A few months after Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the second generation of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses At the company’s Meta Connect 2023 event in September, the glasses are finally getting AI features like image recognition and text translation, which promise to make them more than just a wearable camera .
Features like these played an important role in the original launch of 2021’s Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses. This device’s five-megapixel cameras paired with built-in microphones could be used to take photos or record videos at any time. But as practical as the original Ray-Ban Stories were, they were far from clever.
Although Meta is probably best known today for betting on the “metaverse” with virtual reality and augmented reality headsets like the Meta Quest 3, these devices aren’t really something users can wear all day. THE Ray-Ban Meta second generation smart glasses are.
Currently only available to a small number of users in the United States who opt for a “Early Access Program“, users of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses can now call on Meta AI to assist them with various tasks. recent post on Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated the glasses’ new capabilities by asking Meta AI to recommend pants to pair with a striped shirt, as well as asking the AI to translate the text of a foreign language meme into English. The only contribution he had to make, aside from his prompts, was simply pointing the glasses at the shirt and the meme.
In an update of a December 6 blog post on Meta’s AI initiativesthe company also suggests using the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses to suggest captions on a photo, or simply to identify an object in hand. CNET’s Scott Stein recently demonstrated of the new feature at Meta’s New York offices, where smart glasses were used to recommend which of a small selection of tea bags would likely be caffeine-free.
Unlike smart glasses worn by fictional movie characters such as Tony Stark, which constantly scan their wearer’s surroundings, the added intelligence of Ray-Ban Meta glasses is only activated when the user says “hey, Meta.” The glasses also must first take a photo of an object or panel before Meta AI can process it and provide an audible response. The system isn’t JARVIS (Stark’s intelligent assistant) yet, but the Ray-Ban Meta glasses finally seem to live up to their intelligent claims.
