“Ray-Ban Stories”
Facebook launches smart glasses with Ray-Ban
Facebook is launching smart glasses together with Ray-Ban. Photo: Uli Deck / dpa
Take photos and videos, answer calls or listen to podcasts: Facebook has allied itself with Ray Ban owner Luxottica.
On Thursday, Facebook unveiled smart glasses that can be used to take photos and videos.
With the” Ray-Ban Stories ” you can also take calls or listen to podcasts, because two speakers are built into the temples, announced Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Unlike the failed Google Glasses, Facebook’s Ray-Ban glasses do not have a monitor.
The Facebook glasses are currently only available in Australia, the USA, Canada, Ireland, Italy and the UK. The project partner at Ray-Ban Stories is the Italian Luxottica Group, to which Ray-Ban has been a member since 1999.
In the frame of the glasses are two front-facing 5-megapixel cameras for recording videos and photos. The recordings can be synchronized with the Facebook View app on your smartphone and shared on social networks. Since the pictures can also be used in the normal photo App on a smartphone saved, it works not only with the services from the Facebook group, so Facebook itself, Instagram and WhatsApp, but with a number of networks, such as Twitter or Snapchat.
The glasses have a physical button on the strap to trigger the photo or video recording. It can also be activated hands-free with a voice command (“Hey Facebook, record a video”). To protect privacy, a small white LED lights up next to the camera when the camera takes a photo or video. “This is more than any smartphone makes,” Zuckerberg said.
With its main function of taking photos and videos, the Ray-Ban Stories is equivalent to the Snapchat Spectacles glasses, launched in 2016 with a big PR buzz, but then hardly found buyers. The speakers on both brackets can play the sound from a smartphone via Bluetooth.
