Facebook's Ray-Ban smart glasses are coming: What to expect

At Facebook's recent earnings call , Mark Zuckerberg confirmed what we had already expected: The company's first pair of smart glasses are the next product, coming this year. 

Facebook discussed its glasses, which are made in a partnership with glasses-maker Essilor Luxottica under the Ray-Ban brand, last year during a virtual Facebook Connect conference.

"Looking ahead here, the next product release will be the launch of our first smart glasses from Ray-Ban in partnership with Essilor Luxottica," Zuckerberg said during the call. "The glasses have their iconic form factor, and they let you do some pretty neat things. I'm excited to get these into people's hands and to continue to make progress on the journey towards full augmented reality glasses in the future."

Facebook's head of AR/VR hardware, Andrew Bosworth, spoke with CNET earlier this year about the glasses. He confirmed a few things for us back then: "We're being careful not to call them augmented reality glasses. When you're overlaying digital artifacts onto the world, that's really augmented reality. These aren't augmented reality glasses. However, they do a lot of the concepts we think will eventually be critical for augmented reality glasses. It's all components that people have seen before, but never all in one place. I'm being very coy about the feature set, as you can tell -- that's intentional, I'm not going to answer specifically what features it has. But I will say, one of the things that we're looking at for all of AR, starting with our smart glasses, is how can they help you be more present."

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