Facebook has been developing its augmented reality smartphones at Facebook Reality Labs over the past two years, apparently aimed at replacing smartphones.

But struggles with the development of the project prompted the company to ask for help, and Facebook hopes that the partnership with the famous brand of glasses Luxottica Group SpA, the manufacturer of Ray-Ban glasses, to prepare them for consumers between 2023 and 2025.

Luxottica Group SpA has already tried this technology, and in 2014 participated with Google in the design, development and distribution of Google Glass.

The glasses, named Orion internally, are designed to replace smartphones, allowing users to make calls without tying them to a smartphone and showing information to users via a small screen similar to the Google Glass screen.

It is also said that the glasses include a camera that allows the user to send a live broadcast to friends and followers in social media, such as Facebook; and Instagram.

Facebook is also developing an AI-assisted voice assistant for new glasses, as well as a resonance device called Agios that will allow users to enter information via the motion sensor and allow control of Orion glasses with fingers.

The company has hundreds of employees in its offices in Redmond working in the field of AR glasses technology, but is still struggling to reduce the size of the device to a size that consumers find attractive.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has clearly shown strong interest in these new glasses, but given the long lead time, there is no guarantee that the glasses will be completed on time or shipped at all.

Another report alleges that Ray-Ban will be directly involved, but the fruits of its collaboration with Facebook will not appear on Orion, but on a completely different set of smart glasses, called Stella.

Source : CNBC