Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses Review: Actually Good?

hey everybody it's Norm from tested and today I'm going to be reviewing And discussing in depth my experience with a new pair of smart classes these are the Rayban meta smart glasses announced last year at the connect conference alongside the quest 3 released a short while later and that I've been using um as my everyday glasses for the past month uh these SE generation smart glasses from meta and their partnership with Rayban primarily are sold as sunglasses they're two frame styles this time around addition to the the Wayfair style that I'm wearing right now but for me these this Wayfair design is close enough to the you know the warie Parker glasses I've been wearing forever that with the prescription lens option that I chose for this as opposed to having a tinted option I'm able to actually wear them every day and surprisingly no one has noticed I've actually worn this in tested videos for the past month month no one's made a single comment about them co-workers friends family no one has actually noticed that my glasses are different let alone different because they have c a camera system built into them and that speaks to uh this generation of glass's abilities to miniaturize that camera technology make the hardware compact enough that they can actually pass off as normal sunglasses or in this case normal prescription classes is For Better or Worse there of course pros and cons that come to that but it's a design decision that they've made and they're pushing toward as they want to Minze all this technology to get whether it's Aven reality glasses or smart glasses or technology in glasses to be passible in public to overcome the hurdles that first generation very early smart classes like Google Glass or you know the rayan or the Snapchat spectacles had so we'll be discussing uh the tech that's in here from the camera systems the audio systems to the AI assistant uh new features such as the multimodal input that I'm a part of the beta in so that I can tap into meta's AI assistant with imagery not just voice and some of the surprises that I've come across while using this as well as some disappointments I'm actually going to take these off right now to swap into my previous classes so we can discuss the smart glasses more in depth so again let's start off with the camera system because when you're talking about looking at smart classes most people think the thing that makes them unique is having a camera the ability to be able to take a picture shoot a video in this case even live stream to Instagram without having to wear GoPro or take your smartphone out of your pocket U and get that firsters uh perspective it was that selling pitch you know when the Google Glasses first came out although it was a decade ago now and here the camera system is down to one camera from the two that were in the first Rayband stories it's on the left here so this very small wide angle 13 mm equivalent Ultra wide angle camera it's even wider than that Ultra wide angle 14 mm equivalent lens that's in you know the the iPhones uh these days um on the other side though because this is still a symetrical design is a notification light so if I take a picture and there's a button here on the top right I'll press the shutter button and you see the light actually then turns uh White on the right side to let someone uh know that you're taking a picture of them and as the wear I also hear a little bit of a shudder sound I'm capturing video the light turns on as well so if I press the button then it's shooting video and you can see there's now a light here the light isn't a ring it's just a a dot in the center and if I'm moving around in you know in a indoor environment it very readable very noticeable that the light is on in an outdoor environment not so much I've been in public shooting video taking pictures and not one time had someone come up to me and notice again that I'm wearing smart glasses or notice that the that notification that indication light is actually on now there are some guard rails so that you can't actually cover that up so you can't be like in the movie theater and take a picture of the movie screen um because if you try to cover up this indicator light uh there's actually a light sensor around it and from what understand it tries to match the exposure of what that light sensor can detect with the exposure that the camera itself has detected and if those don't match up then it won't take a picture it prevents you from capturing photos or video If You obscure that indicator light and I wouldn't want to obscure it in any case um it is interesting that it's not an RGB light it's just a white light I don't think I think they they made a conscious decision not to let people change that color or make it red your classic blinking red as an indicator Universal indicator for recording video so take that as it is in terms of capturing photos and video the quality though was something I still found a little lacking it is an improved camera system over that first generation we're talking about a 12 megapixel image so roughly 3,000 by 4,000 pixels in portrait orientation so we're not going to get into a whole debate about portrait versus landscape these are glasses where the intent is to capture imagery for social media for Instagram for Facebook you know forx Twitter whatever and so portrait is what they're doing but the actual image quality that I found was a little bit lacking uh the sensor has to be small by Design the it's Ultra wide in term of its angle but even with a f2.2 aperture which is the same aperture size as what's in the ultrawide angle the lens on the ultra camera of the iPhone um I found that it still didn't receive enough light or at least the system didn't calibrate itself uh to prevent blurry images you know the standard use case for this I have two kids they're running around the house we also have a dog as well and trying to capture photos of kids dogs moving subjects in indoor environments where just normal lighting like this I would find that the system the camera system one would refuse to increase the shutter speed to a fast enough shutter to have sharper images um and resorted to you know um um the lower uh lower ISO so I would prefer that there was some type of shutter priority system where I could say you know always keep that shutter at at bare minimum one 200th of a second uh even if it's indoors and bump up that ISO I don't need to have you know 300 ISO indoors if it's going to give me a unusable BL image bump up the iso to a th000 you know double that ISO but let me double the shutter speed as well uh Outdoors though the imagery is much better so in outdoor environments you have the the shutter going up to 1 3,000 of a second you know anything above that 1400 1500 things even moving objects are look pretty clear now it is fix aperture and it also is fix focus and so there's no autofocus here you're not half depressing the shutter doing anything it what you get in front of you you know the sensor is pretty limited and so a lot of the nearfield things I want to take pictures of you know literally holding a dog up to my face as our puppy is licking us that image actually ends up being blurry not because of necessarily the shutter speed or how much light is in the room but because of the plane of focus the minimum Focus distance of this lens is kind of a you know a hands foot away not up to your face a little bit disappointing uh there there are some optimal situations where you know the imagery seems okay taking pictures of landmarks of of Vistas you know kids walking around in in outdoor environments the best practice use case for this is to think about environments where you would actually need sunglasses that's the places where the camera actually operates best bright daylight outdoor environments indoor the camera for photos not so great now video it's a little bit of a story and the video I was able to capture indoors both indoors and Outdoors I found much more enjoyable to consume I never want to really share any of the photos I took with this on social media they feel like they're good enough quality photos video though wonderful uh image quality and even in indoor environments outdoor environments fast moving subjects there is a uh limit on the recording time you can only record up to 1 minute a video so you can de press that shutter button here will'll start recording you hear an audible uh indicator um and the light will turn on and I found it really enjoyable to capture a video of you know chasing the kids around a playground pushing them on a swing and it's kind of surreal to go back and look at that video and notice that both my hands are in those shots it's not the typical perspective that you would get if you're holding a phone up and capturing similar to that video and you know one of these days the kids are so used to having cameras in their faces my kids actually hate it when I hold a phone up and try to you know get a portrait photo of them or capture some video they're pretty resistant to that and so they haven't caught on to the fact that when I'm wearing these glasses I'm capturing video they're acting pretty normally as I enjoying them and that video is pretty fun to to play back and share with my family I have noticed though that uh I've noticed some chop drop frames pretty regularly in that video so it's taxing on the processor that they have here which which is a reason that they've capped that recording time to about a minute and while there is some Digital Image St visualization here it does affect the final resolution of the video and so because um they do that automatically it's a inconsistent um pixel dimensions of that portrait video as well so from an imagery standpoint not so happy with the photos happier with the videos but the thing I've been happiest most with and most surprised with with the smart glasses is the audio there's a bunch of microphones in the front here to capture your voice as you may want to use the meta AI assistant uh to ask questions have it take a photo check on the battery status and there are two speakers in the arms here they're packed right in the back um that kind of Point toward your ear they don't use like bone connectivity to speakers they are kind of just floating speakers right in front of your ears and while they're not noise isolating or noise cancelling in a standard environment even at medium sound volume I found that listening to music listening to podcasts and listen and doing phone calls was one of the most enjoyable parts of the glasses experience typically I would have you know airpods or over the here ear headphones um walking around listening to music um but I really don't like having you know earbuds in my ears and I don't have airpods you know with transparencies I don't want necessarily be isolated from the world having these glosses being able to take a phone call or listen to a podcast while walking the dog and not be isolated from the world and it's not only is it extremely convenient but it's so much more comfortable I'm completely sold on the design of having speakers and a microphone in the glasses form factor the camera system I can take or leave it audio having good audio a good microphone system and everyone who I've done phone calls with or Zoom calls with using this has noticed decent audio quality uh that's been my favorite feature by far uh now in nois your environments if you're taking the bus if you're on an airplane these are not going to be uh loud enough for you to hear because they're kind of going to they're not isolating so they'll kind of blend in with the room noise you can kind of cup your ears around the stems here to to isolate the audio a little bit or you know put on ear m or something but at that point you're just wearing over the ear headphones anyway um but that convenience that not having to put on extra pair of headphones having something a pair of glasses that I'm going to be wearing anyway having the ability then to record or or to uh playback audio uh make phone calls has been I think gamechanging for my everyday use now I wish there were additional abilities as well like I wish I had the ability to uh record voice memos um create reminders for example and that leads to this meta ai's ability and kind of its limited ability now it uses meta's llama 2 large language model so their version of something like a Chachi BT um and it's it's okay it can understand most queries that I'm asking for and it kind of reads it back as you know chat GPT would but it does get a lot of factual information wrong or kind of often times speaks in very broad terms it's not very specific with the type of information that I may be asking about um so the hallucinations that that the the large langu module has and and the the the um not realtime information that it has uh is a limiting factor uh there is also now multimodal input and with the beta also some real-time information with a partnership that they've made with Bing so I've been testing that for the past couple weeks as well and that's improved the experience so I can ask about sports score that's about you know events and times and locations and things like that and it's done a pretty good job you as if you would be asking you know Siri or Alexa if you had your phone out uh the latency in terms of how long it takes to get the responses to you is a little slower I find than using a dedicated you know AI assistant on your phone because here it is sending that voice information through the the the app and then generating it back it's not localized there's no other than Bluetooth there's no dedicated radio system here there's no Cellular Connection at all everything is Tethered to the phone app um and that goes with the multimodal input as well so one of the new features that they tease and they've started rolling out in beta is the ability to say look and and you can ask the AI to you know give information about uh the image in front of you so it will take a picture it'll actually save that picture as if you took it normal normally and then give you information based on what you're asking for look and tell me about the object in front of me the object in front of you appears to be a gold colored skull sculpture it has detailed features such as eye sockets a nose cavity and an open mou with teeth okay look and tell me something interesting about the object in front of me the ofs to be a model or replica of a Tyrannosaurus skeleton impressive anden aetate it's an opinion and here well it's pretty novel and it works some extent the information that it can give you about the image in front of you is also limited right now it can't give information about locations can't give information about people that things it recognizes as people uh nor products and products is something I really wish it could give me information on I understand some of the use cases where you might be you know traveling or you might see something in a different language and you want it to you know interpret for you you know things that you might use Google lens for um and at that point I found it actually easier just to take the phone out of my pocket and open Google lens and have that information right away without the latency of the glasses uh to get that in an audio form having the information in a in a visual form on my phone still feels like the way to go right now so still much to improve um even with that multimodal input now when that AI assistant is turned on uh something I'm also found myself pretty concerned about was battery life and it's such a weird thing to say to have battery anxiety on on my glasses uh and you know to their credit they've designed these glasses to be you know as Compact and as close to a standard standard glasses form factor as they could you know if you have a standard pair of Rayband wairs that the sunglasses that they sell for $170 and put them side by side um which I did at the store it looks very similar u in the front you know the front almost exactly the same profile on the side it's going to be taller and thicker on the arm for all the electronics and batteries but that also means that they're limited by the the process of the the architecture of the the chip that they're using for here and battery life is something that feels like what you know first gen Apple watch where it's not even a full day of battery life um I got with regular use making uh phone calls listening to some music taking a few pictures not overdoing it about 4 hours of battery life on this meaning that I you have to charge it two to three times a day if you're wearing this as your everyday normal glasses if you're wearing the sunglasses sure you're going to not wear it for more than four hours of time most likely and that might work for you and here's where you're also limited by their Hardware design of making the charging system um the actual glasses case so this glasses case has this two contact points as well as a battery there's USB C port on the bottom and led indicator on the front pairing button on the back and the glasses fold up and they go right into the case and that's how you charge them uh charging doesn't take a long time it's like 20 minutes to get to you 80 90% if you're down to you know 20 30% uh battery life and so it wasn't inconvenient for me to keep a spare pair of glasses in the case itself swap them for about 15 20 minutes at a time uh two to three times a day uh but there is no you know charging port or data port on the glasses themselves there's no USB at all it is all either through these two contact points here on the bridge that go to the glasses and over this Bluetooth connection um and and Wi-Fi connection actually as well um paired to your phone and your local Wi-Fi and here's where Android and iOS users may also have a different experience uh they've actually uh talked about this at uh a little bit where because of the way iOS manages permissions and how much external third party Harbor how much access they have over you know your photo roll and over some of the apis uh it's a pretty clunky process on iOS to offload images and photos and video onto your phone you're using you're having to to load up the uh The metav View application you know you're going to um the photos area and then you actually have to click yes to pair over a Wi-Fi connection to the phone and then or to the glasses and then you're slowly offloading it none of this happens in the background the experience is better on Android you know speaking to how open that is and in the future it could be more limiting in terms of what meta and Rayban may want out of the functionality of these glasses you know things like tapping into your calendar generating reminders and and other types of notifications May that all those abilities may be limited by Apple and ios's uh ability to let these classes tap into those features a little bit disappointing there uh one thing going back to battery life that did make a huge difference and a huge recommendation that I would make for anyone looking in these glasses is to turn off the passive meta AI uh listening so you can in the settings you can actually say don't listen for that keyword the hey meta uh key phrase and so if it's not listening all the time for that to activate that meta AI uh then battery life is essentially double I got well over like 6 to 8 hours of battery life on normal use uh with that turned off and then to access the features there's actually a touch pad on the side you can just do a three-finger tap on the side to access the AI if you want to and that's also how you change volume as well you can swipe forward and backward on the arms here and then finally one additional word of caution for people looking into where maybe buying these and using them as your day-to-day glasses uh is that they're not water not very water resistance there's a ipx4 uh certification on here which means that it can survive splashes of water water you know from raindrops falling onto it but any direct stream of water uh Heavy Rain definitely submersion will make the glasses will break the glasses and I've seen some instances where people got water into these glasses and we're unable to get them to charge unable to offload photos um so anytime there's been heavy rain and there's been a few days of heavy rain in the city here lately I've put kept these in the case and swap back to wearing my normal glasses so it can't for 100% of the time uh be my normal everyday uh everyday glasses and at some point the battery in here will die after so many recharge Cycles um you know you won't be able to recharge this and they will yes still work as normal glosses uh but they won't be the smart glosses uh there also is a dedicated Hardware switch on the left arm here and you can actually turn off all the electronic functionality if you want to preserve that if you're running low it does give you an audio warning if you're getting to 15% battery life um let you know to recharge them or turn the glasses off but as a piece of technology I think the achievement here is twofold one miniaturization again the ability to to get these to pass off as regular glasses um that to a point where people don't notice that they are smart classes that is a milestone in smart classes technology and can hopefully it could only get better um and we don't go backwards as they try to pack more features and functionality into this product category um the other Revelation for me is uh while imagery photos and videos maybe the onp paper selling point for these it's really the audio that was the killer use case for me um I love like I said love listening to music podcasts making phone calls uh with these not having things plugged into my ear and and I think they did a great job with that this time around to point where I could see you know knockoff glasses and I'm sure there are plenty out there maybe over in shenzen where there are classes that just act as Bluetooth audio devices and I never consider those before but after using these I absolutely would consider that product category with cameras or without cameras uh so these are the Rayban meta smart glasses I'm going to continue using them I'm going to continue wearing them as my normal glasses like you know they they are not devisive this is not a pair of glasses or or a piece of technology that's just going to sit in a drawer and not being used because they have utility for me every day as prescription glasses and listening to music just a joy on these uh if you have questions if you have thoughts about smart glasses as a category um skepticism love to hear in the comments below I think it's a healthy discussion worth having today as wearables and glasses become a bigger and bigger part of our technology and uh and culture For Better or Worse um thank you so much for watching and I'm Norm from tested again I'll see you next time bye

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 220,407

Keywords: tested, smart glasses, meta smart glasses, ray ban meta smart glasses, ray ban meta smart glasses review, rayban smart glasses, ray ban smart glasses, ray ban meta, ray-ban meta smart glasses, ray ban meta glasses, ray-ban meta, ray ban meta smart glasses ai, meta connect 2023, ray ban meta glasses review, ray ban meta glasses 2024, norman chan, meta smart glasses review, meta smart glasses ai, meta smart glasses unboxing, meta smart glasses video

Id: zYIkEm9UD-Q

Length: 25min 6sec (1506 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 11 2024