From CNET: I look at myself through the camera of the phone in my hand: I'm wearing pretty normal-looking Ray-Ban glasses. A tap of a button, and now I'm streaming video from the Ray-Bans straight out to Instagram.
While Meta has ambitions for true augmented reality smart glasses, for now it has updated its two-year-old Ray-Ban smart glasses. Announced alongside the new Quest 3 mixed reality-enabled headset at Meta's latest developer conference, the new glasses -- now called the Ray-Ban Meta Collection -- are still just made for listening to music, taking calls and shooting photos and video via cameras embedded in the corners of the frames. Starting at $299, they're arriving Oct. 17, and despite two years having gone by, not a whole lot has changed philosophically from the 2021 version, although these newer ones come in more designs and promise better performance.
The cameras, microphones and speakers are all improved this time, though, and a brand-new Qualcomm chip inside the glasses could be the start of a wave of other improved smart glasses in the next year. However, by comparison, Amazon's recently launched improved Echo Frames smart glasses, developed with glasses-maker Carrera, are audio-only.
Qualcomm's new AR1 Gen 1 chip inside these Ray-Ban glasses could theoretically support embedded displays, but Meta skipped adding any screens this time around. Instead, the proposition is the same as when Meta launched its Ray-Ban Stories in 2021: taking calls, listening to music, snapping photos and videos, and responding to "Hey Meta" to do a few basic tasks. The glasses come in a much larger range of designs and colors this time, though: there are now Wayfarer and Headliner frames, and a range of colors. Transparent blue, yellow and black frame options show off the shape of the circuitry in the arms of what's an otherwise mostly normal-looking design.
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