The Ray-Ban Stories are a fine first attempt at smart glasses by Facebook. It’s great that the company teamed up with a brand people will actually want to wear. The glasses were first reported by CNBC in 2019, but Facebook is hardly the first company to roll out a pair of smart glasses. Social-media rival Snap launched its first Spectacles devices in 2016, and the ill-fated Google Glass devices launched way back in 2013. An iconic leader in sunglasses and prescription eyewear for generations, Ray-Ban remains a top brand in the eyewear industry with authentic styles like the Aviator and Wayfarer. With an 80-year history in American pop culture, public figures and celebrities have worn the world-famous Ray-Ban shades as a symbol of self-expression and an effortlessly cool look.
In 1937, the iconic eyewear brand was created to help reduce or “ban” sun glare for US Army Air Corps pilots, and thus the brand name was born. A year later the sleek metal frame was added, creating the Ray-Ban Aviators. To this day, you can still purchase these iconic sunglasses, among hundreds of other sunglasses and eyeglasses for men, women, and children. From timeless Aviators, to classic Wayfarer styles and everything in between, Ray-Ban offers countless styles and shapes to compliment any face shape or style.
The credits continued in the iconic movies “The Blues Brothers” , “Risky Business” , and “Top Gun” . The brand was purchased in 1999 by the largest eyewear manufacturer in the world – Luxottica. Luxottica’s vision for the brand has dramatically increased the breadth of the line. After recording videos — the glasses can record up to second videos or take 500 photos — people can upload their content wirelessly to the app, where the photos are encrypted. From Facebook View, people can share the content to their social networks or messaging apps, as well as save photos directly to their phone’s on-device storage outside the Facebook app.
The video and photos are stored locally on your phone, not sent into Facebook’s servers or the cloud. Basically, if you don’t choose to post those photos to Facebook, Facebook can’t see them or have anything to do with them, which is probably what you want. Well, if you buy Facebook glasses, I don’t really know what you want. Ray-Ban Stories can take photos and videos with a touch of a button and send them to your phone. On sunny days I do wear sunglasses when I play tennis so it was an added bonus that I could take videos while hitting groundstrokes and volleys.
As you’d expect from Ray-Ban, even with all of those smarts inside these glasses look incredible smart, too. You can choose from three of its classic styles – the Wayfarer, Round or Meteor – all of which pack in the same quality, luxury and fine design that the company is so well known for. You can speak to them, too, with voice control that’s powered by the Facebook intelligence that is built into these ray ban new wayfarer glasses. Unlike carrying a phone or a devoted camera, you won’t have to reach into your pocket and pull it out, by which point the moment is probably gone. And you don’t have to hold a device in front of your face, taking yourself out of the moment so that you don’t really get to experience it the first time around. In many ways, Ray-Ban Stories look just like any other of the brand’s glasses.
It’s not clear whether such a product will find a large market, given that the photos taken on smartphones are far superior and many phone users already have earbuds. They are also much pricier than regular Ray-Ban Wayfarers, which typically cost $100 to $200. Zuckerberg has said he thinks virtual and augmented reality-powered devices are the next major platform for human communication, after mobile phones, eventually replacing some in-person interactions. There’s also a touch area on the right side of the glasses for controlling music, a voice assistant and calls. A user can swipe left or right to adjust volume, tap to play, pause and skip music, or double tap to answer and end phone calls.
The glasses, which come in several different designs and lens colors, are impressive because they seem so nearly normal, even more so than the Amazon and Bose versions. The Ray-Ban Stories look innocuous at first, but they’re still not everyday normal — the arms are thick, and the charging case they come in is particularly shaped just for these glasses. And while my Ray-Ban ray ban caravan glasses have sunglass lenses, they can be outfitted with polarized and prescription lenses. But right now, my review units didn’t come prescription-equipped, so I used contacts when I wore them around. Ray-Ban Stories, the smart glasses being debuted by Facebook and Ray-Ban today, are most notable for just how much they look like a standard pair of the brand’s sunglasses.