Facebook gets in your Ray-Bans: A first look at its new smart glasses
Mark Zuckerberg’s mind often turns to the inadequacies of smartphones—especially their disruptive clunkiness as a tool for engaging with other humans.
“On the one hand, they provide so much value, so you’re not going to not use them,” explains Facebook’s CEO. “But I think the fact that we basically take this thing out of our pocket and kind of have our head stuck in it for a while is just not how we all want to interact.”
Zuckerberg has expressed variations on this sentiment when discussing Facebook’s Oculus VR headsets, its research into augmented-reality wearables, and its ambition to become “a metaverse company.” But in this particular case, he’s giving me the rationale behind Ray-Ban Stories, the new smart glasses that go on sale today, a year after he first teased them at the company’s Facebook Connect virtual conference.
A joint project between the Facebook Reality Labs hardware group and the 84-year-old Ray-Ban sunglasses brand—itself an arm of French-Italian optical-goods behemoth EssilorLuxottica—the new glasses are nowhere near as futuristic as Facebook’s other gambits to diminish the smartphone’s central place in our lives. In fact, the features they offer, starting at $299, are quite similar to products already on the market. You can use them to take photos and shoot brief videos while your phone remains in your pocket or purse—just like Snap’s Spectacles, which have been around for half a decade now. They also deliver open-ear audio for listening to music and making phone calls, as smart glasses from Amazon and Bose do.
