Ray-Ban Stories: hands-on with Facebook’s first smart glasses

This isn’t even near Google glass. This is a direct competitor to Snap’s Spectacles. Glass was also attempting to place a computer-like device on your face. These are no more than fancy head video cameras.

Google glass failed because it was not a very good product - it was very slow to refresh, the screen was hard to see without rolling your eye up into your head, it cost $1500, and it didn't have any kind of killer app. These are a fifth of the price and are decent at doing the 2 things they set out to do. They have improved on everything I hated about spectacles and added budget airpods to the feature list.

I agree, and I am usually the first to cast privacy stones at facebook. While I wouldnt wear these in most cases I wear sunglasses today, I could imagine plenty of social scenarios where I would not be the least bit creeped out to wear or see people wearing these. Generally these are situations where people would already be comfortable taking pictures with their phone.

They are the best looking camera glasses I have seen - they look like standard wayfarers. But then again, I thought the same of the first gen Spectacles (the newer ones are hilariously dumb looking), so we’ll see. $300 is only like twice the price of normal wayfarers, so not bad there either.

Disadvantages AFAICT: - standard Facebook trust issues - no private audio, AR, or motion sensing - not waterproof (wtf, but at least they’re not horribly expensive and I guess just become normal wayfarers when they get wet) - no “click to save the last 30 seconds mode” (maybe with a Orange LED color) like my PS5 has :)