Threads arrived on Quest headsets and Meta Ray-Ban Display, alongside a swathe of other updates for Meta’s smart glasses.
Threads
Launched three years ago, Threads is Meta’s X competitor, launched in the aftermath of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. Threads now has almost as many active users as X, though still lacks much of the political and intellectual user base.
In early August, Meta launched a Threads client on the Meta Horizon Store for Quest, and set it as a preinstalled app, force-downloading it to most Quest headsets.
While it was already possible to use Threads in the browser, the app offers a slightly more refined design. However, many Quest owners were unhappy to see it forcibly downloaded onto their headset, including while they were in the middle of playing VR games.
The Threads app on Quest’s Horizon OS.
Where Threads is potentially more wanted is on the Meta Ray-Ban Display monocular HUD glasses, where the social network arrived in late July.
The glasses already had an Instagram app, and the Threads app functions relatively similarly, letting you scroll the feed by swiping your thumb against the side of your index finger (the regular Meta Neural Band scroll gesture), as well as like or share posts and even watch the videos.
The Threads app on Meta Ray-Ban Display
It’s a greatly simplified interface compared to other platforms, but it works.
Meta Ray-Ban Display, and the screenless Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses Meta powers, received a number of other updates over the summer.
- Meta AI was upgraded to be powered by Muse Spark, Meta’s new series of AI models shipped this year to replace the old Llama 4. After being massively outperformed by competitors, Meta laid off much of the Llama team and spent billions of dollars hiring some of the top talent from across the AI industry.
- Photo Ultra HDR “brings your photos to life with deeper, realistic and more true-to-life colors”
- “Hey Meta, take a dynamic photo” takes a burst of photos over the course of a few seconds, and in the smartphone companion app you can choose the best shot.
- Instagram Instants lets you put up what is essentially a story that can only be viewed once, via “Hey Meta, share an Instant”, which Meta claims lets you ‘share spontaneous, unfiltered photos with friends”.
- You can have a WhatsApp group voice chat on the glasses, started from your phone, and continue to listen to music, capture photos and videos, and get notifications while the call runs in the background.
- A new Battery Saver Mode “limits high-drain features and dramatically extend your runtime”
- For people in Meta’s Early Access program (US & Canada only), a new feature called Wi-Fi Aware makes auto-importing media from the glasses to an iPhone more seamless, removing the “Meta AI wants to Join Wi-Fi network…” prompt.
We expect to see more significant new features announced for Meta’s smart glasses, as well as new hardware, at Meta Connect 2026 later this month.
I’m back writing on UploadVR again (for real this time), and this article is part of a series rounding up what happened in XR over the summer.
