Smart glasses to wear every day and with style: Facebook announces a partnership with the well-known Made in Italy company
Smart glasses to wear every day to live more connected are the latest proposal from Facebook. The Aria project was presented during the Facebook Connect digital event, in which the company also announced a partnership with EssilorLuxottica to produce the first smart glasses with a Made in Italy design.
The digital event of September 16 was an opportunity for the Facebook Reality Labs division to present all the products for virtual and augmented reality, such as the Aria project's smart glasses, and the Oculus Quest 2 augmented reality visors. Among the company's future projects related to these products there are also important partnerships, such as the one on next-generation video games AAA and with the well-known Italian company, which will design and produce with Facebook the first Ray-Ban branded smart glasses. No details on where and when they will be produced, but the design will certainly be the responsibility of the Italian-French company.
Project Aria, the new smart glasses of Facebook
The Aria project for the creation of a prototype of smart glasses was announced during the Connect event, which was attended by both the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and the director of Facebook Reality Labs, Andrew Bosworth. The new smart glasses are presented as a tool that adds a 3D "veil" of useful information and opens to a new way of living and moving in the world.
Realizing a wearable device of this type is not easy, since it is faced with the difficulties of finding an ergonomics that fits different shapes and sizes of the face. A goal that to be achieved requires the improvement of audio and visual input systems, artificial intelligence algorithms and a fairly light frame that hosts, however, all the components.
At the moment it is a research project, emphasize from Facebook, which aims only to implement and optimize both the software and hardware part of the prototype of AR glasses, as well as to establish the main rules and limitations to protect the privacy of both the wearer and those who are observed and filmed, through a protocol of data protection during the experimentation that has been defined and presented. The biggest challenge, explain the Aria project's researchers, was finding a way to make hardware that contained all the sensors in one pair of glasses.
Facebook's smart glasses will not only be able to give spatial information, with sensors already used in VR viewers, but also calculate location from GPS data, take high-resolution photos, capture audio and, of course, shoot video. Wearing them, users will be able to film their surroundings, have additional information on what is framed by the glasses and even call or video call their friends and family without the need to use their smartphone, to live in a world of interconnected augmented reality.
Facebook's smart glasses will be Ray-Ban
The smart glasses of the Aria project are currently destined only for the research department of Facebook Reality Labs, but they could soon become a product made in Italy. During the event, Zuckerberg's company also made a new announcement: a partnership with the company EssilorLuxottica, which produces several eyewear brands from Ray-Ban and Oakley to Armani and Versace.
The two companies will work together to launch the first Ray-Ban-branded smart glasses by 2021, and the suspicion is that it could be just the prototype of the Aria project. The goal is to create a product that blends the innovative technology of smart glasses with a fashionable style, to succeed where Google has currently failed: making smart glasses that we can use every day and that allow us to live more connected.
Oculus Quest 2, launch date and price
In addition to the new partnership, the Facebook Connect event was an opportunity to present the Oculus Quest 2 augmented reality viewers. A new generation of all-in-one VR with an even higher resolution display, equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Platform processor and 64 GB of memory. The new visors will be available from October 13 and on sale for 349 euros, while the version with 256 GB of memory will be priced from 449 euros.