These are the first Facebook glasses
a partnership with luxury eye-wear brand Ray-Ban.
It's no secret that Facebook has been working on augmented-reality
glasses that can project images into your eyes and these glasses...
do none of that.
These are basically just a pair of glasses with cameras in.
They are actually very similar to the Snapchat Spectacles that
were released in 2016
although every time I mentioned that to Facebook
they insisted this is a very different product.
To use them you press the button to take a video, press and hold
to take a photo and you can also use voice commands like
"Hey Facebook, take a video."
There are also some built-in speakers
so you can use them to listen to music or make phone calls.
Although when I tried that on the noisy high street
they were nowhere near loud enough to be remotely useful.
So I'm going to focus on the cameras for now.
The idea is that you can leave your phone in your bag
but still have a way to capture moments
hands-free as and when they arise. I quite like that as a concept.
So, taking it at face value I tried them out over the weekend.
I met up with some friends. I went to a concert.
I took loads of footage and when I came to download it to my
phone the glasses had corrupted and all the footage was lost.
So you're not getting any of that.
Instead, here's my last-minute backup option of meeting a friend for
coffee in the park. The specs record these square videos and
nothing is automatically posted to Facebook or live-streamed.
You download the clips at the end of the day and you can
post them wherever you like. Facebook says one use-case
is if you have children and I can see that being fairly useful because
you can put your phone away, but still capture some nice moments.
I took a video of this dog taking a swim and the footage looks pretty
good. Here is the same moment captured on my smartphone and
I think the smartphone version looks better but obviously you have a greater
selection of lenses on there and probably a bigger sensor.
The camera glasses look OK and if it was the only footage
you have that is better than no footage.
I did feel a bit silly wearing sunglasses indoors to take a video,
but they do versions with clear lenses
sunglasses and ones that transition between both.
A lot of people will
have questions about privacy and I can see why they branded these
Ray-Ban Stories rather than Facebook Glasses or Instaspecs. Ultimately, if
somebody's inclined to take hidden camera footage in a changing room
they can do that with their phone already. They don't need to spend
$300 on a pair of glasses. But even so I thought they
might be a bit more obvious when recording video because they do
just look like an ordinary pair of Ray-Bans. There is an LED
that lights up when you're recording, but maybe it's too subtle.
My housemate thought it was just a reflection on the glasses.
It could have been a red flashing recording light. In comparison
the Snapchat specs were a lot more obvious when recording. So I called
Facebook's head of AR and VR Andrew Bosworth to ask him about privacy.
I think to some degree, we deal with this today.
You've got mobile phones that people have out there
that all have cameras on them. And so there is a degree to which
our goal was to be at least more overt than what people are
doing today with their phones and I think we've achieved that goal.
If you have your phone out you could be taking pictures
there's really no way for bystanders to know that you're
doing that and people are known to have their phones out. So the glasses are...
we think quite a bit more overt than that. You have the LED you also
have an audio sound and you also have to take an explicit action.
I either have to move my hand to my temple and press the button
or I have to use my voice to say "take a picture"
if I have enabled that feature. So I think there's a lot more
opportunities for bystanders to know - and this isn't something we
left to chance. We knew this was one of the most
important things to get right.
One thing that makes me feel really old is
they say when you ask people maybe our age
"take a photo" we gesture like this. And if you ask teenagers do it
they go like this. Maybe you're going to bring back this motion?
That's right. Absolutely.
There's been a lot of talk about Facebook
bringing out full augmented-reality glasses with a display and is this
just a sort of stop-gap to get people used to the
idea of everybody wearing camera glasses?
You've nailed it, Chris. I think for us going back even a year
we were talking about previous projects that we've had and we do
have AR glasses in the pipeline. We really want to have a
conversation and dialogue with consumers around the world on
what are the standards and expectations they have for the
types of computers that we are going to wear in the future. And this is
really our first foray into putting something on someone's face and
we're really excited about it and seeing how people react to it.
I think it's a great product. I've been using it myself
but it is the first in a series of products that give people
more functionality, more capability through a pair of glasses.