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Facebook Will Release Its First AR Glasses in 2021 (venturebeat.com) 18

During Facebook Connect -- the replacement for the AR/VR event previously known as Oculus Connect -- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said today that the company is planning to release its first pair of augmented reality glasses in 2021. From a report: While the company's Oculus unit has become a leading provider of VR headsets, Facebook has touted AR as the next major frontier for computing, and this release date could spread the next-generation technology to the masses earlier than expected. Zuckerberg confirmed that it has been working with Ray-Ban, owned by fashion eyewear company Luxottica, to create the product, and suggested that it will be cosmetically appealing. The companies haven't yet revealed imagery of the glasses, but it's important to note that there are at least two stages to Facebook's plans -- an initial AR wearable with basic functionality, then a future fully functional device with more features. Facebook confirmed its multiple prototype strategy last year.
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Facebook Will Release Its First AR Glasses in 2021

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  • Likely a NO GO!! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cayenne8 ( 626475 ) on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @01:10PM (#60511870) Homepage Journal
    I'm guessing Facebook will require a FB account for any of their AR products.

    No thanks.

    Next?

    • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Also the right to flash advertising at you where ever you go, until they kill enough people that a class action law suit works, likely more than a hundred and less than a thousands. Flash with an advert at the wrong time, they stumble or trip and die, stairs, into a moving vehicle etc.

      They are a truly awful corporation and this stuff needs to be regulated before they kill a bunch of people, AND THEY WILL. Greed and power are their only motivations and they will laugh at the people they kill.

    • But you already have one, even if you don't know it.
  • by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @01:35PM (#60511960)
    I'd pay a pretty penny to wear a pair of Apple glasses. Facebook would have to PAY ME to wear theirs.
    • You could always buy two Apple Watch Series 6 and mount them on a regular eyeglasses frame.

      It's fun to see the technological progress.
      Building computers enabled companies to create laptops.
      Building laptops enabled companies to create tablets*.
      Building laptops enabled companies to create smartphones*.
      Building smartphones enabled companies to create smartwatches.
      Building smartwatches is enabling companies to create smartglasses.
      Neuralink: all you brains are belong to us.

      * yeah I know it kind of happened in re

  • by BeerFartMoron ( 624900 ) on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @01:45PM (#60511988)
    I heard that when you wear your Facebook AR Glasses to watch Mark Zuckerberg testify before Congress that his skin appears real and his image is "surprising lifelike".
  • Fantastic! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @02:53PM (#60512252)

    I can't wait to never buy one!

  • 1. You are a developer. You say that you estimate that doing AR glasses takes about a year, fully understanding that it is a rough estimate and it can be much longer if there are trouble.
    2. Boss/Marketing will launch a marketing campaign, where release date is written in stone.
    3. Now you have a deadline.
    4. You try to keep the deadline, but you encounter problems. As deadline can't be changed, more developers at this point won't help, so you have to sacrifice the quality to keep the deadline, cutting corners

  • ... to strap Facebook to my actual face!
  • by Miamicanes ( 730264 ) on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @05:17PM (#60512726)

    If anyone from Oculus reads this... please, please, PLEASE either allow independent labs to buy the semi-finished blank pucks to do their own freeform rear-surfacing (with enough additional base curve options to allow the lab to surface the lenses with Shaw Lens' designs), or have Essilor license Shaw's IP directly and offer it as an option for people who want it.

    What's so special about Shaw? NO ADAPTATION TRAUMA.

    For people with astigmatism, getting new glasses has historically sucked. Even when the new glasses technically had the same prescription strength as the old ones, they'd STILL warp and distort your world badly enough to make you go through days or weeks of vertigo, headaches, and general dysfunctional misery. The old ones warped and distorted the world too, but the new ones warped and distorted it DIFFERENTLY.

    Shaw lenses were designed by an optometrist with a background in both engineering and programming. About 15 years ago, he realized that the technology finally existed to manufacture lenses with curves that were optimized to fix most of what has historically been wrong with lenses used to correct astigmatism. He prototyped lenses, confirmed that they were awesome, then set out to get big companies like Essilor and Zeiss to use it. They weren't interested, because all THEY cared about was making the lenses cheaper/simpler, thinner, and/or flatter. Only geeks care about things like optical integrity and comfort.

    So, Peter Shaw went and started his own company to make the lenses -- https://shawlens.com/ [shawlens.com]

    What makes Shaw lenses so great? Reduced (or eliminated) adaptation-misery, among other things. I recently got new glasses with Shaw lenses. Both sphere strengths changed, and my eyes ended up an additional 0.25D apart. My cylinder strength doubled, from -0.5 to -1.0. My axes both changed by a few degrees (historically, they were rounded to the nearest multiple of 5 degrees... now, they're precise and spot-on).

    With NORMAL lenses, that kind of a change would have been CRIPPLING, and left me with headaches and vertigo for days or weeks. With Shaw lenses, they were just an instant, immediate total improvement in every way. No pain, all gain. It was the first time in my life I've ever put on new glasses, and immediately felt like they were better than my old ones in every way.

    I'm a believer. I'll never willingly wear glasses without Shaw's enhancements again, because by comparison, all other lens designs are just intolerable. Shaw lenses have all the benefits of other best-of-breed freeform lenses (wide sweet spot with edge-to-edge clarity, no barrel/pincushion distortion, and VASTLY reduced cylinder-induced warping), but the lack of any need to "adapt" to them has sold me on them forever.

    Note that if you go to Shaw's website, you'll immediately be confronted with a term you've almost certainly never heard before: aniseikonia. If you Google it, you might get the impression that it's only a "problem" when it's "severe". The fact is, optometrists historically held that belief because prior to Shaw lenses, there wasn't any good or easy way to FIX small, non-crippling amounts of aniseikonia... so they all just pretended it wasn't a problem at all, and gaslighted their patients into thinking the problem was with THEM, not with their GLASSES.

    The fact is, nearly EVERYONE who wears glasses that have different left/right strengths will find Shaw-type lenses to be more comfortable. And LITERALLY everyone with astigmatism (whose prescriptions have values for "cylinder" and "axis") will find them to be more comfortable, because "dynamic aniseikonia" is basically a fancy way of saying "the horrific dynamic warping and distortion you seen everywhere when looking through new glasses and moving your eyes around".

    Anyway, regardless of what Oculus does, I enthusiastically recommend Shaw lenses to anyone with astigmatism, EVEN IF it's not "severe". The fact is, the optical aberrations from mild and moderate prescriptions are PRECISELY the ones Shaw lenses can mostly eliminate. My own prescription isn't "severe", and I was still BLOWN AWAY by the lack of new-glasses-adaptation-trauma with them.

  • fb and the wearer

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