Beamforming technology and a background noise suppression algorithm provide for an enhanced calling experience like you’d expect from dedicated headphones. The social network on Thursday showed off the glasses, called Ray-Ban Stories—a direct rival to Snapchat’s Spectacles. The $299 Facebook glasses, ray ban new wayfarer which use EssilorLuxottica SA-owned Ray-Ban’s classic Wayfarer frame style, let users take photos and video, listen to music and answer phone calls. While they lack AR, the technology that overlays digital content on the physical world, Facebook says it eventually plans to embed that functionality.
Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses weigh only about five grams more than the original Wayfarer design — that’s equivalent to the weight of about a teaspoon of salt. Sign up to receive product news and exclusive offers from Sunglass Hut. We’re all members of Vision Source, a family of over 3,400 locally owned practices collaborating to provide quality professional eye care and support the long-term success of independent optometry. They also come in a range of different colours and lens combinations that mean you can get access to the smartest glasses you’ll ever own in whatever design you’d like.
But the voice controls worked just fine during the few occasions when nobody could hear my shame. While I didn’t expect much when it comes to audio playback, the Stories surprised me with sound that was good enough for listening to light tunes or podcasts. I could see them being particularly useful while jogging or biking outdoors, where you want to maintain situational awareness.
Getting regular eye exams, eating a healthful diet, taking breaks from staring at digital devices, and protecting your eyes in the sun can all help in keeping your vision healthy. EssilorLuxottica shares this vision for wearables that will transform the way we connect and interact with other people and the world around us. The launch of the first-generation Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses is an exciting glimpse at what’s possible when we begin to shift to devices that enhance day-to-day life, rather than distract from it. As with any new device, we have a big responsibility to help people feel comfortable and provide peace of mind, and that goes not only for device owners but the people around them, too. That’s why we baked privacy directly into the product design and functionality of the full experience, from the start. Three iconic Ray-Ban frames merge with Facebook technology to create the latest in wearable tech.
To date, Facebook hasn’t had a portable consumer hardware device in the market that works with a mobile phone and back-end software, and it’s clear the company is new at this. It lists only five “responsibility” rules for people who purchase the glasses. Believing that people will actually comply with these rules is either naïve or very optimistic. With Ray-Ban Stories, we can’t always know who is recording, when or where they are doing it, or what will happen to the data they collect. A small light indicates that the glasses are recording, but that isn’t visible from far away.
There’s a quiet “shutter” sound when the person wearing the glasses takes a photo, but it’s hard for others to hear. Even if they do hear it, not knowing what someone intends to do with a recording could cause anyone who is privacy-conscious to worry. Now you can leverage the strength of the iconic Ray-Ban brand to seamlessly upgrade patients in both single vision and progressive lenses.
The two 5-megapixel cameras don’t take the best pictures or videos. Modern smartphones come with multiple lenses that offer zoom or wide-angle capabilities for fitting more into a picture, and most have a sharper 12-megapixel resolution. Augmented reality features, which let you overlay digital content on top of the real world, are notably absent. Facebook had previously warned that AR capabilities would be missing from the Ray-Ban glasses, but the lack of AR feels like a disappointment, especially after Snap added AR to the latest iteration of its Spectacles in May.