The first connected eyeglasses from Meta, the Ray-Ban stories, will be released on April 14 in France
18 March 2022
The first connected eyeglasses from Meta (Facebook) will arrive in France. Designed with the EssilorLuxottica group, the Ray-Ban stories will be marketed from April 14, 2022 at a minimum price of 329 euros.
Those in a hurry can go to Belgium, Spain or Austria, where these eyeglasses will be sold from March 17, 2022.
EssilorLuxottica, the parent company of Ray-Ban, signed a multi-year partnership with the Meta group in September 2020 to develop connected eyeglasses. The Stories are the first fruit of this collaboration.
- Ray-Ban stories: up to 60 seconds of video
The Ray-Ban stories are indeed above all Ray-Ban, to which two cameras, a microphone and two speakers have been added.
The user can take photos or up to 60 seconds of video by pressing a button or by voice command.
He can then rework them via a mobile application, Facebook View, then publish them on social networks.
The eyesglasses also allow to take phone calls or listen to music, thanks to the speakers facing the ears of the user.
According to Luxottica, this is also the main use of Ray-Ban stories among its first buyers in the United States or Italy, where the product has been available since September 2021.
The average autonomy of the eyeglasses is 4 hours, and they can be recharged in a connected case.
- Protection of private life
The Ray-Ban stories are for Meta a small step towards its metaverse project, presented in October by Mark Zuckerberg.
The latter dreams of creating devices with the same appearance as eyeglasses, but capable of projecting virtual elements in front of our eyes, such as the avatars of participants in a remote meeting.
The user could navigate in this virtual universe with his hand and thanks to his voice. But this technological challenge should not be completed for another ten years.
In the meantime, the Ray-Ban stories are not without questions about the protection of privacy.
The eyeglasses emit a small light next to one of the temples when the camera is active.
But the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) and its Italian alter ego Garante have warned that is not enough to warn people around the user that they are being filmed.
“Comprehensive field testing has not been demonstrated by Facebook or Ray-Ban to ensure that the indicator light is an effective means of notification” they said in September 2021.
Meta claims to have worked on these issues with associations and is betting on a code of good conduct.
The Facebook View application will remind the user to turn off the eyesglasses when he is in a sensitive place, not to film people without their consent or not to try to hide the indicator light, indicates the group.
Will be this enough? In any case, it is difficult not to think of Google Glass (2014), when some users of which had been attacked by critics of these devices, in France and in the United States.
