FB and Ray Ban unveil smartglasses
NEW DELHI: After putting Snapchat’s Stories feature into Instagram, social media giant Facebook is going after another market that its competitor has pursued. The company, today, announced a new pair of smart glasses in partnership with Ray Ban. Christerned the Ray Ban Stories, the smart glasses have been said to be in production since last year.
Facebook had announced the partnership with Ray Ban just over a year ago, and registered a patent with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) later. However, while earlier reports speculated that the smart glasses would have augmented reality (AR) features, the Ray Ban Stories have cameras for regular photo capture only.
The glasses have two 5MP cameras on either side, which can be used to take photos. They also have microphones for taking calls and listening to podcasts, music etc. Gesture controls will help navigate through these functions, while hardwired LED lights are fitted too, to inform other users when the camera is active.
The Ray Ban Stories have three beamforming microphones, which use noise suppression algorithms, similar to what’s seen on true wireless earbuds today. Beamforming microphones use a digital signal processor to better understand where audio is coming from, and are hence used to cut out environmental noise in consumer devices often.
“Achieving high-quality audio was not a foregone conclusion. We used a bass reflex system, and there were early challenges in getting the speaker porting to fit into the glasses constraint. The answer came with combining great hardware with great software on top of it — and a bit of persistence,” the company said in a blog post.
To use the smart glasses, users will have to download the Facebook
View app and will require a Facebook account as well. The app will allow users to import images from the Ray Ban Stories to Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, TikTok, Snapchat and other apps.
Further, the social media giant has also built its own voice assistant onto the glasses. A physical button allows users to trigger the assistant and use commands like, “Hey Facebook, take a video” for hands-free control.
According to The Verge, Facebook consulted a host of advocacy groups on the privacy aspect of these glasses. In addition, while the privacy policy for the glasses tells users that the company will be collecting data on how users use the Ray Ban Stories, it claims to not analyze this data in order to target advertisements at user.