Mark Zuckerberg speaks at the F8 Developers Conference in San Jose in 2017.
Photographer: David Paul Morris / Bloomberg
Photographer: David Paul Morris / Bloomberg
The planned smart glasses from Facebook Inc. will arrive “ sooner than later ” in 2021, but will not feature the kind of digital overlay technology associated with augmented reality, according to hardware chief Andrew Bosworth.
The glasses, which are built in collaboration with Ray-Ban and older Luxottica Group SpA will connect to a device – although users cannot overlay digital objects over their real-world image, a fundamental element of AR.
“These are definitely connected glasses, they certainly offer a lot of functionality, [but] we are quite cautious about exactly what functionality we offer, ”says Bosworth. “We are excited about it, but we don’t want to overdo it. We don’t even call it augmented reality, we just call it ‘smart glasses’, ”he added.
Facebook first announced plans for AR glasses in 2017 and has since built a handful of camera features that allow people to project digital images onto the physical world, such as face-distorting photo filters. The company has invested significant resources in hardware development in recent years, acquiring the virtual reality start-up Oculus and launching an in-home video device called Portal. Facebook’s VR, AR and hardware teams account for more than 6,000 employees, according to a person familiar with the workforce. That is a larger group than Facebook has worked on apps with a billion users Instagram and WhatsApp.
Read more: Facebook and Ray-Ban team up to make smart glasses cool
Smart glasses are part of a long-term effort within the company to capture the next great computing platform after the smartphone. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg is a strong supporter of both AR and VR, although this first version of Facebook’s glasses doesn’t offer the ultimate promise of augmented reality, namely the ability to fuse the digital and physical world through a lens. Bosworth wouldn’t reveal the feature set for the upcoming glasses, but said they tie in with Facebook’s broader philosophy around AR, which is to make technology peripheral to human interactions to increase “ presence. ”
A common situation Bosworth cited is when parents try to record memories with their young children, “ By the time you get on the phone, not only have you probably missed him, but if you don’t miss him, you’re probably watching to the real event but through your phone, ‘he said. “If you have the right technology, it can get out of the way.”
Facebook is the latest tech company trying to make smart glasses. Google from Alphabet Inc. got into the category early with Google Glass, which never caught on as a consumer device but found a home as a resource for workers in warehouses and industrial settings. Snap Inc. has also launched multiple iterations of its smart glasses called Spectacles, which allow people to record video hands-free and transfer it to their phone. Apple Inc. also builds smart glasses.