Ray-Ban® Stories: Prelude to the future (Part 1)

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) seem to be all the rage these days - if not in the real world then at least in halls of Twitter populated by futurists happy to talk about a metaverse that doesn’t quite exist yet.

The idea of experiencing either the real world or an imagined world through goggles strapped to your face isn’t that new at all. Even before science fiction writers predicted the technology’s eventual existence, Europeans during the Renaissance invented various contraptions that allowed a person to peer into a small hole and see a fantasy world.

In the 1930’s, a company named Sawyer’s introduced the View-Master to the public. Undoubtedly all of us have played around with one of these slideshow glasses - in some ways an early expression of the desire to peer into other realms from the comfort of home.

There were some impressive developments in this space made by places like NASA and JPL in the following decades, but any child of the 90’s knows the real breakthrough product was Nintendo’s Virtual Boy! Strapped to the end caps of the best toy stores and department stores, the red-lined composed worlds generated within the goggles.

OK, so Virtual Boy never took off the way 10 year old me thought it would. But to its credit, no other product really has either.

Google released Glass in 2013 to early adopters and developers, and we really haven’t heard much more about it since then. Facebook bought a former kickstarter company called Oculus and has consistently been releasing new hardware in the intervening years. Microsoft has their version, the HoloLens which unsurprisingly is aimed at businesses. Apple has been rumored for years to be developing their own AR product deep in the design labs of Cupertino.

Of all these hardware companies, Facebook seems to clearly be the leader so far. But what I am most impressed and intrigued by is not the Oculus headset used by teenage gamers or the whacky concept devices shown during the Facebook/Meta renaming keynote, but rather what might have slipped by as another weird pair of sunglasses.

I am talking about the Ray-Ban Stories - a collaboration between Facebook, errr Meta, and the maker of the iconic Wayfarer shades. Yup, I’m talking about smart sunglasses. And I think they might be a product category that will change our lives… for the better.