Facebook has spent years stealing features from Snapchat and pretending that it’s innovating so it perhaps isn’t surprising that the glasses, called Ray-Ban Stories, the company is launching with Ray-Ban later today remind us a whole heck of a lot of Snap’s first-generation Spectacles.
Oh, the Ray-Ban Stories you will tell…
See, the glasses themselves are set to be properly revealed at a Facebook event sometime later this evening but, as ever, someone on the internet knows what’s coming in advance. That someone is Evan Blass, who usually spoils all of Samsung’s fun but who is tacking a crack at raining on Mark Zuckerberg’s parade today. Blass’ Twitter account posted images showing off the new Ray-Bans’ design, which look like classic glasses — only with little cameras on the side.
And very little Facebook branding, which is probably a good thing. They look like Ray-Ban products, in either Wayfarer, Round, or Meteor styles, but for the dual cameras and a physical button on one of the bows. What isn’t clear (yet) is exactly what these sunnies will do but we can’t get this mental image of a male douchebag ambling around a beach taking creepshots of women under the guise of looking over his sunglasses.
What seems likely is that these specs will be capable of either video or photography — the main question will be whether it’ll upload (or live-stream) what you’re seeing automatically, probably via a connection to your smartphone, or whether you’ll have the chance to curate things before you send it out into the world. At the moment, all we’ve got from Zuckerberg is that they’ll “…let you do some pretty neat things”. Hopefully, he was talking about something neater than just… cameras.
If they’re just a set of video/camera glasses then, design by Ray-Ban aside, they’ll face the same issues as Google Glass (in that folks won’t want you recording them all the damn time) and Snapchat’s Spectacles (in that nobody wanted to buy the bloody things). But hey, maybe Facebook integration is just what video glasses needed to take off. We’ll find out just what Ray-Ban Stories can do a little later tonight.