When Facebook revealed insights about its Project Aria glasses last year, it raised the bar of expectations off millions of users all over the globe. However, that project is still underway, and Facebook is likely to launch its Smart Glasses that it is developing in collaboration with Ray-Ban and its parent company, Luxottica. Project Aria’s glasses are expected to provide full 3D digital overlays visible through the device. Amongst other things, some of the promised effects of these glasses include calling a friend and see their life-like avatar in the same room as yours, or a digital assistant aiding you in detecting road hazards and send you safety alerts. They even let you have a completely immersive and noise-canceling audio experience in a noisy environment.
All of this sounded extremely promising for the Smart Glasses also, but now Andrew Bosworth has recently shared some insights, and suddenly the expectations seem to be falling a little apart!
These glasses are not AR-enabled, but they are still smart glasses.
Bosworth told Bloomberg in an interview and also in a blog post that these glasses that are soon to launch are going to be needed to connect to a device. On one hand, the users will not be able to enjoy the 3D overlay of digital objects onto their real-time view. So, this means that the basic and most fundamental aspect of Augmented Reality will not be supported by these smart glasses.
But on the other hand, they will provide a lot of other functional uses, however, the company is not going to announce their exact functionality as of now. Bosworth said that they do not want to over-hype these glasses.
Bosworth’s statement sounds more like a ‘polite warning’ and a salve for an anticipated wound actually! The company probably is trying to temper down the consumers’ expectation bar. But nothing can be said for sure until these glasses come in the markets and people get a good idea of what they may offer. Perhaps, Facebook is just being ‘shy’ and trying to create an element of intrigue and mystery around these glasses?
No digital overlay onto the real-world view, but these smart glasses will have the functionality to capture precious moments.
Bosworth further stated that with the initial iteration of these glasses, users will be able to capture moments, record them, and enjoy them. Usually, when something is happening and we want to capture it with our camera, we either have to look away from that happening to get the camera first and miss on some precious moments while doing so, or we have to capture the event and watch it through the camera’s lens and miss out the ‘real feel’ of it in the present time. These smart glasses will let the users capture moments without the worry of any of these above-mentioned issues.
This is a lot similar to Snapchat’s ‘Spectacles’ which are luxurious and fashionable sunglasses that act as a digital camera and let the users click on pictures while they are wearing them.
However, Spectacles met some developmental and technological problems and Snapchat could not expand its usage by integrating Augmented Reality.
Facebook may face such issues too in the future.
Let us just wait and see.
I’m Ava Paul, an experienced news website author with a special focus on the entertainment section. Over the past five years, I have worked in various positions of media and communication at World Stock Market. My experience has given me extensive knowledge in writing, editing, researching and reporting on stories related to the entertainment industry.
