Our friends over at the big blue company seem to be still be naming everything stories, they’ve done this again this time teaming up with Ray-Ban to produce… Ray-Ban Stories Smart Glasses.
Facebook have clearly set their sights on the future of VR and AR, first demonstrated when they picked up the leader of VR headsets, Oculus for a cool $2billion back in 2014. Their partnership with Ray-Ban sees creation of smart glasses which can take photos, video-capture and playback audio. While not true AR glasses, the Ray-Ban Stories is a deliberate attempt to enter the market for interactive glasses, a market, which will be worth $565m by 2030, according to forecasts. Currently a niche product , smart glasses could potentially replace smartphones in the future.
“Mobile is the platform of today, and now we’re also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow,” says Zuckerberg.
However, the smart glasses market is volatile. Big names like Intel and Bose and well-funded start-ups like Osterhout Design Group (ODG) and Daqri have all exited the market, having failed to produce devices capable of living up to the hype. Added to this is the fact that for now atleast the glasses don’t really do much other than capture video and photo. There’s no app to really leverage the functionality, there’s no AR capability and there’s extreme privacy concerns with the only indicator of video capture being a tiny white LED that turns on (nothing a piece of black tape can’t hide).
In short… cool shades bro… but that’s about it. Ray-Ban Stories’ resemblance to regular eyewear will make them more acceptable to consumers. Facebook will continue to assess consumer perception towards smart glasses before launching its own-brand AR-capable devices, expected in 2022.