Facebook Debuts Its Ray-Ban Stories Smart Sunglasses (techcrunch.com) 118
Facebook announced their long-awaited foray into the smart glasses space Thursday morning, launching the Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses in partnership with eyewear giant EssilorLuxottica. From a report: The svelte frames are some of the most low-profile yet available to consumers and will allow users to snap photos and videos with the two onboard 5 MP cameras, listen to music with in-frame speakers and take phone calls. The glasses need to be connected to an iOS or Android device for full functionality, though users can take and store hundreds of photos or dozens of videos on the glasses before transferring media to their phones via Facebook's new View app. The twin cameras will allow users to add 3D effects to their photos and videos once they upload them to the app.
The lightweight glasses weigh less than 50 grams and come with a leather hardshell charging case. The battery lift is advertised as "all-day" which TechCrunch found to be accurate during our review of the frames. Users will be able to control the glasses with a couple physical buttons including a "capture" button to record media and an on-off switch. A touch pad on the right arm of the glasses will allow users to perform functions like swiping to adjust the volume or answering a phone call. An onboard white LED will glow to indicate to the people around the wearer that a video is being recorded. The glasses will start at $299, with polarized and transition lens options coming in at a higher price point.
The lightweight glasses weigh less than 50 grams and come with a leather hardshell charging case. The battery lift is advertised as "all-day" which TechCrunch found to be accurate during our review of the frames. Users will be able to control the glasses with a couple physical buttons including a "capture" button to record media and an on-off switch. A touch pad on the right arm of the glasses will allow users to perform functions like swiping to adjust the volume or answering a phone call. An onboard white LED will glow to indicate to the people around the wearer that a video is being recorded. The glasses will start at $299, with polarized and transition lens options coming in at a higher price point.
But they're not peril-sensitive! (Score:3)
A lowres camera won't do much. If they aren't fashionable in the rest of the universe, I won't buy.
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It has two cameras with better than 4K UHD - so maybe stereo?
So, for the peril concerned, you can send a 4K stereo image of the person who just slugged you for invading their personal space and have it loaded to the cloud before you hit the floor.
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I agree though, 1080P is not low res.
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Will they go black right before someone punches you in the face for invading their privacy.
Re:But they're not peril-sensitive! (Score:5, Insightful)
Will they go black right before someone punches you in the face for invading their privacy.
It's the return of the Glassholes, fostered by thte biggest asshole conglomeration of all time - Facebook.
Re:But they're not peril-sensitive! (Score:4, Insightful)
But you haven't noticed it's greatest feature, stealth. Unobtrusive spying is the idea companies like Google and Facebook were going for. The technology just wasn't ready.
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And, interestingly, it's against the TOS [buzzfeednews.com] to cover that LED.
Of course you could always argue they want people to break their rule because they're evil and stuff.
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"An onboard white LED will glow to indicate to the people around the wearer that a video is being recorded."
And, interestingly, it's against the TOS [buzzfeednews.com] to cover that LED.
Of course you could always argue they want people to break their rule because they're evil and stuff.
The truth is that Facebook doesn't care one way or the other whether you cover or disable the LED, but making the rule that you can't covers their asses.
Re: But they're not peril-sensitive! (Score:3)
Then you can sue them for assault, send them to jail and get compensation.
Betting pool, anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
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A derogatory name for users needs to be made so beatings sound more justified. We had "glasshole" for google glass wearers, what are some good face punchable nicknames for users of these things?
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Cunts
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Beat me to it. The rest of them can argue all they want, that's what I'll be calling them.
Re: Betting pool, anyone? (Score:2)
raytards but I don't know, seems a bit too edgy. might be easier to just come up with a verb -- getting facebanned. It's like a double or triple entendres.
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Re:Betting pool, anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
A derogatory name for users needs to be made so beatings sound more justified. We had "glasshole" for google glass wearers, what are some good face punchable nicknames for users of these things?
I think we should stick with glasshole. Different names for people wearing a different vendors creepy stalker glasses is going to confuse the public.
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Not sure what to call the person, but the act of getting punched in the face for it should be "Ban Hammered".
Re: Betting pool, anyone? (Score:1)
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A derogatory name for users needs to be made so beatings sound more justified.
Indeed. Their first trick was convincing everyone that the Jews were subhuman. You're reading right out of his playbook.
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Wrong, Hitler was just affirming what the populace wanted to hear and what they already decided.
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No that is Righty logic trying to make Lefties seem like a violent group of people, so you Righty can justify being aggressive to the Lefties.
The Conservative Message is to Fear that "Violent Group" of Pacifist.
Re: Betting pool, anyone? (Score:2)
And by "Liberal Message" you mean factual truth? The vast majority of protests were not violent or destructive.
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Proud Boys and others were openly recruiting members to infiltrate the BLM and Antifa protests to cause violence right on their Facebook/Gab/Parler/etc. accounts. Three of them were caught in Las Vegas filling molotov cocktails that they were going to throw at police to see if they could get them to fire into the crowd. This is the sort of thing that you've never seen Left groups do, partly because it's antithetical to their morality and partly because Right wing protesters come armed with guns and clubs
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So, how long do you think it will be before a user gets punched in the face for recording someone who doesn't appreciate it? My guess is three days.
I can hardly wait until someone decides to take and post images of some "legitimate businessmen" while they are enjoying lunch in their favorite haunt.
Gonna be a most interesting afternoon for the glasshole.
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The difference is that it's generally quite obvious when someone is trying to record you with a cellphone, so people are generally not against phones in public, because they will notice if you record them.
I bet it would be a very different story if people had to hold their phones in front of them all the time, giving you no clue whether they're recording you or just standing there.
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The difference is that it's generally quite obvious when someone is trying to record you with a cellphone, so people are generally not against phones in public, because they will notice if you record them.
I bet it would be a very different story if people had to hold their phones in front of them all the time, giving you no clue whether they're recording you or just standing there.
I figure that anyone using these surreptitiously will need to be kind of staring at who they are recording, but it makes no difference.
People sometimes meet in places that are public, yet private at the same time. And when people are at a bar or restaurant. Privacy is kind of expected. People do business deals, people date and form relationships, and people line up romantic encounters and even cheat. All perfectly legal things that should probably not be recorded.
We went through a similar thing with t
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With the difference probably being that people generally still have some kind of restraint when it comes to breaking the brats. I kinda think that won't be the case with the glasses.
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With the difference probably being that people generally still have some kind of restraint when it comes to breaking the brats. I kinda think that won't be the case with the glasses.
I certainly hope so. The question is telling them to take their glasses of like an old school gentleman, or disabling the glasses/camera in one punch.
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That will probably depend entirely on whether they take them off before the glasses get smashed.
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That will probably depend entirely on whether they take them off before the glasses get smashed.
So many jerks - so few wood chippers... Oh, I'm going to hell now.
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I can hardly wait until someone decides to take and post images of some "legitimate businessmen" while they are enjoying lunch in their favorite haunt.
I assume you're talking about business lunch venues such as "The Pink Pussycat" gentleman's club? Yep, what could possibly go wrong?! Facebook has for some reason chosen to ignore the debacle known as "Google Glass". Apparently, Cuckerberg's oversized ego has led him to believe that his company can succeed in popularizing such an invasive product. But considering what Facebook has gotten away with so far, maybe this isn't far from the truth.
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I can hardly wait until someone decides to take and post images of some "legitimate businessmen" while they are enjoying lunch in their favorite haunt.
I assume you're talking about business lunch venues such as "The Pink Pussycat" gentleman's club? Yep, what could possibly go wrong?!
That would be one place. Another might be a group of "made men" having a sitdown at their favorite little Italian restaurant.
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And that person will be invited to see the inside of a courtroom, courtesy of the video evidence of that person assaulting a victim.
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So, how long do you think it will be before a user gets punched in the face for recording someone who doesn't appreciate it? My guess is three days.
Do people regularly punch each other? I mean my phone has 5 cameras on it and random people end up in my recordings all the time. Is this punching epidemic so severe in the USA? Can we recommend therapy to those who feel the need to randomly punch people?
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In spite of all the talk I don't think there were actually any cases of Google Glass wearers getting beat up for wearing them, although a few had their glasses snatched and destroyed.
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It's always legal to record when your recorder is in plain view. There could be an interesting discussion about whether the glasses in completely plain view passes. If the glasses become common, and everyone knows what they are, then the fact they are in plain view could make the recordings completely legal, on the assumption that typical people should know what they are.
Luxottica? (Score:5, Informative)
You mean the company which has a 80% monopoly on eyeglasses and sunglasses? The one which has even their "high end" glasses made in China?
Who would have guessed that a company which models its activities on the Chinese government would have its glasses made in China?
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Luxotica doesn't make real high-end sunglasses, although they do charge moderately high-end prices. Most of their brands are cheap plastic crap, and the ones that aren't plastic are still shit. For example they bought Gargoyles (it's owned by their sub-brand costa del mar) and put shittier hinges on them while raising prices. So it's not clear what this thread actually has to do with the topic at hand.
Cybermen (Score:4, Funny)
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My opinion is that they send whatever you are looking at back to the Facebook Mothership so they can sell the information to advertisers who will then send targeted ads to any electronic billboards and other devices in your field of view. This of course creates a loop in advertising spacetime and you will disappear into a cloud of Terminal Informational Transcendence and lose the will to live, i.e. you go TiTs Up. Or, realizing how small your world has become, you will take them off and experience the real
Re: Cybermen (Score:3)
Do you understand the point of augmented reality. It's so billboards become a thing of the past. When the user can have ad space beamed into their perspective, it's totally going to fuck most people up way before this digital transcendency point you mention.
You will be driving down the road when a billboard pops up for the latest cyberpunk but since you have turned on adult mode, it's a bunch of bouncy titties with bullets flying in a 3-d perspective. So it's not that off putting yet, you only look to the r
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What has Augmented Reality got to do with these camera-phone-music glasses?
From the linked article:
"The glasses notably do not have in-lens displays that will allow users to see digital augmented reality content like competitor Snap’s latest Spectacles prototype."
So... uh, what??
Did you bother to read anything before blurting out a random unrelated comment?
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The glasses start at $299 and... (Score:2)
selling not only your soul to the devil (Facebook) as all of that data now feeds to them, but also the souls of your friends, family and even strangers that you capture with these devices and they use facial identity to construct the networks of people you see and interact with but don't mark as your friends...
Why aren't the lemmings aware of how evil FB actually is?
I'm betting... (Score:2)
...they come with Smartrak® (or something similar) so you're never out of touch with Facebook and it can conveniently serve up those juicy personalized ads even when you're not looking.
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...they come with Smartrak® (or something similar) so you're never out of touch with Facebook and it can conveniently serve up those juicy personalized ads even when you're not looking.
Imagine Zuckerborgs tongue so far up ones ass it can clean your eyeballs from behind.
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That's probably the upgrade. Required for security reasons.
The glasses will start at $299 ... (Score:4, Interesting)
I have a life-long "Murphy's Law" kind of observation about sunglasses:
Expensive sunglasses get lost or broken very easily and/or quickly, but cheap ones stay and last *forever*.
Here's an anecdote. About 34 years ago a friend and I were sailing a small 12' (or so) catamaran off Key West, FL when we hit some rough winds and capsized it. He was wearing a brand new pair of expensive sunglasses with adjustable-length temples and I was wearing a super cheap (like $5) pair. When the cat tipped over we both had to jump/dive to get clear. After righting the thing, I noticed that his sunglasses were gone. The temple tips were still over his ears, attached to the croakies, but the glasses had slipped off. My sunglasses were still on and fine. We looked around for his but they were (quite obviously) *gone*.
I *still* have those cheap-ass sunglasses around here somewhere.
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We were walking on the beach and a pair of expensive Oakley sunglasses in their case washed up. Took them home and used them for about six months. Went out to my car one morning and the window was smashed, but I couldn't figure out why since even the change was still in the ashtray. A couple of days later I realized that I had left the sunglasses on the car seat and they were gone.
Most expensive free sunglasses I ever had.
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To be fair, I once lost three pairs of $5 sunglasses in a single day. I was hang gliding and a friend who came along to watch kept being helpful, picking up my helmet and accidentally dumping out the glasses I'd tossed into it.
Still, I always get the cheap ones. They work just as well and losing or destroying a $10 pair a couple times a year is way better than a $300 pair.
start with all plastic (Score:1)
basically, plastic degrades too fast and is too expensive to recycle.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11... [npr.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Plastic isn't recyclable
Some plastic isn't recyclable, most plastic isn't recyclable into the same grade that it was before, but saying plastic isn't recyclable is inaccurate.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
it's less than 9 minutes, if you c
Hope their marketing is better than google glass (Score:2)
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Why are you hoping for that? Do you see some desirable feature about these glasses that I'm missing?
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That *is* a good case, but I can't map it onto anything I've done in the last several years. I don't think it would work well for locating program bugs...or at least not as well as something like git.
Not bad. (Score:2)
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"Alex Himel, VP of AR at Facebook Reality Labs, informed me over a Zoom chat that taping over the LED light was a violation of the terms of service of the glasses, which prohibit tampering with the device. "
So I guess if you do that then Zuckerberg will come to your house and take your glasses away.
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According to one article, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/a... [buzzfeednews.com]
"Alex Himel, VP of AR at Facebook Reality Labs, informed me over a Zoom chat that taping over the LED light was a violation of the terms of service of the glasses, which prohibit tampering with the device. "
So I guess if you do that then Zuckerberg will come to your house and take your glasses away.
yes, because users of technology always adhere to the terms of service. Hell, how many of them even read the terms of service?
I hope they are not made out of glass (Score:2)
For the wearers sake
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I hope they are.
For entertainment's sake.
Recording light? (Score:2)
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So you didn't even bother to RTFS?
An onboard white LED will glow to indicate to the people around the wearer that a video is being recorded.
**sigh**
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Because they're not Apple, who would make it black.
Glasshole, take two (Score:1)
Don't come near me wearing those things if you value them and your nose.
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With that UID you're probably around 60 years old, and you're threatening to beat up the 20-somethings that are going to be buying these? Good luck with that.
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What dressings are available with that word salad?
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I don't punch people. Others do that for me.
um (Score:2)
"Facebook" and "smart" don't go together in a sentence.
Well, that explains... (Score:2)
...why I was always getting ray ban spam in my facebook feed...
No AR? (Score:2)
So... it's just a $300 version of cheap "hidden camera" glasses people use to film shitty porn?
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Yeah. So now when you watch POV porn you can see a dude wearing shades reflected in her eyes instead of some geek with a Go Pro strapped to his forehead.
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Exactly
See, this is everything that Facebook needs (more video and camera stills upload to its site to ingest), and but nothing for the user (no AR, VR, etc). Oh, no, sorry, they stuck some music into it... because apparently earbuds are too much to listen to music on.
Anybody who buys these are being utterly hoodwinked... and they're even paying Facebook for the privilege!
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Right, except the software to support them will be designed to send the data easily to facebook. I know someone who's working on the project and he was gushing about how facebook is taking steps to protect your data, but he glossed over how they're taking steps to get you to upload your data, at which point it becomes theirs.
Frankly after the original facebook app downloaded and then deleted everyone's contacts, anyone who fucks around with any facebook software running on their machine is a dumbshit. It's
Style (Score:2)
The glasses kind of look nerdy, but then I remember that stuff like what this guy is wearing:
https://mobile.twitter.com/Blo... [twitter.com]
is now considered "cool" and the glasses don't seem to look so nerdy anymore.
(sorry 'bout the Twitshit link)
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They are Ray-ban Wayfarers... considered one of the most classic designs of all time.
Glasshole (Score:2)
>"An onboard white LED will glow to indicate to the people around the wearer that a video is being recorded."
Like you can see that in daylight.
Like that does anything for photos.
"glasshole"
Data collection wet dream (Score:2)
All the faces and locations instantly to FB database, what could could go wrong!
Re:Blowhards (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry, nope.
In my country, I have the "right to the image", in other words, if you take a picture of me and publish it in any way, which essentially is already the case if that picture somehow ends up with Facebook (which it invariably will), you either have my permission to do so or you are in for a really expensive law suit.
The only exception would be if I'm some kind of celebrity or other "person of public interest". But I'm not that important.
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So if you're walking across the Plaza de la Puerta del Sol and are in the background when I take a picture of my wife I need to get your approval before I can put it on my Christmas cards? Sorry, but you're so full of crap that your eyes have turned brown.
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No, that's one of the exceptions. If you can credibly claim that the person is not the motive of the picture (e.g. when taking a picture of a building or of a full arena of people during a sports event), this rule does not apply. The same is true if it's a person of public interest (e.g. a celebrity), who also are not protected by this privacy law.
If the person is filling the picture, even if in front of a cathedral, it does. There are some grey areas, you can read it up here [wikipedia.org] in French or if you prefer here [wikipedia.org]
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I've got a satellite image of you that I'm looking at right now. Sue me.
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I'm not in the mood of repeating myself [slashdot.org].
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Does your country not have the concept of street photography? I think you're massively simplifying the rights photographers have.
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and for you [slashdot.org].
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Why the hell would I want to go to the US?
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I so wish I had mod points :)
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So you go around punching random security guards as you walk in front of stores because you're on their cameras? Unless you're Chuck Norris I'm going to call BULLSHIT.
And if you are Chuck Norris, nice to meet you!
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I *think* you want the files from the people who are looking at her. Otherwise... even on Slashdot you're weird.