Available in a variety of shapes and colors, Ray-Ban sunglasses are retro style made modern. With polarized lenses and UV protection for your eyes, these sunglasses are built to keep up with you as you move through your day. Ray-Ban prescription sunglasses start at around $250 with single-vision lenses and no add-ons. The highest-end prescription sunglasses from Ray-Ban cost around $800 and include a titanium frame, and thinner, polarized and anti-reflective lenses made for progressive vision. On average, you can expect to spend closer to the lower end of the scale, with most of the popular Ray-Ban frame styles priced at around $260 with single vision lenses, and $320 with progressive lenses.
Choose styles that hold true to Ray-Ban’s roots, or snap up a modern frame that riffs on the classic. Facebook has been able to fit an impressive amount into a frame just a few millimetres thicker and five grams heavier than a standard pair of Wayfarers. Each wing of the glasses hides a camera, which combine to shoot five ray ban caravan megapixel still images and video of up to 30 seconds with a long or short tap of the device’s only button. So far, so similar to Snap’s Spectacles, but the Ray-Ban Stories also feature open-ear speakers to listen, and a “three-microphone audio array to deliver rich voice and sound transmission for calls and videos”.
The company has created its first “smart glasses”, with a pair of cameras to take photos and videos, a microphone and speaker to listen to podcasts, and a voice assistant to let you do the whole thing hands-free. Ray-Ban Stories essentially mix the functionality of earbuds like Apple’s AirPods with sunglasses that can capture photos. It’s not clear whether such a product will find a large market, given that the photos taken on smartphones are far superior and many phone users already have earbuds. They are also much pricier than regular Ray-Ban Wayfarers, which typically cost $100 to $200. Snapchat parent Snap Inc. first released Spectacles in 2016 with a built-in camera for shooting video.
Alex Himel, VP of AR at Facebook Reality Labs, informed me over a Zoom chat that taping over the LED light was a violation of the terms of service of the glasses, which prohibit tampering with the device. There’s a difference between technology that is merely “creepy” versus something that causes actual harm, and conflating the two is an easy mistake . But the potential for real-world harm with these glasses seems obvious and clear. Photographing people without their knowledge is usually merely creepy, but a vengeful ex or jealous partner using this technology to threaten, blackmail, or embarrass someone is harmful.
And so Macready began working with Bausch & Lomb to design goggles especially suited to protect against the dazzle in the stratosphere. “My dad gave Bausch & Lomb the original shape, tint and fit” of aviator lenses, Wallace said. We offer free single-vision lenses for your eyeglasses , as well as free single-vision lenses for sunglasses with basic Rx (-2.00 to +2.00). Save up to 70% off retail prices on Ray-Ban eyeglasses and sunglasses with or without prescription.
In June of last year, Google bought the AR glasses startup North, signaling its interest in re-entering the consumer market after Google Glass failed nearly a decade ago. The deal was sealed when Zuckerberg flew to Milan in early 2019 to meet with Leonardo Del Vecchio, Luxottica’s founder and chairman. Facebook’s hardware executives traveled to tour Luxottica’s sprawling research center in northern Italy. Most of the features of the glasses (codenamed “Stella”) were decided during a weeklong workshop with top executives from both companies. After testing a pair of Ray-Ban Stories for the past week, I’m impressed with the build quality and how well they work.
On the front of the specs are two 5-megapixel cameras, as well as a barely-there LED indicator light that lets people know the wearer is recording. Ray-Ban Stories are the first product in a multiyear partnership between Facebook and the European eyewear conglomerate EssilorLuxottica, Ray-Ban’s parent company. While they’re limited in what they can do, Ray-Ban Stories are the most normal-looking, accessible pair of smart glasses to hit the market so far. Both companies also see them as a step toward more advanced augmented reality glasses that overlay graphics onto the real world.
The camera lenses and indicator light on the Ray-Bans are easy to miss. Where Snap’s design team has leaned into the Burning Man aesthetic for its Spectacles, Facebook and Ray-Ban went normcore. If you ignore the fact that they have cameras and wireless connectivity, Ray-Ban Stories are just a pair of Wayfarers. We weighed one of the pairs, which measured 49.3 grams—just shy of the stated 49.6 grams cited in the specs, and around 5 grams more than the original Wayfarers they’re modeled after. Crucially, that extra weight is distributed well, and both of us remarked that it was easy to forget you were wearing tech-laden shades.
How will we feel going about our lives in public, knowing that at any moment the people around us might be wearing stealth surveillance technology? People have recorded others in public for decades, but it’s gotten more difficult for the average person to detect, and Facebook’s new glasses will make it harder still, since they resemble and carry the Ray-Ban brand. In addition to coming in several styles and colors, they can be made as sunglasses or untinted lenses, prescription and even progressive lenses.