Facebook and Ray-Ban announce smart glasses on Thursday

Eyewear maker Ray-Ban has put a teaser page online announcing the upcoming smart glasses that the brand has co-created with Facebook. The glasses will be revealed on Thursday 9 September.

In addition, both Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Vice President Andrew Bosworth in the past few days put videos online from the viewer’s perspective, filming without hands. Bosworth added a sunglasses emoji to the video.

The arrival of the glasses was confirmed by Facebook at the beginning of this year. Facebook is working with Ray-Ban on smart glasses that, contrary to previously thought, will not have augmented reality features. However, the glasses can film clearly and according to the images, that is in any case in 1080p. It was previously known that the glasses are wirelessly connected to a smartphone, just like many smartwatches. It is not yet known what functionality the glasses have. In conversation with Bloomberg in January, Bosworth does not explicitly mention the glasses as augmented reality glasses, because they do not have an AR overlay.

Last year, Facebook gave employees a prototype of the glasses, with the working title Project Aria to show how they would be used in practice. The glasses resemble glasses from Snapchat developer Snap and Amazon’s Echo Frames, among others. Based on the silhouette of the image on Ray-Ban’s site, the new version is a lot more streamlined.