Facebook’s ‘smart glasses’ bring us closer to wearable AR in 2021

Beyond this, demos and concept videos of AR wearables typically show 3D animations overlaying city streets with things like restaurant offers, arrows pointing out directions, and live safety warnings for pedestrians. What Facebook is tinkering with for 2021, however, isn’t that.

Developed in partnership with the creators of Ray-Ban, Luxottica, we know little today apart from the fact that Facebook’s upcoming smart glasses will not offer up a direct blend of the digital and physical world synonymous with AR. Aesthetically, the wearable certainly looks sharp and surprisingly unassuming, but in terms of integrated features hardware chief Andrew Bosworth has kept his shtum thus far.

‘These are certainly connected glasses, they are certainly providing a lot of functionality, [but] we’re being quite coy about which functionality precisely we are providing,’ Bosworth revealed an in interview with Bloomberg. ‘We’re excited about it but we don’t want to over-hype it. We’re not even calling it augmented reality, we’re just calling it smart glasses,’ he added.

Facebook says smart glasses are coming "sooner than later", but tempers expectations for AR functionalities for the device, which it plans to make in partnership with Ran-Ban maker Luxottica.https://t.co/gzF494SHTf
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— AWE (@ARealityEvent) January 9, 2021

Further comments repeatedly throw up key phrases like ‘convenience’ and ‘enhancing human presence’, giving strong hints as to the this wearable’s purpose for the coming year.

Like Snapchat’s Spectacles – which are essentially fashionable sunglasses that double as a hands free digital camera – it appears Facebook is focused on easier camera capabilities rather than overlaying digital assets over our normal eyesight, at least for now.

So there we have it, in the grand scheme of AR wearables you could say this is a bit of a dampener, though Facebook did suggest in 2017 that full AR integration likely wouldn’t be fully realised (or widely available) until around 2025. Truthfully, a full rollout of any form of smart glasses is big news regardless, and full integration could well come a few years down the line.

In the short term, it’s looking increasingly likely that we won’t be strolling out of lockdown in 2021 donning swanky AR glasses then, though we are expecting updates on Apple’s version (Apple Glass) any day now.

On that front, you can bet the relentless Apple machine is determined to zero in on the next gen of smart tech as it did with smartphones. Stay tuned.