On Thursday, Facebook Inc. announced that it is starting to sell smart glasses. These glasses were created in partnership with Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica. They allow wearers to listen to music, take calls or capture photos and short videos and share them across Facebook’s services using a companion app. The glasses line starts at $299.

Facebook is a social media company that makes most of its money from advertising. However, the company has been investing in virtual and augmented reality, developing hardware such as its Oculus VR headsets and working on wristband technologies to support augmented reality glasses. Its chief scientist said last year that the company is five to ten years away from being able to bring to market “true” AR glasses, which would superimpose virtual objects onto the wearer’s view of the real world.

Ray-Ban Stories’ dual integrated 5MP cameras let you capture life’s spontaneous moments as they happen. You can easily record the world as you see it, taking photos and up to 30-second videos using the capture button or hands-free with Facebook Assistant voice commands.

The hard-wired capture LED will light up when you are taking a picture or video. The open-ear speakers are built in, and the three-microphone audio array will deliver richer voice and sound transmission for calls and videos. Beamforming technology and a background noise suppression algorithm provide for an enhanced calling experience like you’d expect from dedicated headphones.

Ray-Ban Stories now works with the new Facebook View app. With Facebook View, it’s easy to import, edit, and share content captured on the smart glasses with your friends on social media. You can use Facebook View on iOS and Android devices to post content to Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, and more.

You can also save content to your phone’s camera roll and edit it there. Facebook View has new, exclusive post-capture enhancements that let you create unique content for your posts.

Many major tech companies, such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Snap Inc., have developed various smart glasses products. However, early offerings like Google Glass proved to be difficult to sell to consumers because of high price points and design issues.

Snap, which unveiled its smart Spectacles in 2016, this year launched AR glasses but they are not for sale and are offered only to AR creators. Snap’s CEO, Evan Spiegel said in 2019 that he expected it would be a decade before consumers widely adopted AR smart glasses.

Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, recently announced that the company is working on building a virtual environment called the metaverse. The metaverse is a shared virtual environment which they believe will be the next big thing after mobile internet.

Facebook, which has been criticized over its handling of user data, said it would not access the media used by its smart-glasses customers without their consent. The company also said it would not use the content of the photos or videos captured using the glasses and stored in the Facebook View app for personalizing ads.

The glasses include a virtual assistant that helps you take photos and videos hands-free. The LED light on the glasses tells people when you are taking a photo or video. Facebook also published a guide on how to use the glasses responsibly. For example, you should turn them off in private spaces like public bathrooms, and not use them for illegal actions like harassment or capturing sensitive information such as PIN codes.