The Meta Ray Ban smart glasses have been taking the blind and low vision community by storm. I had held off until the recent announcement by Meta that they are partnering with Be My Eyes. This brings Call a Volunteer to the glasses, at which point I couldn’t resist any longer. After owning them for a week, I wanted to share my Blind Meta Ray Ban Review. At the time of writing, the Meta Ray Ban integration with Be My Eyes is not available but is due soon.
What are Meta Ray Ban Smart Glasses?
Meta teamed up with the iconic Ray Ban sunglasses brand to bring smart glasses to the world. These are a follow on to the Meta Stories which allowed people to capture photos and videos. The Meta Ray Bans built on this success and added Meta AI, an AI chat bot allowing you to ask questions and to use the camera as a source of input. This allows for questions like ‘Hey Meta, Look and describe the scene’, initiating the camera followed by a description of your surroundings.
Being Ray Ban glasses, they provide a couple of styles but a whole range of lenses including prescription options to fit your specific needs. The glasses have a built in 12 mega pixel camera discretely placed in the corner of the frames. The glasses arms contain speakers that allow you to listen to responses, play music and make calls using the five built in microphones. The battery lasts up to 4 hours with a further 36 hours available by placing them in the supplied case to charge.
Blind Perspective
It didn’t take long for the Blind and Low Vision community to start using the glasses with the promise of hands-free descriptions of what is around them. Meta AI isn’t tuned to the needs of blind and low vision users but is useful and has the potential to be better. In addition to Meta AI there are several other features:
- Bluetooth speakers in the glasses arms, allowing for listening while still allowing the wearer to hear the outside world. Great for navigation.
- Ability to recieve and send messages hands free via text, Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.
- Ability to take photos and videos with a simple click or voice command.
- Ability to ask Meta to take a photo and send it to a contact in Whats App or Facebook Messenger.
- Make a video call to a Whats App contact and share the view from your glassses. This is super useful for assistance, allowing you to keep your hands free while getting sighted help.
These are all fantastic features and have proved very useful in the week I have been using the glasses. However, there are areas of potential improvement specific to the blind and low vision community.
- Full integration with Be My Eyes – integration with calling a volunteer is coming, but it would be great to have access to Be My AI too.
- Integration with Aira, the visual interpreting service.
- Tuning the Meta AI for blind and low vision users, such as allowing it to describe people or reading text as it is, not summarising or halucinating additional information.
How to Set Up Your Meta Ray Ban Smart Glasses
My amazing friends over at Double Tap created a great Shaun of The Shed segment on how to setup the Meta Ray Ban Smart Glasses.
What Others In the Blind Community Are Saying:
Meta Ray Ban Blind Review Consideration
It is great to have tech at a considerably lower cost than specialist tech, currently about £300 a pair, but this is still a lot of money for something we could easily damage – walking into a tree branch, sitting on them, etc.
The battery life does lead to some trepidation of running out, the case works really well, but taking them off and on to keep them charged during the day is a pain, especially if you need them to block the light. I have a pair of Oho Sunshine bluetooth glasses that just fit in the case, so I can swap between them and mitigate this a little.
Internet connection is needed, so if you are deep in a supermarket you may find there isn’t a connection to be able to do what you need. I believe many supermarkets provide wifi, but you will need to factor this in and ensure you are setup before you start shopping.
The glasses remove some of the difficulty in taking photos and videos, making it easy for us to capture with a single click and be pointing in the right direction. They won’t rival the quality of a phone camera, but they are reasonable. Some blind users are using them to help capture incidents or barriers as they come across them.
Would I Recommend Them?
Yes, I would recommend the Meta Ray Ban smart glasses. Meta AI is improving, all the time, and with the partnership with Be My Eyes, these glasses will only get better.
Tell me what you think in the comments below or on X @timdixon82
