Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses

Why must sunglasses also be a camera? Or Alexa?

It's not for lack of knowing the answer. Because you're already taking your sunglasses with you everywhere, anyway. Because there's no way you're carrying around another thing. Because it's the most convenient way of securing a more intimate relationship with customers.

I'm with the others: I thought the future would be more exciting than this.

1. Outward appearance. People don't like wearing glasses if they don't have to.

2. Tech issues: e.g. short battery life, weight, need for charging, UX.

3. Compelling features that make them worthwhile to use. This point is harder to explain, but a device needs to provide features to the wearer as they wear them and not indirect benefits. These features need to be particular to the device's unique position on the face. It needs to solve the question: what can a device on the face do, that one in the hand can't.

4. Recording content must be a secondary feature of such devices. We let smartphones into private places, such as change rooms, because they provide an enormous set of features, and only bad actors would use the recording features in an indecent way. If the main purpose of smart eyewear is to record others, then they'll not only be banned from such locations, but those around the wearer will become unnerved by them. People need privacy and downtime.

I feel meta's smart glasses partly answer point 1, but fail at the rest. They are a lop sided product in their efforts: the main feature is to produce recordings, this means there's no compelling reason to always take them out and their primary purpose is bested by the smartphone they need to be paired with. The smartphone has better cameras, better battery life, the ability to easily review and retake photos, and doesn't need to be worn on the face.

I can't understate how wearable tech needs to deliver features to the user as they're wearing them, and in a way that only that position on the body enables. Meta's product here doesn't really offer anything that they can't get in a better form from other products, products that the market already owns:

Recording content: The phone is infinitely better.

Shortcuts/listening to music: BT headphones/Airpods are simpler, have longer battery, more private and provide all of the same features such as handling calls, volume and playback control.

With al of these obvious shortcomings, the only rationale I can imagine is that Meta are just doing their fast-follow strategy. They couldn't acquire Snap, so they copied Snap's stories and now these are a copy of Snap Spectacles.