Facebook starts testing with AR glasses

Facebook starts a test with AR glasses under the name Project Aria. The glasses have a camera and microphone to capture data for research into how AR glasses should work. Only employees of Facebook and partner companies participate in the test.

The approximately 70g AR glasses from Project Aria have a 2.5Wh battery that should be good for 1.5 hours of recording and 30 hours in standby. The glasses run on an otherwise unknown Qualcomm Snapdragon soc with 4GB and a storage of 128GB. The glasses have Bluetooth 5.0 and WiFi 5. In terms of sensors, the glasses have GPS, barometer, compass and gyroscope.

The Aria glasses get a white LED to indicate that the glasses are recording its surroundings. In addition, Facebook promises that it will automatically blur faces and license plates in the images to ensure privacy.

Shooting is done with a single 8-megapixel camera with an angle of view of 110 degrees horizontally and 110 degrees vertically capable of capturing footage at 30fps. To keep track of the user’s hand movements, there are two monochrome cameras with VGA resolution of 640×480 pixels with 90fps.

The intention is to get a picture of environments with the glasses, so that an interface can be overlaid on them later. As examples, Facebook mentions in addition to navigation in the glasses also extra information about products in a store, being able to remember where users have left things such as keys and more. In the long term, according to Facebook, it should be possible to replace products such as TVs and tablets with virtual variants that run as an app on AR glasses.