Facebook launches smart glasses with Ray-Ban
Other companies had previously failed with similar projects.
Menlo Park Facebook unveiled smart glasses on Thursday that can be used to take photos and videos. With the “Ray-Ban Stories” you can also answer calls or listen to podcasts, as two speakers are built into the glasses, announced Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Unlike the failed Google Glasses, the Ray-Ban glasses from Facebook do not have a monitor.
For the time being, the Facebook glasses will only be offered in Australia, the USA, Canada, Ireland, Italy and the United Kingdom. The project partner for the Ray-Ban Stories is the Italian Luxottica Group, to which Ray-Ban has belonged since 1999.
In the frame of the glasses there are two front-facing 5-megapixel cameras for recording videos and photos. The recordings can be synchronized with the Facebook View app on the smartphone and shared on social networks. Instagram Facebook Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, as the images can also be stored in the normal photo app of a smartphone, this works not only with the services from the Facebook group, i.e. Facebook itself, Instagram and WhatsApp, but with any networks such as Twitter or Snapchat.
The glasses have a physical button on the temple to trigger the photo or video recording. But it can also be activated hands-free with a voice command (“Hey Facebook, record a video”). To protect privacy, a small white LED lights up next to the camera when the camera takes a photo or video. “That’s more than any smartphone does,” Zuckerberg said.
With its main function of taking photos and videos, the Ray-Ban Stories corresponds to the Snapchat Spectacles glasses, which were launched in 2016 with a big PR hype, but then hardly found buyers. The speakers on both temples can reproduce the sound from a smartphone via Bluetooth.
