Facebook Glasses

The first thing you'll notice about Facebook’s new camera glasses is that they are not called Facebook Glasses — they are called Ray-Ban Stories. This is because they are made in partnership with Ray-Ban (a cool company that no one hates), and Facebook has had a rough couple of years in the public eye. And “Stories” because, you know, Instagram stories and Facebook stories and also Snapchat "story," lol.

If the idea of camera sunglasses seems familiar, perhaps that’s because it sounds like Snapchat Spectacles, which launched in 2016. In what I can only imagine is a loving tribute, Facebook has named its camera sunglasses “Stories” after the other signature product that Facebook/Instagram lifted from Snapchat.

From that app, called View, you can see all the videos and images, and from there, you can do whatever you want with them — download to your phone’s camera roll, upload to Facebook, and send over text or anywhere else through your phone’s standard image-sharing options

A few brief notes on how the glasses actually work: The photos and videos actually look really good considering they’re taken from, well, glasses. They have a 5-megapixel camera, along with some onboard processing wizardry that does a lot to sharpen and clean up the images. In my experience, the glasses shot decent images in lower light, and image stabilization was solid enough to prevent video from looking too shaky. Videos only last 30 seconds, but there are some basic tools in the View app to string multiple videos together into montages.

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