new Garmin Varia HUD draws closer as Meta and Strava support emerges

Over the last year, several leaks have pointed towards a new Garmin Varia Head Up Display. The jigsaw pieces supporting that fell better into line today as META announced two smart glasses products, one with Garmin and Strava integration.

Let’s talk about the META products first, specifically the sporty version, as it’s interesting in its own right. Then, we will move on to how today’s news suggests Garmin will launch a different but related product soon.

What’s New – Meta Vanguard

Facebook owner, META, has co-developed some smart sports sunglasses with Oakley. They’re called the Oakley Meta Vanguard AI glasses, designed as performance AI glasses for athletes – think runners, snowboarders, and cyclists and you will soon understand the use cases.

TL;DR – META Vanguard gives real-time audible and visual performance metrics. It captures video based on milestones and overlays workout metrics from Garmin onto it. The whole workout video can then be shared on Strava.

Don’t get this confused with another Meta smart glasses collaboration announced today – Meta Ray-Ban are non-sports glasses that can be controlled by hand and finger gestures from its Neural Band. Meta Ray-Ban has a head-up display; Meta Vanguard does not.

Meta Vanguard – Typical Usages

“Hey Meta, what’s my heart rate?”

Like a voice assistant, the glasses use a microphone and speaker to hear your requests and present the answer. The twist is that the glasses communicate with your Garmin device to bring in on-demand performance metrics as part of the answer.

We’ll come back to the usefulness of that. But it’s also key to point out that Meta Vanguard has video capabilities. Recordings are triggered automatically when you meet specific performance characteristics on your Garmin. Thus, when there are changes or ramps in heart rate, speed or elevation, the video is triggered, as it also is when you hit key distance markers. It’s unclear how long each video clip can be, but there appears to be a 3-minute total video recording time.

There is also an LED above the right eye in the wearer’s peripheral vision. This indicates whether you are within target zones for pace, heart rate, or power.

Another handy use of the glasses speaker is up to six hours of continuous music playback. This requires a connection to your smartphone.

Finally, making calls and messaging with Meta AI is possible. This also requires the smartphone link and adds noise reduction capabilities to the glasses.

Post-Workout Summaries and Social Sharing

The activity summaries appear on the META AI mobile app (US only). These summaries can then be shared – for example, on Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp.

Meta Vanguard – Key Specifications

The specifications for Meta’s first-generation product are probably okay. They appear sufficiently robust for the intended purpose, perhaps only slightly let down by the 3k video images and 3-minute video recording time.

Meta AI and Garmin Integration

Meta has developed an app for the Garmin Connect IQ store to send training insights and alerts to the Oakley Meta Vanguard AI glasses. This integration relies on the Meta AI app on your paired smartphone. A paired Garmin device is also required, and support for relatively old models, like the Forerunner 165 and Fenix 7, is included.

Take Out

Almost the right product at the right time—but in the wrong place.

There’s a lot to unpack with Meta’s latest smart glasses, and the story can be viewed from several angles.

On one level, this is just a small step towards Meta’s bigger vision: the Metaverse. That long-term goal looms in the background, but few of us seem interested, at least for now.

In the near term, the strategy is clear: drive hardware sales, grow ad revenue, and deepen engagement with its ecosystem, all while positioning its AI as a central tool and latest corporate saviour.

Meta is again trying to establish one revenue stream from smart hardware using leading-edge tech. After Oculus/Quest, the company is pushing two lines of smart glasses, blending AI, multi-sensory input, and contextual data. To do this, Meta has partnered with credible hardware brands—Oakley and Ray-Ban—and with established sports platforms—Garmin and Strava. The ingredients are solid: design, build quality, customer reach, and data. Yet somehow, the final package doesn’t quite gel.

From Garmin’s perspective, this looks more like a careful experiment than a core strategy. Garmin has not handed over control of its core asset—user data. Instead, Meta only gets high-level summaries, extracts and overlays to share. Interestingly, Garmin’s data isn’t integrated with the Ray-Ban Display, which could have shown live in-workout performance metrics. That omission is telling.

I suspect Garmin steered away from letting Meta stream live sports data because a new Varia Vision is due soon!

So how will this play out? The hardware looks competent and will appeal to a slice of Meta’s audience. Meta’s demographic is ageing—the very group with disposable income, sports-related mid-life crises, and a willingness to share their experiences online. Even so, I doubt Meta can dislodge Strava as the hub of sporting social interaction, or Garmin as the custodian of performance data.

Right now, it feels like Meta is tinkering at the edges, grasping at new forms of engagement. Garmin, on the other hand, is steadily expanding its capabilities in emerging hardware, backed by a loyal customer base and an unmatched sports data platform.

Smart sports glasses make the most sense when they deepen sports ecosystems—not when they serve as extensions of Facebook. That’s why the likes of Engo 2 are good Garmin-compatible sports glasses and why Garmin will build on its microLED knowledge developed from Fenix 8 Pro to combine a flexible microLED panel in your field of view inside sports sunglasses – a head-up display with the ability to display all the richness of the Garmin data ecosystem, not just a few tired old snippets like heart rate.

Sources and further Resources

• Meta Product: Oakley Meta Vanguard AI glasses
• Meta Press release
• Garmin Press release
• Straa Press Release

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tfk, the5krunner
Sports Technology Reviewer and International Age Group TriathleteWith 20 years of testing Garmin wearables and competing in triathlons at an international age group level, I provide expert insights into fitness tech, helping athletes and casual users make informed choices.

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