Facebook Ray Bans

Facebook have teamed up with Ray-Ban to make smart glasses. You may feel like you have seen this movie before? That is because you have. A similar collaboration was announced between Google Glass and Luxottica (maker of Ray-Bans and many others) a few years ago. Unfortunately, Google Glasses never really took off and got scrapped.

Facebook clearly feel they can do what Goggle couldn't after Mark Zuckerberg announced the product in a Facebook virtual conference recently. The project called Aria will be tested in the real world by Facebook employees from this month.

Remember that Facebook already owns Virtual Reality company Oculus. Smart glasses which will be based around augmented reality can leverage off the technologies they have already developed. You can read more about Project Aria on the Facebook blog.

The nice thing about owning shares in these hugely profitable tech companies is that they have the cash to experiment on these side projects. If they don't work, the company moves on with barely a scratch. If it does work they have the scale to make it huge. Just look at Amazon and AWS.