Opinion article by Arnau Sanz, partner and director of New Business at IMAGINA, for Economy3.
I have passed a week of my life wearing Ray-Ban Stories daily, the new glasses Facebook that promised to revolutionize the way we recorded, took photos and contemplated, in short, reality in the first person.
Facebook has been engaged for some time on a strategy to increasingly decouple the brand from the social network it was originally. To do this, among other services, the company seems committed to creating hardware.
They already did it with a smartphone, with cameras, with cases and, more recently, with smart speakers. In September they presented glasses, with Ray-Ban frames, right in the middle of the debate about privacy and in the middle of a brand crisis never experienced before in that company.
Just a few months later, Facebook is no longer Facebook, but Meta, and they are certainly no longer the startup that everyone was talking about, but rather a good example of how not to manage fame, money and success.
The glasses would be spectacular if they had been presented in 2010, with a quality similar to an iPhone 6 and with a good stabilizer. Even more so if they were planned as an initial version, even a prototype, of a product of the future, as was the case with the first smart watches, which first did little and are now just another gadget.
As a summary: the glasses record video, take photos, have a speaker and microphone. Without a doubt, private detectives have been using similar things for years. But they are not and do not offer anything else.
In our agency the nickname of ‘toy’, because it doesn’t give any more and it is what they are: a toy. They are normal glasses, they even go unnoticed as a technological gadget, but they do not fulfill any need nor do they replace any of the actions we now do with a smartphone.
The main obstacle you face is neither weight nor aesthetic, but the limits that have been placed with privacy. Created to be able to record only 30 seconds in a row, this limit makes their professional use quite difficult. There is a mobile application to save and manage content, somewhat slow via Bluetooth.
At Imagina we have been pioneers in using them to create content for companies. As a photo and video camera, it is ideal for following the communication process and making it closer, fun and cheeky. And in that sense, it may be ideal for some young brands. Also to complement online sales processes, such as guided tours of a house, generating content on social networks such as TikTok, collaborating with influencers at points of sale, creating content involving workers or experimenting with first-person points of view, etc. But I insist: they don’t give much more of themselves or do anything that a smartphone doesn’t do.
However, what has surprised me most has not been the lack of usefulness of the product, but rather its advertising. It has not reappeared on official channels, it is not sold in more than three countries after a few months, there are few reviews, and practically no engagement.
Has Facebook, now Meta, forgotten about them? I don’t think so. I simply think they are not interesting. Any improvement would mean crossing the border of privacy and the eternal debate of limits, which neither they nor anyone else has resolved.
Facebook, like any technology company, would be able to create glasses 100 times better, but they don’t dare. For now, they are going to focus on augmented reality, because in real life it seems that no one pays much attention to them anymore.
