Facebook rolls out first smart glasses

The glasses, which were created in partnership with Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica, allow wearers to listen to music, take calls or capture photos and short videos and share them across Facebook's services using a companion app. Facebook said the glasses line, called "Ray-Ban Stories," would start at $299.

The social media giant, which reported revenue of about $86 billion in 2020, makes most of its money from advertising but has invested heavily in virtual and augmented reality, developing hardware such as its Oculus VR headsets and working on wristband technologies to support augmented reality glasses.

Facebook's chief scientist said last year the company was five to 10 years away from being able to bring to market "true" AR glasses, which would superimpose virtual objects onto the wearer's view of the real world.

Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, recently announced the company was setting up a team to work on building the metaverse, a shared virtual environment which it is betting will be the successor to the mobile internet. 

"We’ve believed for a long time that glasses are going to be an important part of building the next computing platform," said Zuckerberg in a video posted on his Facebook page on Thursday.

Major tech firms including Amazon.com Inc, Alphabet Inc's Google, Microsoft Corp, Apple Inc and Snap Inc have raced to develop various smart glasses products, but early offerings like Google Glass proved difficult to sell to consumers put off by high price points and design issues.

SOURCE: REUTERS