by Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel
WE GOT TWO Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses and I believe they are the best piece of tech I've purchased this year. Their design, audio performance, camera quality, and charging case deliver value for the €495 I spent to get the two sets of glasses. And I believe I will open new opportunities to spam friends with live streams before the end of the spring semester 2024.
I discovered a few things during the first two days of ownership.
TL;DR This is the time for you to consider wearing connected eyeglasses as you walk, run, and drive.
It looks like there will be opportunities to converse with Meta AI soon. I did a factory reset with the glasses and saw more than 10 DALL-E libraries the had to be deleted in the process of resetting the glasses from one phone to another. Here are a few other first impressions.
- Using the glasses to record video and then download more than a dozen video clips to my phone used 30% of my phone's battery. That's about the amount of battery power drained from the glasses themselves.
- These are Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, not Ray-Ban Stories. Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses. They are truly a worthy second-generation model and much better than the original.
- I bought Wayfarer and Headliners The glasses come in many more styles with fashion-aware finishing.
- I used them on the street in the rain, proving their water-resistance. I wouldn't recommend showering with them.
- The audio is louder than you would expect and at max volume your tracks are audible to those around you.
- The well-stabilised camera records only in portrait BUT it also records when off your nose so that means I could record in landscape format. This would mean holding the glasses vertically and away from my face, then post-producing for landscape viewing. I want to see if Magisto AI will automatically produce the landscape viewing option for me in the cloud.
- The Meta View Android app is top class.
- The built-in Meta AI voice assistant lets me query my phone book, answer text messages from WhatsApp, and knows simple things like the time.
- If I had the money, I would buy the next generation Smart Glasses with Transition Lenses. I'm trying to figure out if my Irish health benefits pay to fit transition prescription lenses in the Ray-Ban Smart Glasses that I bought.
If you've questions about my journey with Smart Glasses, ping me on Threads.
[Bernie Goldbach teaches digital transformation on the Clonmel Digital Campus.]
