Recently, I stood in a throng of tourists looking at the Golden Gate Bridge. But instead of reaching into my pocket for my iPhone, I tapped the side of my Ray-Ban sunglasses until I heard the click of a shutter. Later, I downloaded the photos that my sunglasses had just taken to my phone.

The process was instant, simple, unobtrusive — and it was powered by Facebook, which has teamed up with Ray-Ban. Their new line of eyewear, called Ray-Ban Stories, can take photos, record video, answer phone calls and play music and podcasts.

It all made me feel I was being dragged into some inevitable future dreamed up by people much more techie than me, in which the seams between the real world and the technology that supports it had all but vanished.

Remember Google Glass, the smart glasses that Google co-founder Sergey Brin introduced while jumping out of an airplane? That project foundered, with bars in San Francisco at one point barring Glass-wearers — also pejoratively known as “Glassholes” — from entry.

Now Facebook is aiming to usher in an era when people grow more comfortable sharing their lives digitally, beginning with what is in front of their faces.

“Isn’t that better than having to take out your phone and hold it in front of your face every time you want to capture a moment?” said Andrew Bosworth, head of Facebook Reality Labs.

“This product has not been tried before because we’ve never had a design like this before,” he said, adding that Facebook and Ray-Ban were focused more on the fashion of eyewear than the tech inside the frames.

“Eyewear is a very specific category that changes the way you look,” said Rocco Basilico, chief wearables officer at Luxottica, which owns Ray-Ban.

Let’s be real for a second. The new glasses, which start at $299 and come in more than 20 styles, face hurdles apart from Silicon Valley’s stop-start history with smart glasses. Facebook has long been under scrutiny for how it treats people’s personal data. Using the glasses to surreptitiously film people is bound to cause concerns, not to mention what Facebook might do with the videos that people collect.

I took the new Facebook Ray-Bans out for a spin. On close inspection, I found the frames house two cameras, two micro speakers, three microphones and a Snapdragon computer processor chip. They also come with a charging case that plugs into any computer via USB-C cable.

The spectacles require a Facebook account. They are also paired with a smartphone app, Facebook View. After recording videos — the glasses can record up to 35 30-second videos or take 500 photos — people can upload their content wirelessly to the app, where the photos are encrypted. From Facebook View, people can share the content to their social networks as well as save photos directly to their phone’s on-device storage outside the Facebook app.

To preempt privacy concerns, a small indicator light flickers on when the glasses are recording, notifying people that they are being photographed or filmed. As you set up the Facebook View app, it also displays prompts asking users to “respect others around you” and asking whether it “feels appropriate” to take a photograph or video in the moment.

Still, users may have other hesitations, as I did. The spectacles have an audio activation feature, called Facebook Assistant, which can be turned on to take hands-free photos and videos by saying, “Hey, Facebook.”

For me, that was a sticking point. What do the people around me think when they hear me utter, “Hey, Facebook, take a photo?” Can I still look cool doing that? Can anyone?

For a few moments on my hike, I could just make out that vision of the future that Facebook executives were so excited about.

Clambering down the many trails in the Presidio presented me with dazzling views, which I was able to shoot using only my voice while still having one hand gripping my dog’s leash and the other holding my backpack. Clicking the cityscape was as easy as issuing a voice command while my phone stayed in my pocket.

I just looked like a normal dude wearing sunglasses, not someone wearing a wacky face computer.

One added bonus was that no one (except my dog) could hear me say, “Hey, Facebook,” while I was alone on the trails. But in the city surrounded by people, I confess I might stick to tapping the side of my frames to take photos.

NYTNS