Facebook is releasing smart glasses with Ray-Ban

“Ray-Ban Stories”

Menlo Park (DPA) – Facebook on Thursday unveiled smart glasses that can be used to take photos and videos.

With “Ray-Ban Stories” you can answer calls or listen to podcasts, because two loudspeakers are built into the hands of the temple, announced Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Unlike the failed Google Glass, Facebook’s Ray-Ban glasses do not have a monitor.

For the time being, Facebook glasses are only available in Australia, USA, Canada, Ireland, Italy and Great Britain. Ray-Ban Stories’ project partner is the Italian Laxotica Group, which has been involved with Ray-Ban since 1999.

There are two front 5 megapixel cameras for recording videos and photos in the frame of the glasses. Recordings can be synced with the Facebook View app on the smartphone and shared on social networks. It works not only on services from the Facebook group, such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, but also on any network, such as Twitter or Snapchat, as images can be saved in a standard photo app of a smartphone.

The glasses have a physical button on the temple to trigger photo or video recording. But it can be activated hands-free with a voice command (“Hey Facebook, record a video”). To protect privacy, a small white LED illuminates next to the camera when the camera takes a photo or video. “This is more than any smartphone can do,” Zuckerberg said.

With its main function of taking photos and videos, Ray-Ban Stories matches Snapchat Glasses, which was released in 2016 with a lot of PR inspiration, but could not find buyers later. Both hand speakers can play sound from a smartphone via Bluetooth.