Facebook and Ray-Ban have teased their own smart glasses, which they will formally announce on September 9. Given the description, it appears that the social media company is aiming to make its own device similar to Snapchat Spectacles.
There is little information about the specs, let alone what they will be called. The teaser page on the Ray-Ban website only has the cryptic image seen above, the date, and a registration field for ‘your release notification’.
There are also some pretty suggestive images shared by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s head of VR / AR Andrew Bosworth, as noted by The Verge. They both posted videos in square format (on Facebook and Twitter, respectively) of images seemingly from head height, with no descriptive text for context, and save a single sunglasses emoticon in each post.
We don’t have to wait long to find out more about the Facebook x Ray-Ban project, which appears to be the brand’s twist on social sharing glasses that we last saw in 2019 with Snapchat Spectacles 3. But this is far. from the beginning we heard about smart glasses from Facebook.
(Image credit: Facebook)
Analysis: Facebook smart glasses, it’s about time
We first saw a patent for Facebook glasses (not the official name or rumored, but we have to call them somehow) in June 2020, which showed a variety of methods that potential smart glasses could use to detect the depth and range, which could be useful for normal or portrait photos, as well as augmented reality (AR) tools.
As with any patent, these are just a collection of different possible sensor configurations, not a complete list of all the components that will be included in the final product. It goes without saying that uncovering a patent typically means we’re a few years away from seeing it hit the market in a production-ready model.
Or at least, that’s usually the case, but Bosworth promised in January that we would see Facebook’s smart glasses land sometime in 2021, and they would be much simpler than the full AR specs from ‘Project Aria’ that are still in development. . During Facebook’s latest earnings call in late July, CEO Mark Zuckerberg openly revealed that smart glasses will be the company’s next hardware product.
“Looking ahead, the next product launch will be the launch of our first Ray-Ban smart glasses in association with EssilorLuxottica,” Zuckerberg said on the call at the time. “Glasses have their iconic form factor and they allow you to do some very cool things.”
Zuckerberg didn’t specify what those ‘cool things’ would be, but he had previously noted that they wouldn’t have a built-in display – they’ll be closer to Snapchat Spectacles than to a rugged AR headset like the Microsoft HoloLens. Which probably means less hardware, possibly aligning them with the Amazon Echo Frames, but we’ll wait for the September 9 unveiling to be sure.
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