by Aadi Biswas
Our family was discussing our annual holiday gifting tradition, and as always, I tried to ease my lack of creativity by simply asking my cousins what they wanted. My extended family is steeped in tech geeks and it wasn’t surprising that “Ray-Ban Stories” was the most popular ask.
But wait, “Aren’t Ray-Bans just… glasses?”, you might ask. Well, it’s a lot more complex than that:
In early September, Facebook (in collaboration with Ray-Ban’s parent conglomerate Essilor Luxottica) introduced state of the art smart glasses called “Ray-Ban Stories.” The glasses include built-in cameras to capture photos and video, are able to transfer data, have microphone and speaker to listen to music and podcasts, and have touch controls that can be operated hands-free.
So what do Smart Glasses do? At a basic level, Smart glasses are wearables which can access information (pictures and videos), provide real time communication, process information (e.g. facial recognition), store data, as well as overlay digital objects onto their real-world counterparts in a manner of augmented reality. But that’s not all: Facebook and Rayban are hoping to make them fashionable!
For years, engineers have chased a vision of placing sensors and cameras on eye-glasses. Google launched their variation in 2014, Snapchat in 2019, and many other companies followed suit. Sadly, other than a few enterprise deployments, these innovations were rejected by consumers. Complaints of price, clunkiness, and general ease of use were common.
So with such a chequered history, why is Facebook launching one now? And why is Apple following suit? For one, technology doesn’t grow in isolation: there needs to be an ecosystem to support and propagate it. Apple’s iPhone wouldn’t have been a success without the growth of mobile Internet or nano-technology. Whatsapp’s growth is predicated on the backs of affordable lightning speeds of dependable networks. It’s certainly possible that the previous products were ahead of their time.
Of course, Facebook is hoping they have launched a unique pioneer in the industry that’s differentiated from the rest. Moreover, products, however well marketed, fail if consumers don’t realise a distinct value proposition. The Augmented Reality capabilities make these glasses unique as AR technology is predicted to make a big impact across various applications in areas such as Medical, Retail, Classroom Education and Tourism. The immersive experience of AR is also expected to drive the development of the “metaverse,” which is expected to be the next stage of the internet, further impacting several key aspects of our lives:social connections, work, entertainment, shopping, education, and a cyber-economy.
On the other hand, privacy matters more than ever before and the prospect of people wearing regular looking glasses—which are computers and cameras combined—is frightening. To mitigate this concern, Ray-Ban stories have a LED light which gets activated when the camera is on for the sake of privacy.
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