For example, if you photograph a person with an ultra wide angle lens up close, their nose, eyes and lips can appear unrealistically large, while their ears can look extremely small or even completely disappear from the image. Take a look at the following photos of a subject captured with a wide-angle lens at very close distances:

Such “perfect” lenses are very rare, since most lenses suffer from at least one kind of distortion defined below. Very good lenses have lens elements that significantly reduce distortion, where it is not noticeable to our eyes. Many zoom lenses, especially superzooms like Nikon 18-200mm VR suffer from multiple types of distortion such as barrel and pincushion at different focal lengths.

Pincushiondistortion

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For example, the Meta AI and voice assistant? It’s nothing like Peter Parker issuing commands to EDITH via the smart aviators he got from Tony Stark in Spider-Man: Far From Home. While the Meta assistant sounds very natural, it can’t do a whole lot of stuff yet, and it takes a hot second to process commands. The most I used it for was taking photos and videos hands-free, listening to texts as they came in, as well as sending messages. But even here, the Meta assistant got tripped up because my spouse apparently has multiple entries in my contact list. While you can send normal texts, most of my contacts aren’t on Messenger or WhatsApp, and these don’t natively share to non-Meta apps. I imagine this will be more useful to you if these are apps you use frequently.

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As you can see, the fence on the curvilinear lens sample appears unnaturally curved – that’s because I photographed it using a fisheye (curvilinear) lens. The image on the right is what you would see from a rectilinear lens – the fence looks straight and natural, just like you would see it with your eyes. The size of the fence appearing large in the front of the frame and getting smaller at longer distances is perspective distortion (see below), which has nothing to do with optical distortion.

When straight lines are curved inwards in a shape of a barrel, this type of aberration is called “barrel distortion”. Commonly seen on wide angle lenses, barrel distortion happens because the field of view of the lens is much wider than the size of the image sensor and hence it needs to be “squeezed” to fit. As a result, straight lines are visibly curved inwards, especially towards the extreme edges of the frame. Here is an example of strong barrel distortion:

I hope this article clarifies differences between the different types of distortions. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know in the comments section below!

While AI features on the glasses are in beta, I can’t say that I was ever itching to use a ChatGPT-esque bot in the ways Meta suggested (i.e., writing raps and poems, generating excuses to get out of parties, etc.) However, down the road, audio AI bots could be a useful form of augmented reality. The first version of the Bose Frames tried to make audio augmented reality apps a thing but crashed and burned when third-party developers didn’t glom onto the idea. Meta’s approach is a bit different. In a future feature drop, you’ll be able to ask the AI to identify objects in your surroundings via the camera. That’s a cool idea, and I’ll be eager to see how it works if and when it arrives.

Thank you for the article. It was very interesting. I read an article about front mobile phone cameras that they can distort faces up to 30% and the reason was perspective distortion. They suggested to used longer focal length would correct this and gives a realistic shot. Front camera’s have focal length of around 25mm. Human eyes have a focal length of 17mm. If their argument is true, they mean that human eye doesn’t see objects as they are? Or in other words, if you want to take a picture of an object from 30cm, and you want it to appear as human eye can see it, you can to take a picture of the item with focal length of 17mm, standing 30mm from the object?

Meta has privacy guidelines and etiquette tips when you set the glasses up and a link to its privacy page in the app. It boils down to don’t be a glasshole. That’s nice, but glassholes are going to use this device however they please. The rest of us have to figure out how to not be a glasshole on the fly.

How do I correct for perspective distortion in real time and after the fact using software such as Lightroom or Photoshop?

Distortionaberration

I have no real answers here. If everyone had a pair of these tomorrow, would I start to treat people wearing Wayfarers differently? A part of me wishes that I’d be the wary privacy stalwart. But the depressing reality is I already live like everything in my life is surveilled. What do a few hundred extra smart glasses cameras matter?

I have my priorities straight. As soon as I unboxed and paired these glasses, the first thing I did was take a photo and a video of my cats Petey and Pablo. I uploaded them to The Verge’s Slack and sent the video to my spouse and friends. My tech-savvy co-workers found the quality to be surprisingly good for smart glasses. My friends and family thought it was something I took on my phone. Several times during this review process, our own video team remarked that the quality was better than they’d expected.

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I’ll say it again. Meta isn’t reinventing smart glasses. What it’s done is nail the execution. Culturally, I also think the timing is ripe. We’re more desensitized than ever to surveillance, and a lot of us are trying to look less at phone screens. If smartwatches can field notifications, then maybe smart glasses can replace the camera and take calls in scenarios where phones aren’t ideal.

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The image on the left is how you would see it with your eyes if you stood there, while the image on the right is what a perspective control / tilt-shift lens would do to the image, after it is aligned to the building.

There are three known types of optical distortion – barrel, pincushion and mustache / moustache (also known as wavy and complex). Let’s examine each in more detail, but before we do that, let’s take a look at a lens with zero distortion:

The nice thing about these glasses is you don’t have to use the camera at all. They’re also a viable replacement for your headphones. Unlike the camera, the audio features works like any other Bluetooth headset in terms of what apps you can use, though there is one built-in Spotify integration you can enable.

Perspective distortion occurs when the photograph is viewed with an angle of view that differs from the angle of view captured by the camera.

The problem is we don’t have the same social cues for smart glasses as we do phones. If you hold your phone up in a certain way, people know it means you’re recording. If you hold your finger up to the temple of your glasses, you could be adjusting the fit. To address that, Meta added an LED capture light to the original Ray-Ban Stories. Most people didn’t think it was enough. This time around, Meta has made it so you can’t disable the LED light, and it has a pulsing pattern that’s supposed to be more noticeable. When I polled my co-workers, friends, and family, it was a mixed bag. Some said it was easily seen indoors. Others disagreed. Most agreed that while you can see the light outdoors, it’s also easy to ignore or mistake for light reflecting off the lenses.

RadialdistortionFormula

I’m a smart glasses skeptic. Not because the technology is impossible but because I’ve tested several pairs and even dove deep into the category for a two-part mini-documentary a while back. So when I say I was impressed by the $299 Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, it’s not just that mine came with rose-colored lenses.

If you’re into photography, you’ll be able to suss that the quality doesn’t match up to the latest and greatest phones. But it’s good enough to match a phone from a few years ago and, therefore, shareable on social media and in the group chat. That’s a Big Deal.

That comes with pros and cons. I’ll get to privacy in a bit, but if you’re worried about looking like a total jabroni, like this pic of me wearing the Bose Frames Tempo, fear not.

In photography, distortion is generally referred to an optical aberration that deforms and bends physically straight lines and makes them appear curvy in images, which is why such distortion is also commonly referred to as “curvilinear” (more on this below). Optical distortion occurs as a result of optical design, when special lens elements are used to reduce spherical and other aberrations. In short, optical distortion is a lens error.

However, this is a perfectly natural perspective with no distortion, because your eyes would see this exactly the same way. Lens manufacturers offer “perspective control” or “tilt-shift” lenses to deal with this particular situation, but the result actually turns out unnatural, since that’s not how it looks in real life when we look up. Take a look at the below examples of before (left) and after (right) perspective control change:

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There are a few mitigating factors. The charging case is a lot slimmer than the previous version, and it is easy to stash in a fanny pack, purse, and backpack. It charges via USB-C, and there’s a new indicator LED button that turns orange while charging and green when everything is full. (This is both for the case itself when it’s empty and for the glasses when they’re in there.) Charging is quick, too. The other day, I went from 15 percent battery after three hours of heavy use to 100 percent in less than an hour. I’ve also had these for a whole week, and aside from the initial charge, I haven’t had to plug in the case whatsoever. You do end up charging the frames multiple times a day because where else are you going to put them when they’re not in use if not the case?

By Victoria Song, a senior reporter focusing on wearables, health tech, and more with 11 years of experience. Before coming to The Verge, she worked for Gizmodo and PC Magazine.

Livestreaming is an example where Meta sort of shot itself in the foot as far as content creation goes. I have no doubt some streamers would love this if they could use this on TikTok or Twitch. But they can’t. Instead, they’re corralled into Meta’s services. It makes sense — Big Tech loves protecting its walled gardens — but from a broader adoption perspective, this is silly. It’s one of the reasons Snap’s Spectacles never took off. Meta’s mostly lucky that Instagram is still popular with influencers.

I appreciated taking phone-free, hands-free videos in my day-to-day life. I now have so many videos of Petey and Pablo being adorable that would have been difficult to capture otherwise because both my cats get weird when they see my phone come out. They either refuse to look at the camera, leave, or — in Petey’s case — try to eat the camera. It’s also easier to film and interact with my cats when I have both hands free. Case in point, I have enjoyed partaking in the cat-twirling meme — even if it was quite the feat lifting a 19-pound Pablo.

It is important to note that most zoom lenses that go from wide angle to standard or telephoto focal lengths typically suffer from barrel distortion at the shortest focal lengths, which gradually transitions to pincushion distortion towards the longest end. A good example of such behavior is the Nikon 18-300mm VR, which starts out with strong barrel distortion at 18mm, then quickly switches to pincushion distortion at 28mm and stays that way till 300mm.

Pincushiondistortionlens

Are good execution and timing enough? At heart, I remain a smart glasses skeptic. To me, this device appeals most to gadget nerds and content creators rather than the average Joe. But even if these flop, it’s set a new bar for what smart glasses can and should be able to do. Again, I’ve tried a ton of smart glasses, and until now, I’ve never had a pair that looks good, is priced reasonably, has multiple use cases, and delivers what it says it will.

This is the reason why mustache distortion is often referred to as “complex” distortion, because its characteristics are indeed complex and can be quite painful to deal with. While this type of distortion can be potentially fixed, it often requires specialized software. You cannot just use the built-in tools in Lightroom and Photoshop, unless a specific lens profile is already built to combat such distortion. If you attempt to deal with such distortion as barrel-type, you will end up curving the extreme corners a lot more. And if you attempt to compensate for pincushion distortion, you will end up curving it for even stronger barrel distortion towards the center.

Fixing barrel distortion is usually a pretty straightforward process. Post-processing software such as Lightroom and Photoshop, as well as many other third party tools, can easily fix barrel distortion issues, as long as the lens has a supporting profile in the database. Since every lens is different, such lens profile data must be carefully tested in a lab environment and created. I wrote a detailed article that outlines this process in my Lightroom Lens Corrections article.

It’s also easy to import photos and videos from the glasses to your phone, even if you’re on the go. The glasses have their own local Wi-Fi network, and your phone just needs to connect to it with the Meta View app open. It can be a little slow if you have a lot of footage, but even then, it’s not too bad. For example, yesterday, I imported 143 videos and photos. It took a few tries to establish a stable connection, but altogether, it only took about five minutes. It’s a lot faster — maybe two or three minutes — if you’re sending 15 or fewer photos or videos.

Note that the lines appear straight at the very center of the frame and only start bending away from the center. That’s because the image is the same in the optical axis (i.e. the center of the lens), but its magnification decreases towards the corners.

On top of looking good, no one will know you’re wearing tech on your face unless you walk around saying “Hey Meta” at the top of your lungs. Nobody knew I was listening to EXO’s EXIST album on my commute. You can hear some faint audio leakage when you’re at full volume, but that’s only necessary when trying to block out the squeaky rails of the New York City subway system. Your fellow commuters likely won’t notice because they’ve got AirPods in or the ambient noise is louder. More troubling, no one batted an eye whenever I took photos and videos in public or private areas.

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Every smart device now requires you to agree to a series of terms and conditions before you can use it — contracts that no one actually reads. It’s impossible for us to read and analyze every single one of these agreements. But we started counting exactly how many times you have to hit “agree” to use devices when we review them since these are agreements most people don’t read and definitely can’t negotiate.

One potential con is that videos max out at one minute. Meta says that’s to optimize storage and importing, which is a fair tradeoff in my book. These are clearly meant for social content, especially since all photos and videos are vertical, and there’s no landscape option. Generally, you’re not watching more than a minute-long clip on Reels, TikTok, or YouTube Shorts anyway.

But we live in a different era now. People are wearing Quest 3 headsets to coffee shops. Every time I open TikTok, I see normal people and content creators alike vlogging their lives. When I walk outside, people are having very private conversations out loud on FaceTime or through their AirPods. For better or worse, the smartphone has made us all very comfortable with the idea that there are cameras everywhere.

Nasim Mansurov is the author and founder of Photography Life, based out of Denver, Colorado. He is recognized as one of the leading educators in the photography industry, conducting workshops, producing educational videos and frequently writing content for Photography Life. You can follow him on Instagram and Facebook. Read more about Nasim here.

I have no answers for my bigger questions. I won’t have them until smart glasses are a thing — if they’re ever a thing. But in the meantime, I’ll settle for taking more cat videos.

Just like barrel distortion, pincushion distortion can also be easily fixed in post-processing software like Lightroom and Photoshop. Lens profiles built into Lightroom and Camera RAW have the capability to completely eliminate it with a single click.

Look at the size of his head on the left photograph – it appears disproportionately large relative to his body. His eyes, nose and lips are very much enlarged, while his ears are dwarfed.

Brown-Conradydistortionmodel

To take photos or videos, you can use the “Hey Meta” command or use the capture button on the top of the right arm. You press once for photos and long-press to start recording video. There are also accompanying audio cues and an LED in your right peripheral vision.

The thing about smart glasses is that you’ll never wear a pair if they make you look like a low-rent Warby Parker model. Aside from the original Bose Frames, I’ve never really liked the way I’ve looked in smart glasses so far. That’s why it matters that these are Ray-Bans and come in more styles than typical smart glasses. While Wayfarers are considered to be universally flattering, rounder frames look better on me. Most smart glasses come in tortoiseshell or black, and I’m tired of both, so I was happy that I could pick a round, transparent blue frame with pink lenses. They’re more my style, and while I wish the colors were more noticeable in darker lighting, I dug the extra pop of color in sunlight. I wore these in various scenarios: dolled up for a wedding, clad in functional but hideous running gear, bumming it in sweatpants, and rocking leather jackets. You name it — it goes with everything.

Barrel distortion is typically present on most wide angle prime lenses and many zoom lenses with relatively short focal lengths. The amount of distortion can vary, depending on camera to subject distance. Even standard 50mm prime lenses can potentially yield barrel distortion at close distances. Barrel distortion can be decreased significantly by using compensating optical elements, but completely eliminating such distortion is nearly impossible. Some lenses like Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8G have a number of such distortion compensating elements, which heavily increase both the weight and the size of the lens. This is why wide-angle lenses are typically bigger and heavier than standard / normal lenses.

Calls are another story. These glasses trump the majority of smart glasses I’ve tested. I’ve taken a few calls from my spouse while on the go in loud environments. I had no trouble hearing them, and they had zero issues hearing me (provided I had good cell service). That’s likely because there are now five mics, one of which is in the nose pad. It made me sound clear in all my videos — almost like I was the main character in a first-person video game.

If you are interested in reading more, below is the list of articles on other types of aberrations and issues that we have previously published on Photography Life:

It’s hard to think of smart glasses without remembering that time when a pair of Google Glass got ripped off a person’s face. How subsequently, the people wearing Glass were dubbed glassholes, and how some public spaces banned the device entirely.

So far we have been only talking about optical distortions. Another distortion type that is often seen in images is perspective distortion. Unlike optical distortion, it has nothing to do with lens optics and thus, it is not a lens error. When projecting three dimensional space into a two dimensional image, if the subject is too close to the camera, it can appear disproportionately large or distorted when compared to the objects in the background. This is a very normal occurrence and something you can easily see with your own eyes. If you take a smaller object like your mobile phone, then bring it very close to your eyes, it will appear large relative to say your big screen TV in the background (and the farther your phone is from your TV, the smaller the TV will appear relative to your phone). The same thing can happen when photographing any subject, including people.

In this image of a downtown San Francisco street, the four story buildings to the left and the right look larger than the 48 story Transamerica Pyramid (the long building in the distance), when in fact they are much smaller if you were to put them side by side. Because I used a wide angle lens, I was able to show the front buildings much bigger than they really are.

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Pincushion distortion is the exact opposite of barrel distortion – straight lines are curved outwards from the center. This type of distortion is commonly seen on telephoto lenses, and it occurs due to image magnification increasing towards the edges of the frame from the optical axis. This time, the field of view is smaller than the size of the image sensor and it thus needs to be “stretched” to fit. As a result, straight lines appear to be pulled upwards in the corners, as seen below:

I get why. These glasses look good. They officially come in 150 style variations across two frame styles, seven colors, and multiple lens options (including color, prescription, and transitions). The camera has been upgraded from 5MP to 12MP. Photo resolution has improved to 3024 x 4032 pixels, while videos are now 1080p at 30 frames per second. There are now five mics instead of one, so you sound better on calls. The speaker quality has also improved. It’s louder, with more bass, less audio leakage, and spatial audio support. They stuffed some AI in there, and you can now livestream to Facebook or Instagram. These are significant updates.

The other neat thing is spatial audio. When you watch videos, you can hear where people were when it was recorded. Alex Cranz, managing editor of The Verge, crept behind me while I was recording at the office to say, “Victoria sucks.” When I replayed it, I could hear her trolling me from behind. Is it something you’ll make use of often? Probably not, but it’s fun nevertheless.

Another thing for content creators to consider is battery life. If you use these lightly, you can get five, maybe six hours on a single charge. If you’re taking a ton of video and photos, that’s going to dwindle to three or four hours. Using the glasses as headphones in my 70-minute commute drained the battery by about 18 to 20 percent. I doubt this will trouble casual users, seeing as these are still a functional pair of glasses if the battery’s dead. But power users — folks who want to get through a whole day of meetings while using these as headphone replacements — may find this annoying.

The above examples of perspective distortion are known as “wide-angle”, or “extension” distortion. There is another kind of perspective distortion, which is the opposite of wide-angle distortion – it is called “telephoto” or “compression” distortion. Compression distortion is only possible with telephoto lenses, because it requires the photographer to stay at a long distance relative to the subject, which essentially makes very distant objects appear larger than they are when compared to “normal” perspective.

Take the last image (of two men blowing up balloons) as an example. If you enlarge that image sufficiently to enable you to view it from close enough, then you will see it with no distortion at all. It will look perfectly normal. It should be viewed from the “centre of perspective” or “centre of projection” to see it without any distortion. If you view it from further away, then the image shows wide-angle distortion (because the viewer’s angle of view is less than the camera’s angle of view). If you view it from closer than the centre of perspective, then the image shows perspective compression (because the viewer’s angle of view is greater than the camera’s angle of view).

Even if you aren’t obsessed with your pets, I can see this being a more discreet alternative for a GoPro. It’d be easy to film cooking instructions, parts of running or cycling routes, a scenic drive, or even capturing slice-of-life candids of your kids before they grow up too fast.

Barreldistortion

It’d be one thing if Meta failed to deliver, but like I said: I’m impressed. But that, in turn, has raised a lot of questions that I don’t have answers for. All I can say is whatever you think of Meta, these are a turning point for smart glasses.

Pincushion distortion is also a very common aberration, especially on zoom lenses. Expensive super telephoto prime lenses have compensating elements that can significantly reduce pincushion distortion to negligible levels, but most consumer and even pro-level zoom lenses like Nikon 80-400mm VR suffer from pincushion distortion. In fact, pincushion distortion can be very heavy on consumer-grade lenses, something that you will quickly notice in images.

While it was weird to explain, she gave me her blessing. I got to protect my eyes from the sun, discreetly record the ceremony for the couple, keep my phone in my bag, and stay present in the moment. Afterward, my friend was happy to have that footage since there wasn’t a videographer. At the same time, you won’t find those photos or videos in this review because this was a private ceremony. I’m glad that was a conversation I had beforehand, but would anyone in 2023 feel compelled to do this with phones? I can’t count the times I’ve seen people take photos of weddings and post them directly to their own personal feeds.

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I don’t know why you would call perspective a distortion and I don’t know how you say the car looks distorted. It look like a close perspective, which it is. Of course we lose the depth of focus and parallax that go with this effect in the real world and help cue our brains in to what’s going on, but the proportions are real, not distorted.

But all said and done, I’m glad Meta didn’t bother attempting a smart display. The tech isn't there yet. When I tried Google Glass Enterprise Edition, Epson Moverio glasses, and Focals by North, trying to focus on the information overlays was hard on my eyes. That’s because these tend to rely on projection tech, which can get easily washed out by bright ambient light. And navigating screens usually requires some kind of physical control. It’s clunky, kills battery life, and introduces the problem of developing third-party app ecosystems.

Audio quality for music and podcasts is on par with other smart glasses. Like other open-ear headphones, they’re not the best at reproducing thumping bass, but they are better than any ambient mode at helping you maintain situational awareness. Noise-canceling headphones, however, are much more effective at blocking out the world.

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We will cover three different types of optical distortion, then discuss rectilinear vs curvilinear nature of wide-angle lenses. We will wrap it up by showing what perspective distortion does to images, as shown in the table of contents below.

Lastly, there is also the case of converging lines. When the camera sensor is not perfectly parallel to the photographed object such as a building, it produces an image that at first might seem unnatural, due to its “leaning” effect, as shown below:

To be clear, nothing about the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses is revolutionary. The Google Glass Explorer Edition first introduced us to modern-day smart glasses in 2013. Several other companies, big and small, have since jumped on the bandwagon, including Snap, Bose, Razer, Epson, Amazon, and the now-defunct Focals by North. Most were underwhelming, with potato cameras, washed-out displays, useless voice assistants, and middling mics. I had a hard time imagining the average person liking them enough to own a pair.

Here are a couple of more examples of converging lines, where one part of the image appears much larger than the other simply because it is closer:

The nastiest of the radial distortion types is mustache distortion, which I sometimes call “wavy” distortion. It is basically a combination of the barrel distortion and pincushion distortion. Straight lines appear curved inwards towards the center of the frame, then curve outwards at the extreme corners, as shown below:

The lenses you pick can impact whether you want to use these as headphone alternatives. Because Meta sent me a pair of sunglasses, it was tough to see how well these would fare in my usual workday. My greatest regret was not getting these with clear lenses or transitions because sunglasses are limiting. I’m not trying to be one of those people who wears sunglasses indoors. I tried for the sake of this review, but it hurt my eyes after an hour or two. The Transition lenses cost $80 more and are the best option if you want to use these in as many scenarios as possible. As for prescriptions, you can order them directly from Ray-Ban or a participating LensCrafters if you fall in the -6 to +4 range. If you’ve got worse vision, like me, you may want to use them with contact lenses. Otherwise, you could take them to a local optician, but that would void the warranty.

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Some lenses are optically designed to be “rectilinear” (like the Nikon 14mm f/2.8D and the Canon EF 14mm f/2.8L II USM), where they yield straight lines without bending them (resembling human vision), while other lenses like “fisheye” lenses are designed to be “curvilinear”. Rectilinear lenses generally stretch objects to make them appear straight, especially towards the edges of the frame. Curvilinear lenses, on the other hand, do not stretch anything, but they heavily distort images by curving straight lines (like in door peepholes). Take a look at the following image samples that show both rectilinear and curvilinear lens effects:

I’ve only seen a handful of Bond flicks, but even I know two things about Agent 007. James Bond looks good, always, and the spy gadgets Q gives him are discreet. The Meta glasses are both and, in many ways, feel like they belong in a spy movie.

This is the part that seems to confuse a lot of photographers – the relationship (or lack thereof) of focal length to perspective distortion. You might hear some photographers say that one should use longer focal lengths to photograph people, or they will get distorted due to the lens’ short focal length. This is a mostly false statement, because lenses have no perspective. Other than fisheye lenses, all lenses have the same perspective – it is the camera to subject distance that determines perspective, not the focal length. There is an illusion of different perspective of lenses, because with long focal lengths you have to stand further away from the subject to frame them the same way. If you were to stand at the same distance, the subject would appear exactly the same! So if you take a 50mm lens and an 85mm lens, there is no difference in perspective between the two, as long as you stand in the same spot and keep the subject to camera distance the same. Yes, the subject would certainly appear smaller with the 50mm lens due to shorter focal length / wider field of view, but the perspective and proportions would be the same on both. So the point of longer focal length lenses in such cases, is the possibility to enlarge the subject in the frame, while keeping normal perspective. Telephoto lenses do not magically fix perspective distortion – they force you to move back from the subject, which is what changes the perspective.

I know this an old post and you probably have moved on. But I was browsing looking for a way to explain what I call closeup distortion when I came across this article. The author in my opinion does a great job explaining the effects and differences in perspective and distortion. I wish the author offered ways to prevent perspective distortion especially for closeup images which occurs more often these days because of cell phone photography. That said, maybe proportional distortion would be to your liking?

Speaking of which, livestreaming was hard to test organically, mainly because none of my Instagram followers expect me to livestream. What I can say is that a glasses icon pops up automatically on the livestream screen in Facebook or Instagram. (Though, let’s be real — most content creators aren’t livestreaming to Facebook.) You can either tap the icon or double-click the capture button to seamlessly switch views between your phone camera and glasses. There’s a teeny lag between what you see versus what gets livestreamed, but nothing egregious.

Note how the balloons in the center of the frame appear natural, while the heads of the groom and the best man look egg-shaped. This is a direct result of using an ultra-wide angle lens at a very close distance and badly placing the subjects. If both sat back to back and inflated balloons in the opposite directions, their heads would have looked pretty normal being in the center, while the balloons would have been egg-shaped.

A number of older lenses, as well as some modern lenses have mustache distortion. A good example of this is the Nikon 18-35mm f/3.5-4.5D lens, which shows a rather nasty case of a mustache distortion.

You control the audio with a gesture control area on the right arm, just under the capture button. There’s a library of gestures in the app, but the most basic ones are tapping once to pause / play audio and sliding forward and back to control volume. Tapping twice will play the next track, while three taps will let you go back a track. If you enable Spotify Tap, you can tap and hold to play your automatic recommendations based on your favorites. On the left arm, right on the hinge, there’s also a small toggle that lets you cut the Bluetooth connection and power to the camera.

I’m not a camera expert, so I asked our resident camera expert Becca Farsace to weigh in. One thing Becca pointed out was the stabilization on the camera is surprisingly good. While there’s some wobbliness, it doesn’t look like garbage, especially when viewed on a phone. Low-light performance was also better than I anticipated. When you move from light to dark environments, you don’t really notice a massive drop in video quality. Color reproduction and details are also solid in good lighting.

The Manual of Photography by Jacobson et al. explains this in Chapter 4 on the geometry of image formation. The last section of that chapter is on perspective.

Since CS-Mount is basically the same as C-Mount except for the flange focal distance, you can adapter a CS-Mount to C Mount by adding a 5mm C-CS adapter to a CS ...

Tangentialdistortion

LensdistortionExamples

Prompt Alert: Contains a message, a text box for input, and 'OK' and 'Cancel' buttons. Basic Java Selenium Code for Handling Alerts. 1 ...

That said, there are quirks. What you see isn’t what the camera sees because it’s not actually in your eyeball. It’s in front of the left hinge. You have to remember that when framing your shots, or everything will be mildly off-center. This is also how I learned I often tilt my head like a confused puppy. Many times, I went back to photos and videos I’d shot to find they featured unintentional Dutch angles and wisps (or full chunks) of my bangs. Becca had issues with her hat popping up in shots as well.

This applies to so many scenarios. If I take concert footage, am I the glasshole? What if I’m house hunting and want to remember what a property looked like later? Do I alert the real estate agent? What if I’m wearing these as headphones, enter a public restroom, and somebody freaks out because they notice I’m wearing smart glasses? Am I the glasshole for filming my commute to test these glasses? Or is asking permission from my fellow commuters potentially opening me up to physical harm? Is wearing what’s essentially a face-mounted bodycam an invasion of privacy, or is it a safety tool? A co-worker told me they bought a pair of these glasses partly because if someone tries to murder them while walking the dog, they can grab footage of their potential assailant.

Also, there’s a one- to two-second delay when taking photos. While walking, a lot of my landscape photos came out blurry if I didn’t stand completely still. It’d be easier if there was a way to preview images via your phone, but there isn’t unless you’re livestreaming.

thank you for organizing concepts nicely in this article. it was very helpful. ironically, it also enabled me to articulate my disagreement in an intelligible way. I think perspective distortion is not always same for every lens or circumstances. the difference is very visible when you use expensive camera system like leica, naked eye, or a cheap small phone camera lens. Can you make a follow up article about how perspectice distortion can be different depending on certain circumstances?

The car looks completely distorted, because I stood very close to it and photographed it with a wide-angle lens (Nikon 14-24mm). Note that the left part of the car looks disproportionately big – even the left light looks about 50% bigger than the one on the right, although you know that they are both the same in size. The car is occupying the majority of the frame and everything in the background looks relatively small. If I used a normal lens and stood in the same spot, I would have ended up with only a part of the car filling the whole frame. Yet, if I were to crop both images for the same field of view by heavily cropping the wide angle shot, the perspective distortion effect would be the same on both.

In photography, there are two types of distortions: optical and perspective. Both result in some kind of deformation of images – some lightly and others very noticeably. While optical distortion is caused by the optical design of lenses (and is therefore often called “lens distortion”), perspective distortion is caused by the position of the camera relative to the subject or by the position of the subject within the image frame. And it is certainly important to distinguish between these types of distortions and identify them, since you will see them all quite a bit in photography. The goal of this article is to explain each distortion type in detail, with illustrations and image samples.

I have a 70 yr. old family photo with 7 subjects. The parents are in the back of basically two rows on the right and left. It appears that the photographer was slightly to the right of the center of the group. The male parent on the right side appears to be much taller than the female parent on the left, which was not the case in real life! It also looks as if those on the right side of the photo appear taller than they really were in comparison to the rest of the subjects. Is this some sort of camera or perspective distortion? Or just uneven ground.? It is an outdoor photo.

All this made me feel like Eggsy from Kingsman: The Golden Circle — another high-tech spy film. There’s a scene where Eggsy takes a call through the glasses during an important dinner. To everyone else, he looked like a dapper gent with some snazzy frames about to eat some fancy food. But because of his glasses, Eggsy was able to hear (and see) things they couldn’t. My experience wasn’t exactly the same. (I had no imminent bombs to defuse.) But the point is I spent a lot of time wearing these in public doing and listening to things that people looking straight at me weren’t aware of. It doesn’t get more incognito than that.

To use the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, you’ll need a Meta account and the Meta View app downloaded onto your phone. A Meta account works across platforms like Meta, Instagram, and Quest and comes with its own Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Should you decide to integrate with services like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Spotify, you also agree to those terms and privacy policies. You may also be asked to give permissions related to Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, location services, and voice data. If you choose to get a pair of prescription lenses, you may also be asked to share that information with Ray-Ban and/or Lenscrafters.

For example, these glasses are perfect for an outdoor wedding. I just so happened to be invited to one this past weekend. But while it’s normal to take photos and record wedding footage on your phone, would that apply to content taken on smart glasses? It felt wrong to make any unilateral decision, so I asked my friend for permission.

That was really educational. I knew something wrong was happening when objects were too close to the lens. Specially in selfies. But thought it a problem with lenses. Now I know how to explain this phenomena.