I was once at a conference where Google was letting people try out their new smart glasses. I was eager, but the lines were always too long. The Google Glass project ultimately fizzled—buggy performance, few practical applications available, the surveillance aspect creeped people out, and the glasses themselves were just ugly—but development on the smartglasses idea continues to bubble along. Last week, Facebook announced Ray-Ban Stories, which might start propelling these into the mainstream.
- Facebook on Your Face [The Verge] “The frames feature two-front facing cameras for capturing video and photos. There’s a physical button on the glasses for recording, or you can say ‘Hey Facebook, take a video’ to control them hands-free. And, perhaps most importantly, they look and feel like regular glasses.”
- Ray-Ban Stories: These are Facebook’s first mass-market smart glasses [Ars Technica] “The Ray-Ban Stories are equipped with a Snapdragon processor, but they don’t have displays in the lenses, so these are by no means augmented reality (AR) glasses.”
- Xiaomi launches its own smart glasses, of course [TechCrunch] “The device won’t only be capable of taking photos, but also of displaying messages and notifications, making calls, providing navigation and translating text right in real time in front of your eyes.”
- Facebook’s Smart Glasses Give People a Good Reason Not to Trust Your Ray-Bans [Gizmodo] “No amount of assurance is going to erase or even ease privacy concerns. That’s going to take a massive cultural shift. These glasses need to give us a killer reason why we’d trade our collective privacy—or the illusion of it—for the ability to snap a 2014-quality video.”
From the Ohio Web Library:
- Pressman, Aaron. “Lenovo Unveils Smartglasses That Project Your Windows Desktop Screen in Midair.” Fortune.Com, Jan. 2021, p. N.PAG.
- Metz, Rachel. “Google Glass Is Dead; Long Live Smart Glasses.” MIT Technology Review, vol. 118, no. 1, Jan. 2015, pp. 79–82.
- Dion, Jason. “Security implications of wearable technology.” CASP+ Cert Prep: 2 Enterprise Security Architecture. LinkedIn Learning. [Retrieved 2021-09-13]
