Facebook

Facebook promised that it would release a pair of smart glasses in partnership with Ray-Ban sometime this year and now it looks like we have our first look at the device.

The emergence of Facebook's collaboration with Ray-Ban to launch Stories smart glasses has finally put an exclamation point on a new category of smart glasses: the pre-augmented reality wearable segment.

It's always fun to get an unexpected glimpse of the future, especially when that peek is so close you can actually feel the excitement of the new emerging dynamic.

Facebook's earnings calls are generally focused on numbers—revenue and user growth.

The last few weeks were fairly busy in the realm of augmented reality and remote meetings developments. Most of that activity was generated by some mammoth announcements from Snap and its Spectacles AR smartglasses, and Google, with its Project Starline experimental holographic video conferencing system.

The development of virtual reality at Facebook has been evolving lightspeed in the last few years. But while a relatively small group of VR enthusiasts and gamers are enjoying the social media giant's dedication to immersive headsets, it is the augmented reality space and its potential scale that truly has the tech market enthralled.

As Apple, Google, Snap, and Facebook wrestle for positioning to lure developers and creators to build augmented reality experiences for their respective tools, Facebook is looking at a learning approach for its Spark AR platform.

One Instagram creator's augmented reality homage to Disney's deep bench of animated characters has earned him fifteen minutes of fame.

Starbucks is spicing things up ahead of this holiday season with a little augmented reality joy.

Music producer Mark Ronson, fresh off his Oscar win for Best Original Song as a co-writer of "Shallow," the song by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper for the movie A Star Is Born, has now added augmented reality to his varied repertoire.

Next to Apple, Snap is currently one of the most important companies on the planet in terms of delivering products that are moving augmented reality into the mainstream. That's why it's no surprise that Facebook, which is also focused on AR and tried to acquire the company for $3 billion several years ago, duplicates many of the smaller company's features.

It looks like Facebook really likes Google's augmented reality leadership talent, as the social media giant has hired away another employee from the AR and VR team at Mountain View to lead its team for a product that brings Facebook's AR platform into homes.