Smart glasses come from Facebook and Ray-Ban – t3n – digital pioneers

Smart glasses should have the classic Ray-Ban look. (Photo: Nor Gal / Shutterstock.com)

It’s been almost a year since Facebook’s Hugo Barra teased the collaboration with Ray-Ban on Twitter. For 2021, the partners have announced smart glasses that will follow the classic design line.

Little has been seen since then. Skeptics had already written off smart glasses, even if they were opposed by the massive increase in staff at Facebook’s Reality Labs division, which is responsible for hardware related to virtual and augmented reality. Within four years, Facebook expanded its Reality Labs from 1,000 to 10,000 employees.

During a conference call, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that he had not just forgotten about the device. Instead, it will be the company’s next hardware release. Zuckerberg couldn’t or didn’t want to name a time perspective.

Zuckerberg addressed the issue of smart glasses when he described his vision to “build the next computer platform”. Then he sees the future in mixed reality, a mixture of virtual and augmented reality. It also assumes that mixed reality is already conceptually a social platform.

But we also see compelling use cases and other forms of entertainment, as well as work, creativity, and fitness. “The next product release will be the launch of our first Ray-Ban smart glasses in partnership with Essilor-Luxottica,” Zuckerberg said on the conference call. The glasses have an iconic form factor and let you do some pretty cool things. He noted that he is looking forward to “completing augmented reality glasses in the future.”

This illustrates what has already been suspected: a smart Ray-Ban will be more like Amazon Echo Frames, Bose Frames or Razer Anzu. At first, it’s still not clear what kind of “very cool stuff,” Zuckerberg said, that a clever Ray Ban should be able to do. If smart glasses want to at least keep up with the competition, we can expect that we will be able to use them to make calls, listen to music, and operate voice assistants. Interest in such a product is likely to be limited.

Zuckerberg’s vision of Facebook devices becoming part of a larger “metaverse” is also likely to meet with a somewhat moderate response given the data protection implications of such a scenario. Zuckerberg understands that the metaverse is a virtual environment in which people can work, make connections and spend money, that is, a three-dimensional Internet with which one can interact and in which the boundaries between reality and realism blur, if not immediately disappear. It’s hard to imagine that Facebook can gain people’s trust and make them transparent in such a metaverse

Zuckerberg certainly has to see these difficulties, but he clearly sees them differently. Since the plans of the social network have not retreated in this direction – Facebook is already working on a smartwatch.