Ray-Ban and Facebook team up to put cams on your face
Remember Google Glass and all those recordings of people saying “turn that off,” and the protestations of the Glassholes claiming the cameras were not recording? Well here’s the 2021 version of that with Ray-Ban and Facebook combining to make Ray-Ban Stories, although without the AR feature set.
Ray-Ban Stories are sunglasses with two front facing cameras, a microphone that can be used for audio recording or the Facebook assistant to start and stop recording. You can also tap the frame to start or stop recording without having to give verbal cues that you’re recording.
Privacy advocates probably are going to immediately be up in arms about this, however FB and RB have already thought of that and have placed a white recording light next to the right eye’s lens that nobody would ever think to disable or use a sharpie on to hide the fact that they’re recording. There’s also an audible camera sound according to PCMag.
Why do you keep tapping your glasses, Marsha?
The glasses can also play music, look like standard sunglasses, and have a staggeringly small level of recording and battery life it appears from the specs The Verge lists about 18 minutes or so of video cut into 30 second chunks or 500 or so photos. Presumably with a shutter sound at each one.
The glasses feature no AR, or appear to do much of anything particularly interesting. If you want two 5mp cameras at eye level, here you go. Beyond that the 30 second recording and shutter sound limit the use cases (good or bad.)
[The Verge]
