Meta glasses feature landed on the cheaper hardware. Now Meta should say which cities it actually works in.