I don't love the idea of smart glasses and I'm definitely very concerned about the implications of their widespread adoption. And yes, most of what we've seen hasn't looked very good.
But when I see a headline like "tacky men with ridiculous glasses" I get a sense that the intent is more to persuade via bullying than anything else, which...I dunno. Doesn't feel great!
It also seems incredibly shortsighted. No fashion conscious person would have been caught dead wearing a smartwatch circa 2012, then Apple partnered with Hermes and eventually things changed. There are all sorts of valid complaints against this tech, but fashion is something so ephemeral that it's a silly to act like it is a long-term hindrance to adoption.
No fashion forward person wears an Apple watch. Anyone, who remotely cares about what's on their wrist wears a whoop and a traditional watch.
Problem with the Apple Watch is it does too much. They should have never enabled Apps on the Apple Watch. Kept it super simple. I hope they'll come up with a new version with an improved form factor and better battery life soon.
Ignoring the fashion context (to which, no comment), totally agree.
I have an Apple Watch SE that I got the battery refurbed after 5 years, 95% of my use is a quick check on my next calendar, setting timers, managing the morning alarm, and tracking medication and exercise. Oh, and constantly putting it into power save mode after I take it off the charger.
It's not a cellular model, so the other 5% is basically letting me know my phone has something to tell me. I have in the past tried to put games on it, but purely as a novelty.
The point of that story was that everyone was going along with something that was obviously nonsense, and the kid who breaks the spell simply tells the truth.
In this situation most people don't buy smart glasses because they don't look good or have a killer use case. It's not the same thing.
They are literally deforming his ears, as you can see in this near-profile photo. If you wear these for more than 5-10 minutes at a time you will either find them painfully uncomfortable or you will damage your ear cartilage. The might have worked great as part of an integrated helmet or something, as glasses they completely fail.
Yup. You're supporting my point, right? People see stuff like that and don't buy it as a result. The emperor doesn't have new clothes, and nobody is acting like he does.
Whatever, man. Making fun of those losers is the least damage we can cause to them. No need to defend the Zucks and co. like they were kids (although I agree they behave like children).
In this instance, it's directed at people who are literally at the top of the world, having amassed almost unthinkable power and influence, and want to start a fashion trend specifically to grow their business empires.
So yeah, it's a tiny bit different than bullying a classmate for having bad eyesight.
> it's directed at people who are literally at the top of the world
The very first sentence in the article associates people who wear these with "pervs".
So no, this is not merely directed at "the top of the world".
As an aside: VRs were "the cool thing" in the 90's and 00's. They never became practical, and fell out of favor. "Normal" people never stopped mocking those who used them. Now that Meta has made glasses that actually come close to looking normal, tech folks mock back ...? I just don't get it.
Yes, I get all the privacy concerns. But making fun because of very subjective reasons like appearance? It undercuts all the privacy concerns.
This would be a great argument if there were any non-pervy application for these glasses. They're marketed at people who already have screens and better cameras in their pockets and on their wrists. "Clandestine" use cases are the only application here.
I agree but I also feel like surely these are so few and far between that no reasonable person would introduce a new tech device into their day-to-day wear for this purpose?
You really just don’t require constant recording of your surroundings, in a way that is not socially acceptable, in order to get around your hands being full.
In the situations where we DO need that capability, we already have solutions, like go pros. What makes this different is that these are for all the time, and targeted at candid strangers in public. Not, like, the mountain bike path. So, to me, that makes them fundamentally perverted.
It is, because when you're using a smartphone camera you're not trying to hide the fact that you're filming, or at least it's harder to do so. There are already ways to film without having to hold a camera, and those ways produce a better product. The advantage of the glasses is you can be a creep but be less obvious about it.
zuck is trying to push bad, ugly glasses to profit at the expense of causing nefarious social impact. the blog is mocking the ugliness of the glasses. it represents how out of touch zuck is. i’m not sure how you got to “four eyes” from there
although it's true and funny that rich assholes often have terrible taste, it's important that criticism of pervert glasses doesn't make their ugliness load-bearing. what happens if the next gen looks good, we're suddenly okay with them?
It's not about taste! They're literally too big to function effectively! If you bed over to look at something they will fall off your face. It's like offering running shoes with kilogram-weight batteries on the bottom, a basic failure to understand the problem.
I can't believe people are trying to make excuses for a product that is clearly not ready for consumer applications.
i dont think the blog is proposing a long-term criteria. the ugliness is funny and worth noting now because its currently happening and a great symbol of them pushing plainly horrible stuff down our throats
You use normal glasses to see better. You buy a smart glass to record people without their knowledge. The only thing similar in these objects is that your wear them on your face.
But they are ridiculous glasses. They're so big that they're visibly crushing the top of the Snapchat guy's ears. As a lifelong glasses wearer, this is a billboard size red flag.
This is an emperor's new clothes kinda situation. You could say 'our royal personage seems to be experiencing a sartorial deficit' or you could say 'the emperor's butt naked.'
I think there’s a difference between full-on “bullying” and what I’d call “blunt criticism”. I think bullying requires an intent to silence or otherwise coerce through fear. Blunt criticism is more about skipping the niceties and saying it plainly, and accepting that your subject might get offended as a result. Calling someone “tacky” is way more in the blunt criticism camp I think. It’s certainly not “nice”, but there’s no way that I read this blog article as trying to change Mark Zuckerberg’s mind through fear. Nobody is getting pilloried for being tacky, and tackiness can even be repositioned as desirable through the lens of nostalgia or similar.
Real answer: more than I'd like. I am a contrarian who has intentionally worked to temper that impulse.
But...nah, not really.
I will say though: The only time I know for sure I knew someone had a pair of Meta Ray-Bans was in my kid's youth baseball league; The coach would film the kids batting while he pitched and shared the videos with us. People loved it. There are definitely cases where hands-free video recording would come in handy.
The benefit of glasses is that you know for sure what they're recording cause they're recording pretty much what you're looking at. A GoPro on your chest could be angled weirdly and you'd have no idea.
I know what you're saying—but there's also an Emperor's New Clothes aspect to this. I mean, someone might really need to say, "Hey guys, and you also look ridiculous."
(Edit: I should read more of the comments—someone beat me to it.)
This feels like I'm reading a comment written by anti-video game moms in the early 90s talking about the stupid unfashionable nerds and how they were ushering in a frightening new age of fewer values and greater social isolation.
I dunno, I'd love to have elf-like abilities to see systems of energy in the world around me that the human eye can't see, like wind patterns, and be able to zoom in on plants and animals in the garden and woods where I hike. I can't wait to see the skins people create for themselves, just walking around the world on holidays with fun appearances. And I'm excited for all the identity crises coming. Philosophy as physical reality.
But I guess this is as diverse of a human experience as y'all are willing to tolerate. :/
People already walk around with skins created for themselves. Clothing choices, hair styling, tanning, tattoos, piercings, colored contacts, fur suits, teeth sharpening, surgery for changing the shape of various parts of their body, and probably more that I'm not thinking of at the moment.
I don't think the people who would make AR avatars would exceed the groups of people who do the more uncommon forms of the above. A very niche thing.
That’s not what you see when you wear the glasses, you will see a symbol, a series of symbols, a facsimile of life that you will convince yourself is real.
It’s not elf like, it’s not magic, it’s not a sense, quite the opposite, it’s replacing sensing and processing with reading. The death of aptitude, prowess, and the human experience.
> replacing sensing and processing with reading. The death of aptitude, prowess, and the human experience.
Replacing something all animals do with something uniquely human, perhaps the most important thing that sets us apart, is the death of the human experience?
> That’s not what you see when you wear the glasses, you will see a symbol, a series of symbols, a facsimile of life that you will convince yourself is real.
aka the "Digital photos aren't real photos!" argument.
it’s not wrong. it’s what is unique about the AR medium in particular. “heightening reality” is whats in discussion. we can talk about it, but its not the sane discussion as photos, or video games, or VR.
I wouldn’t say that “what if the world was digital!” is some kind of apex creative insight.
More practically the people in power need to own real estate. The metaverse, VR, AR, you’re giving these builders way too much credit by connecting it to creative expression.
Technically speaking, yeah, those things are cool. What’s not cool (anymore?) is that people like Zuck and other similar billionaires are behind such tech. I didn’t give a shit of the millionaires of the 80s/90s… but these billionaires of today, simply suck big time. So fuck them
I'm actually looking forward to AR glasses getting more mainstream. My dream is glasses with displays that show live captions for people speaking. My auditory processing kinda sucks, and live captions would be a huge help in conversations. I'd also see the appeal of a HUD with some basic information like compass direction, clock, and weather, but really just captions would be awesome.
But all of the mainstream glasses are basically just bad earbuds and cameras. The idea of permanent cameras on my face feels creepy as hell, and there are a million better options for earbuds. It also feels ridiculous to get a device with a permanent connection to one single company's AI. It's like a dedicated Hulu button on a smart TV's remote, but several cranked several notches dumber.
I’m deaf and just got a pair of Even G2 glasses, which have a live captioning mode and no camera. They’re already lifechanging, even if they come with the risk of being taken away at any moment if the company shuts down or discontinues support.
You should be skeptical of industrial use case as well. Allowing any device with internet access and a camera on it onto the floor of most electronics manufacturing facility is a nonstarter, phones, smart glasses, or anything of that sort. The other thing is, smart glasses buy nothing over having PCs/assembly line machines with screens for HMI, and standard operating procedures can be printed on paper. Also, if you are actually an operator on an assembly line, wearing these glasses for 10 hours a day is the last thing you want at your job.
The case for them gets even worse for heavy manufacturing industry/trades, since you have to think about safety and liability now: what if these smart glasses fall into the machines and cause an accident? Can these smartglasses can withstand the environmental conditions in the workshop?
Industrial use-cases could end up as fundamentally different product, ex:
* Guiding someone through a complex assembly, it's going to be on pretty much all shift, with effects on thermal management and battery capacity.
* You'll want to swap batteries so that it can be used by another shift, which will take priority over fashion.
* It may also need to incorporate positioning markers and QR codes and external sensor data from a particular environment, sometimes taking preference over any general object recognition.
* Facial recognition won't figure very much.
* Ruggedness and repairability may be prioritized over miniaturization.
* Little to no tolerance for letting the vendor have footage or vague "telemetry" when trade secrets are involved.
In other words, it's like kind of like how the design/use/adoption of freight trains isn't necessarily indicative of the design/use/adoption of pickup trucks. Sure, they both move large things on wheels using diesel power, but...
> * Ruggedness and repairability may be prioritized over miniaturization.
repairability? in what trend are you seeing that being a thing? they'll just make you buy an expensive warranty/insurance plan for replacements. i really don't see tech allowing for repairability
Job sites don't want downtime. Companies aren't going to futz around with a bin of spare replacement glasses if they freeze or the battery dies every four hours.
Industrial and consumer electronics are entirely different industries. Industry isn't typically tolerant of the kind of extended warranty bullshit runaround that consumer brands employ.
For an industrial customer, your thing either needs to be repairable right NOW or it needs to be cheap enough that you can have disposable stock on hand. If your delicate widget can only be repaired by hand-delivering it to nude virgins on a mountaintop, you are not getting that 500k unit contract, you're getting shown to the door.
That is unless you're literally IBM and/or have monopolized your class of utterly indespensible widget. Only then do you have the power to tell Amazon to fuck off and send a warranty claim.
I think something like this might be implemented as part of the helmet for jobs that require it, definitely not built into glasses that will likely always be ridiculous just like riding penny-farthing is kinda ridiculous now.
I disagree. The idea humans will be in the loop and the best way to accelerate things is to teach them slightly faster is fundamentally flawed. Future industrial will be automated, the only humans who will need comprehension will be the maintenance staff or management, and they will have familiarity and/or alternate tooling rendering glasses a noncritical value add at best.
By the time that rolls around, this stuff will be available for cents on the dollar, just as Shenzhen showrooms were full of AR/VR hardware in 2015 and the industry has gone nowhere for 30+ years.
Industrial use cases will be huge once software+AI are firing on all cylinders.
Industry has had entire VR rooms since at least the 1990's, when I saw one in use.
AR glasses are toys compared to what the big oil companies have been using to visualize underground strata since before Facebook et.al. even existed.
Pretending that they're going to revolutionize the industrial space is just grasping at straws to justify a gadget that nobody other than tech bros and perverts want.
The accessibility features for blind and low-sight individuals is life-changing. These are available already for Meta glasses, and I am very hopeful that the Google Audio glasses will be as good.
I keep getting this ad for... Meta? glasses that shows a guy at a concert I guess filming it with his glasses. It zooms out and everyone around him has their phone in the air but not him because he's super cool.
It's like one of those puzzle images where you're supposed to find 20 things wrong with this picture.
Blog owner here. The notification prompt uses standard browser support for this. I know many people don’t like, but there are some that appreciate getting updates this way.
FYI, every major browser has a global switch to disable notification prompts like my blog did. It works as expected.
All of the people whining about the tone of this are way off base. These glasses are a joke because they are too large for the human head. They are visibly crushing the ears of the wearers. They are so large that if you bend your neck or back to look at something they will fall off.
But it's making fun of people who wear glasses
No it isn't. I've had to wear glasses with thick ass lenses since the age of 5 and I am telling you with my 50 years of glasses-wearing experience that these glasses are stupid because they were very clearly designed by people who don't have to wear glasses. Defending these is like saying that people who laugh at bicycle wheels with rounded corners are being shapeist.
It's not about the fashion, or the technology, or even the social applications. It's because these are not ready for market and anyone who makes the mistake of buying them is going to regard them as a $2000 paperweight by the end of week 1.
I feel like there is a lot pf potential for display-based AR in a glasses form factor. I wouldn't want to dismiss that outright. However, the concern about sensors (cameras and microphones) in the glasses is also real, despite them adding potentially the most value to those devices.
The tech will make its way into commercial applications and assistive technology. Beyind that, things can go a couple of ways:
- There is a killer application with mass appeal and thise glasses become common in public
- Consumer devices will lose their cameras due to large scale pushback. This will kill one of their major AI-related selling points (images as context). Microphines, although potentially equally intrusive, are more likely to stay.
- Comsumer devices will fade away in their entirety.
This stuff is probably inevitable since economics will drive data collection. What we really need is a digital bill of rights to protect everyone. Recording in public without consent also needs to end.
The glasses David Gilboa is sporting honestly don’t look that bad. I think putting them in the same “ugly” bucket as Snapchat’s SPECS is a bit of a reach.
Yesterday's story about airpods causing wearers to isolate themselves and become unhappier comes to mind. Headphones in your ears, display in your glasses... about the only way to connect with anyone will be to smell really bad I guess.
Now it's even lower friction. Zuck wants absolutely no delay between you having a moment of inactivity and having reels in your face. They need every single drop of your attention on adverts.
The "smell" will be a pepper sprey! Why people can not just leave strangers alone? Always soliciting attention and "look at me" attitude!
Most people are not "isolating themselves", they have stuff to do and places to be. They do not want to talk about some animal, or current issue of today!
I would encourage anyone who has a chance to book a Vision Pro demo at an Apple Store. It changed my mind in the following way:
Previously, I thought AVPs were expensive, ridiculous and useless. Now I think they are expensive and still mostly ridiculous and useless.
I saw the immersive movies and the immersive sports experiences. If they had AVP support for MLB/NBA games in my market I would absolutely buy a subscription. I think they have Lakers now but I don’t care about that.
From what I understand, there’s still a chicken and egg problem for Meta and Apple with regards to content and devices. It sucks because both companies are flush and could fix it if they wanted to.
I'm rooting for this general class of technology as a platform for sensory augmentation for the blind. I don't know exactly what sonic encoding of spatial information is exactly ideal — I suspect it's something echo-like, only slowed-down — but it's going to be a hell of a lot easier to develop it and support it on commodity hardware. Please no Meta login, though.
As someone who wears glasses, I hate glasses. Yet these wears are never designed for those with glasses so you have to buy add ons to ensure you can see out these glasses.
To have eyesight without glasses would be bliss, minus laser surgery.
Agreed, I can't even remember to wear my prescription eyeglasses that help me see and not get a headache. No chance I'm going to wear worse, heavier, more expensive glasses so I can take pictures and have AI talk to me 24/7.
I agree that VR goggles hit a ceiling due to simple inconvenience. Whether smart glasses will suffer the same fate is a very interesting question.
But the article would be much more effective without the cheap “tech bro” ridicule. Ultimately, after calling every product ugly, the analysis put forward by this author comes down to “short battery life and privacy concerns”.
My wife wore Meta glasses (we borrowed a pair from a friend) on a visit to the Vancouver aquarium and they were frankly amazing. You could just hit a button and say something like “what’s that orange fish in the back?” and it just tells you and then you can read stuff off the plate or get more information if you need.
I get that this kind of dunk polemic is popular among a certain crowd but it’s more incantatory than persuasive. For the rest of us who don’t particularly dress stylishly or whatever I guess it’s fine. I can be tacky. Not the greatest sin.
Yes, and now I can do it with my glasses without casually and needlessly invading the privacy of everyone around me - except the fish and I’m not that convinced by an argument for fish privacy.
I read in another thread on another site that the Snapchat SPECs were targeted at developers. If not are they going to market with what Evan is attempting to wear at over $2K ?? Insights appreciated, NSC.
Ya.. if they can't admit they're fantastic for cycling or other activities where you want hands free access to some of your phones capabilities and don't want your ears obscured, then they aren't being intellectually honest in the argument. I think that's what most people actually get them for.
I think that’s a reasonable characterisation of what people think of these devices.
Even if not strictly for perving it’s still seriously uncool to go around pointing a camera at people 100% of the time. So maybe ‘glasses for inconsiderate people who are sometimes also pervs’ is a better description?
> I think that’s a reasonable characterisation of what people think of these devices.
It's not a reasonable characterization of the people that wear these devices, and that's what the sentence is implying.
> Even if not strictly for perving it’s still seriously uncool to go around pointing a camera at people 100% of the time.
Isn't it great, then, that these glasses don't do that?
Years ago I lived in a country where your type of comment is precisely what much of society said about smartphones. Taking one out in a social event brought a lot of angry stares.
> Isn't it great, then, that these glasses don't do that?
As long as there’s a lens on them the perception remains. Ala panopticon. Particularly the idea that not knowing when you are being watched means you must assume you are being watched all the time. In the case of your glasses this maps 1 to 1. Your camera is there, it is pointing forwards at all times. We do not know what you are or are not filming.
Regarding your smart phone analogy. Which seems to make the point that you shouldn’t argue against the negative aspects of something that may later become popular, I have a story too. Before smart phones were a thing, my school attempted to ban the ‘camera phone’. Which was a pretty reasonable thing to do in that context and at that time. History shows that this was a good idea, even if the levee broke later with the smart phone which has been an absolute negative in school hours.
> Isn't it great, then, that these glasses don't do that?
Are the cameras somehow removable? Is there an obvious lens cap? If not, then everyone in your field of view is at the business end of a camera lens all of the time, and might as well be filming.
Even if I trust the wearer of these glasses to not be constantly recording, I certainly don't trust the manufacturer of them.
I think passthrough has no future. VR games are fun, immersive applications are real, AR adds a dimension to that but without the immersive applications tech bros will keep failing at this one.
I've seen legit-useful AR apps for doctors/surgeons, dentists, firefighters, law enforcement, warehouse workers, etc. Basically anything where you need to be out in the real world doing something that would benefit from having situational-awareness of other non-visual conditions. This is a pretty wide swath of professions, with a lot of potential to save lives. Just having a patient's vital signs projected while a surgeon operates could prevent many deaths on the operating table, along with lots of fuck-ups like leaving a scalpel behind in the patient.
I did quite a bit of work in VR about a decade ago. The VR vs AR delineation was a constant conversation back then too. In meetings, at the bar, and so on: “This VR sure isn’t great but just you wait, AR will be the good one”…
But in reality it’s splitting hairs. Similar to discussing which tone pot values are better for your Stratocaster. Most people just don’t care, nor should they! “Stop trying to make fetch happen” as they say.
I’m inclined to believe in a future a bit less binary and more MR in general. Devices that can handle a variety of experiences from 1% augmented to 100% virtual.
I hope theft deters people from wearing these perv glasses. They're easier to nick than phones since owner isn't gripping them at all. I'd tolerate a fair amount of crime and public disorder as part of this tradeoff, like how we keep predators around to control pests.
The Meta glasses camera has a very wide field of view. You'd need to be quite close to a person to realistically take "pervy" photos, and it'd be really obvious. Seems like it'd be no better at this than a cell phone.
I don't love the idea of smart glasses and I'm definitely very concerned about the implications of their widespread adoption. And yes, most of what we've seen hasn't looked very good.
But when I see a headline like "tacky men with ridiculous glasses" I get a sense that the intent is more to persuade via bullying than anything else, which...I dunno. Doesn't feel great!
It also seems incredibly shortsighted. No fashion conscious person would have been caught dead wearing a smartwatch circa 2012, then Apple partnered with Hermes and eventually things changed. There are all sorts of valid complaints against this tech, but fashion is something so ephemeral that it's a silly to act like it is a long-term hindrance to adoption.
No fashion forward person wears an Apple watch. Anyone, who remotely cares about what's on their wrist wears a whoop and a traditional watch.
Problem with the Apple Watch is it does too much. They should have never enabled Apps on the Apple Watch. Kept it super simple. I hope they'll come up with a new version with an improved form factor and better battery life soon.
Ignoring the fashion context (to which, no comment), totally agree.
I have an Apple Watch SE that I got the battery refurbed after 5 years, 95% of my use is a quick check on my next calendar, setting timers, managing the morning alarm, and tracking medication and exercise. Oh, and constantly putting it into power save mode after I take it off the charger.
It's not a cellular model, so the other 5% is basically letting me know my phone has something to tell me. I have in the past tried to put games on it, but purely as a novelty.
> Apple partnered with Hermes and eventually things changed
no, they didn't; the people who buy Hermes bags still wear Rolex, Cartier, Patek Philippe, ...
It's the "cheaper" Swiss watches -- those in the same price range as the higher end Apple Watches (sub $1000) that have suffered.
I find it to be an acceptable use of mockery, one of the most powerful cultural methods of exposing that the emperor has no clothes
The point of that story was that everyone was going along with something that was obviously nonsense, and the kid who breaks the spell simply tells the truth.
In this situation most people don't buy smart glasses because they don't look good or have a killer use case. It's not the same thing.
They are literally deforming his ears, as you can see in this near-profile photo. If you wear these for more than 5-10 minutes at a time you will either find them painfully uncomfortable or you will damage your ear cartilage. The might have worked great as part of an integrated helmet or something, as glasses they completely fail.
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/live/snap-specs-launch-live-l...
Yup. You're supporting my point, right? People see stuff like that and don't buy it as a result. The emperor doesn't have new clothes, and nobody is acting like he does.
His employees and the lickspittle tech blog press are
it is spiritually the same even if its not exactly the same
Stating the obvious truth and mocking are, spiritually, two very different things.
no, they’re not
Whatever, man. Making fun of those losers is the least damage we can cause to them. No need to defend the Zucks and co. like they were kids (although I agree they behave like children).
I'm not finding it to be any different from "Four eyes!"
In this instance, it's directed at people who are literally at the top of the world, having amassed almost unthinkable power and influence, and want to start a fashion trend specifically to grow their business empires.
So yeah, it's a tiny bit different than bullying a classmate for having bad eyesight.
> it's directed at people who are literally at the top of the world
The very first sentence in the article associates people who wear these with "pervs".
So no, this is not merely directed at "the top of the world".
As an aside: VRs were "the cool thing" in the 90's and 00's. They never became practical, and fell out of favor. "Normal" people never stopped mocking those who used them. Now that Meta has made glasses that actually come close to looking normal, tech folks mock back ...? I just don't get it.
Yes, I get all the privacy concerns. But making fun because of very subjective reasons like appearance? It undercuts all the privacy concerns.
People need to grow up.
This would be a great argument if there were any non-pervy application for these glasses. They're marketed at people who already have screens and better cameras in their pockets and on their wrists. "Clandestine" use cases are the only application here.
Ugh, trying not to get baited into stuff like this but -
There are absolutely non-pervy reasons why your hands might be occupied but you want to record a video.
I agree but I also feel like surely these are so few and far between that no reasonable person would introduce a new tech device into their day-to-day wear for this purpose?
You really just don’t require constant recording of your surroundings, in a way that is not socially acceptable, in order to get around your hands being full.
In the situations where we DO need that capability, we already have solutions, like go pros. What makes this different is that these are for all the time, and targeted at candid strangers in public. Not, like, the mountain bike path. So, to me, that makes them fundamentally perverted.
This is why gopros exist.
I mean, this is logically no different than saying that we shouldn't use smartphone cameras because DSLRs exist.
It is, because when you're using a smartphone camera you're not trying to hide the fact that you're filming, or at least it's harder to do so. There are already ways to film without having to hold a camera, and those ways produce a better product. The advantage of the glasses is you can be a creep but be less obvious about it.
- glasses are only for "clandestine" use
- any use case I could suggest will be dismissed because other tools exist
- those tools are "better" partly because they're not covert
- which re-asserts that covertness is the glasses' only distinguishing feature
- therefore the only use is being a creep
Am I reading this right? If so, it's circular, and I don't think I can do much more than just point that out.
Ah yes, because DSLRs are hands free?
> This would be a great argument if there were any non-pervy application for these glasses.
Have you even bothered researching it?
Can you please go and respond to the comments in this submission and let them know you are denying their reality?
Use a GoPro or something. You'll get better quality video and you won't look like you're trying to hide the fact that you're filming.
So it's clear you're not going to bother researching into why people use it.
No, I don't need to research it. I have all the evidence I need.
> The very first sentence in the article associates people who wear these with "pervs".
But they're literally the target market. Nobody else needs a hidden camera on their face.
zuck is trying to push bad, ugly glasses to profit at the expense of causing nefarious social impact. the blog is mocking the ugliness of the glasses. it represents how out of touch zuck is. i’m not sure how you got to “four eyes” from there
although it's true and funny that rich assholes often have terrible taste, it's important that criticism of pervert glasses doesn't make their ugliness load-bearing. what happens if the next gen looks good, we're suddenly okay with them?
It's not about taste! They're literally too big to function effectively! If you bed over to look at something they will fall off your face. It's like offering running shoes with kilogram-weight batteries on the bottom, a basic failure to understand the problem.
I can't believe people are trying to make excuses for a product that is clearly not ready for consumer applications.
i dont think the blog is proposing a long-term criteria. the ugliness is funny and worth noting now because its currently happening and a great symbol of them pushing plainly horrible stuff down our throats
> zuck is trying to push bad, ugly glasses
...
> i’m not sure how you got to “four eyes” from there
I'm guessing you're younger than me. In my youth, having glasses meant being ugly.
It doesn't mean that anymore. But having "smart glasses" does mean "jerk".
i know what it means. you’re projecting something completely inappropriate, i’m guessing from your own life, onto the blogs criticism.
You use normal glasses to see better. You buy a smart glass to record people without their knowledge. The only thing similar in these objects is that your wear them on your face.
... These are people with fine vision, wearing ugly glasses by choice. It's not at all comparable.
I can criticize anyone's choices. Needing glasses is not a choice. Wearing Meta creep-shot raybans is a choice i will never stop criticizing
Prescription glasses are a medical device that corrects for a disability.
This shit ain't it.
Why are you trying so hard to shoehorn inappropriate criticism of people with disabilities... Into appropriate criticism of this technocrap?
But they are ridiculous glasses. They're so big that they're visibly crushing the top of the Snapchat guy's ears. As a lifelong glasses wearer, this is a billboard size red flag.
This is an emperor's new clothes kinda situation. You could say 'our royal personage seems to be experiencing a sartorial deficit' or you could say 'the emperor's butt naked.'
I think there’s a difference between full-on “bullying” and what I’d call “blunt criticism”. I think bullying requires an intent to silence or otherwise coerce through fear. Blunt criticism is more about skipping the niceties and saying it plainly, and accepting that your subject might get offended as a result. Calling someone “tacky” is way more in the blunt criticism camp I think. It’s certainly not “nice”, but there’s no way that I read this blog article as trying to change Mark Zuckerberg’s mind through fear. Nobody is getting pilloried for being tacky, and tackiness can even be repositioned as desirable through the lens of nostalgia or similar.
Does it make you feel like getting them out of spite? Real question.
Real answer: more than I'd like. I am a contrarian who has intentionally worked to temper that impulse.
But...nah, not really.
I will say though: The only time I know for sure I knew someone had a pair of Meta Ray-Bans was in my kid's youth baseball league; The coach would film the kids batting while he pitched and shared the videos with us. People loved it. There are definitely cases where hands-free video recording would come in handy.
A GoPro with a chest or hat harness would take much better videos
The benefit of glasses is that you know for sure what they're recording cause they're recording pretty much what you're looking at. A GoPro on your chest could be angled weirdly and you'd have no idea.
> hat harness
I know what you're saying—but there's also an Emperor's New Clothes aspect to this. I mean, someone might really need to say, "Hey guys, and you also look ridiculous."
(Edit: I should read more of the comments—someone beat me to it.)
Slips past the filters when “Voyeur glasses let you record your creepy interactions with females” gets flagged.
None of those mentioned in this post will ever read it. I wish I could persuade Zuck to be a less awful person…
They are billionaires, so it’s fine for us to make fun of them (because the joke is on us)
> I get a sense that the intent is more to persuade via bullying than anything else, which...I dunno. Doesn't feel great!
Most advertising persuades you with less-than-rational means. It's just fighting fire with fire.
And it's quite justified, because in this case, it punches up against a technology with a net-negative social impact.
I, of course, could never confirm intent in an online comment thread, but I suspect that some people like to give themselves permission to be mean.
(This suspicion hasn't been lessened by some of the replies I've received.)
Lack of bullying is exactly why the world is now run by sociopathic dorks like the ones pictured in the article
This seems implausible.
Is this meant to be even close to a reasonable perspective?
I could equally say "Bullying is exactly why Trump is in power and Elon Musk ran DOGE".
Both can be true.
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This feels like I'm reading a comment written by anti-video game moms in the early 90s talking about the stupid unfashionable nerds and how they were ushering in a frightening new age of fewer values and greater social isolation.
I dunno, I'd love to have elf-like abilities to see systems of energy in the world around me that the human eye can't see, like wind patterns, and be able to zoom in on plants and animals in the garden and woods where I hike. I can't wait to see the skins people create for themselves, just walking around the world on holidays with fun appearances. And I'm excited for all the identity crises coming. Philosophy as physical reality.
But I guess this is as diverse of a human experience as y'all are willing to tolerate. :/
People already walk around with skins created for themselves. Clothing choices, hair styling, tanning, tattoos, piercings, colored contacts, fur suits, teeth sharpening, surgery for changing the shape of various parts of their body, and probably more that I'm not thinking of at the moment.
I don't think the people who would make AR avatars would exceed the groups of people who do the more uncommon forms of the above. A very niche thing.
If you want to wear these things in your own garden, go ahead.
But please don’t bring the panopticon to the forests.
> they were ushering in a frightening new age of fewer values and greater social isolation
For as much as I love video games, it's really really what happened, though.
That’s not what you see when you wear the glasses, you will see a symbol, a series of symbols, a facsimile of life that you will convince yourself is real.
It’s not elf like, it’s not magic, it’s not a sense, quite the opposite, it’s replacing sensing and processing with reading. The death of aptitude, prowess, and the human experience.
> replacing sensing and processing with reading. The death of aptitude, prowess, and the human experience.
Replacing something all animals do with something uniquely human, perhaps the most important thing that sets us apart, is the death of the human experience?
Other animals use symbols, Koko clearly used symbols.
Not using our senses except to read symbols is the death of human experience.
> That’s not what you see when you wear the glasses, you will see a symbol, a series of symbols, a facsimile of life that you will convince yourself is real.
aka the "Digital photos aren't real photos!" argument.
No, it’s the “reading about exercise isn’t exercise” argument
it’s not wrong. it’s what is unique about the AR medium in particular. “heightening reality” is whats in discussion. we can talk about it, but its not the sane discussion as photos, or video games, or VR.
I wouldn’t say that “what if the world was digital!” is some kind of apex creative insight.
More practically the people in power need to own real estate. The metaverse, VR, AR, you’re giving these builders way too much credit by connecting it to creative expression.
They want to own the land.
90s’ moms were right all along!!
Technically speaking, yeah, those things are cool. What’s not cool (anymore?) is that people like Zuck and other similar billionaires are behind such tech. I didn’t give a shit of the millionaires of the 80s/90s… but these billionaires of today, simply suck big time. So fuck them
I'm actually looking forward to AR glasses getting more mainstream. My dream is glasses with displays that show live captions for people speaking. My auditory processing kinda sucks, and live captions would be a huge help in conversations. I'd also see the appeal of a HUD with some basic information like compass direction, clock, and weather, but really just captions would be awesome.
But all of the mainstream glasses are basically just bad earbuds and cameras. The idea of permanent cameras on my face feels creepy as hell, and there are a million better options for earbuds. It also feels ridiculous to get a device with a permanent connection to one single company's AI. It's like a dedicated Hulu button on a smart TV's remote, but several cranked several notches dumber.
I’m deaf and just got a pair of Even G2 glasses, which have a live captioning mode and no camera. They’re already lifechanging, even if they come with the risk of being taken away at any moment if the company shuts down or discontinues support.
Industrial use cases will be huge once software+AI are firing on all cylinders.
I’m a skeptic on the consumer side of this being a runaway hit like smartphones.
Enterprise and industrial and the trades use cases in physical space is big.
You should be skeptical of industrial use case as well. Allowing any device with internet access and a camera on it onto the floor of most electronics manufacturing facility is a nonstarter, phones, smart glasses, or anything of that sort. The other thing is, smart glasses buy nothing over having PCs/assembly line machines with screens for HMI, and standard operating procedures can be printed on paper. Also, if you are actually an operator on an assembly line, wearing these glasses for 10 hours a day is the last thing you want at your job.
The case for them gets even worse for heavy manufacturing industry/trades, since you have to think about safety and liability now: what if these smart glasses fall into the machines and cause an accident? Can these smartglasses can withstand the environmental conditions in the workshop?
Industrial use-cases could end up as fundamentally different product, ex:
* Guiding someone through a complex assembly, it's going to be on pretty much all shift, with effects on thermal management and battery capacity.
* You'll want to swap batteries so that it can be used by another shift, which will take priority over fashion.
* It may also need to incorporate positioning markers and QR codes and external sensor data from a particular environment, sometimes taking preference over any general object recognition.
* Facial recognition won't figure very much.
* Ruggedness and repairability may be prioritized over miniaturization.
* Little to no tolerance for letting the vendor have footage or vague "telemetry" when trade secrets are involved.
In other words, it's like kind of like how the design/use/adoption of freight trains isn't necessarily indicative of the design/use/adoption of pickup trucks. Sure, they both move large things on wheels using diesel power, but...
> * Ruggedness and repairability may be prioritized over miniaturization.
repairability? in what trend are you seeing that being a thing? they'll just make you buy an expensive warranty/insurance plan for replacements. i really don't see tech allowing for repairability
Job sites don't want downtime. Companies aren't going to futz around with a bin of spare replacement glasses if they freeze or the battery dies every four hours.
Industrial and consumer electronics are entirely different industries. Industry isn't typically tolerant of the kind of extended warranty bullshit runaround that consumer brands employ.
For an industrial customer, your thing either needs to be repairable right NOW or it needs to be cheap enough that you can have disposable stock on hand. If your delicate widget can only be repaired by hand-delivering it to nude virgins on a mountaintop, you are not getting that 500k unit contract, you're getting shown to the door.
That is unless you're literally IBM and/or have monopolized your class of utterly indespensible widget. Only then do you have the power to tell Amazon to fuck off and send a warranty claim.
I think something like this might be implemented as part of the helmet for jobs that require it, definitely not built into glasses that will likely always be ridiculous just like riding penny-farthing is kinda ridiculous now.
I install heavy machinery for a living.
What exactly do you envision these things will help me with?
In the long run it could spread from commercial to consumer scenarios; perhaps extra fast if there was adoption in the services sector.
Are you sure?
Wasn’t HoloLens (from Microsoft) squarely aimed at this use case? What went wrong there?
I disagree. The idea humans will be in the loop and the best way to accelerate things is to teach them slightly faster is fundamentally flawed. Future industrial will be automated, the only humans who will need comprehension will be the maintenance staff or management, and they will have familiarity and/or alternate tooling rendering glasses a noncritical value add at best.
By the time that rolls around, this stuff will be available for cents on the dollar, just as Shenzhen showrooms were full of AR/VR hardware in 2015 and the industry has gone nowhere for 30+ years.
It would be amazing to be able to look at an equipment nameplate and pull up a cutsheet, installation and operations manual, etc.
I can already do that with my phone and google lens. I don't have to strap extra crap to my face or let a device spy on everything I see.
That’s a good point, my electricians already have iPads and are wearing eye protection. I’ll have to check out Google lens, thanks!
Industrial use cases will be huge once software+AI are firing on all cylinders.
Industry has had entire VR rooms since at least the 1990's, when I saw one in use.
AR glasses are toys compared to what the big oil companies have been using to visualize underground strata since before Facebook et.al. even existed.
Pretending that they're going to revolutionize the industrial space is just grasping at straws to justify a gadget that nobody other than tech bros and perverts want.
The accessibility features for blind and low-sight individuals is life-changing. These are available already for Meta glasses, and I am very hopeful that the Google Audio glasses will be as good.
The problem is not the glasses.
I keep getting this ad for... Meta? glasses that shows a guy at a concert I guess filming it with his glasses. It zooms out and everyone around him has their phone in the air but not him because he's super cool.
It's like one of those puzzle images where you're supposed to find 20 things wrong with this picture.
Why did this site prompt me for permission to send notifications? Did my browser just do something weird? Seems strange
Tons of sites do that, because everyone who designs websites is a moron.
Blog owner here. The notification prompt uses standard browser support for this. I know many people don’t like, but there are some that appreciate getting updates this way.
FYI, every major browser has a global switch to disable notification prompts like my blog did. It works as expected.
He doesn't like Zuckerberg's glasses, but he likes using his same dirty tactics!
same question
Okay, great, I was genuinely not certain it was the site or something I somehow did
All of the people whining about the tone of this are way off base. These glasses are a joke because they are too large for the human head. They are visibly crushing the ears of the wearers. They are so large that if you bend your neck or back to look at something they will fall off.
But it's making fun of people who wear glasses
No it isn't. I've had to wear glasses with thick ass lenses since the age of 5 and I am telling you with my 50 years of glasses-wearing experience that these glasses are stupid because they were very clearly designed by people who don't have to wear glasses. Defending these is like saying that people who laugh at bicycle wheels with rounded corners are being shapeist.
It's not about the fashion, or the technology, or even the social applications. It's because these are not ready for market and anyone who makes the mistake of buying them is going to regard them as a $2000 paperweight by the end of week 1.
These people have no taste.
But I must admit, similar things regarding style were said about the AirPods and here we are.
I feel like there is a lot pf potential for display-based AR in a glasses form factor. I wouldn't want to dismiss that outright. However, the concern about sensors (cameras and microphones) in the glasses is also real, despite them adding potentially the most value to those devices.
The tech will make its way into commercial applications and assistive technology. Beyind that, things can go a couple of ways:
- There is a killer application with mass appeal and thise glasses become common in public
- Consumer devices will lose their cameras due to large scale pushback. This will kill one of their major AI-related selling points (images as context). Microphines, although potentially equally intrusive, are more likely to stay.
- Comsumer devices will fade away in their entirety.
Since when was looking ridiculous a hindrance to being fashionable?
links to pages which ask if they can send you notifications should be insta-flagged + banned on hn
This stuff is probably inevitable since economics will drive data collection. What we really need is a digital bill of rights to protect everyone. Recording in public without consent also needs to end.
> Sorry for exposing you to this image
The photo captions are hilarious: "Style icons"; "Ahead of his time"
The glasses David Gilboa is sporting honestly don’t look that bad. I think putting them in the same “ugly” bucket as Snapchat’s SPECS is a bit of a reach.
Yesterday's story about airpods causing wearers to isolate themselves and become unhappier comes to mind. Headphones in your ears, display in your glasses... about the only way to connect with anyone will be to smell really bad I guess.
I can just imagine people walking around in a daze while instagram reels play endlessly in their meta spy glasses.
Folks are already walking (and driving, which is more scary) in a daze, glued to their doomscrolling rectangles
Now it's even lower friction. Zuck wants absolutely no delay between you having a moment of inactivity and having reels in your face. They need every single drop of your attention on adverts.
The "smell" will be a pepper sprey! Why people can not just leave strangers alone? Always soliciting attention and "look at me" attitude!
Most people are not "isolating themselves", they have stuff to do and places to be. They do not want to talk about some animal, or current issue of today!
Somebody saying hello to you has you reaching for pepper spray?
That doesn't sound distinct from "isolating themselves". Some people actually enjoy connecting with people.
My brother in christ, what are you even talking about
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I would encourage anyone who has a chance to book a Vision Pro demo at an Apple Store. It changed my mind in the following way:
Previously, I thought AVPs were expensive, ridiculous and useless. Now I think they are expensive and still mostly ridiculous and useless.
I saw the immersive movies and the immersive sports experiences. If they had AVP support for MLB/NBA games in my market I would absolutely buy a subscription. I think they have Lakers now but I don’t care about that.
From what I understand, there’s still a chicken and egg problem for Meta and Apple with regards to content and devices. It sucks because both companies are flush and could fix it if they wanted to.
The device itself still costs too much though.
I'm rooting for this general class of technology as a platform for sensory augmentation for the blind. I don't know exactly what sonic encoding of spatial information is exactly ideal — I suspect it's something echo-like, only slowed-down — but it's going to be a hell of a lot easier to develop it and support it on commodity hardware. Please no Meta login, though.
Zuckerberg looks like Woody Allen in that photo. :)
and equally creepy
As someone who wears glasses, I hate glasses. Yet these wears are never designed for those with glasses so you have to buy add ons to ensure you can see out these glasses.
To have eyesight without glasses would be bliss, minus laser surgery.
Agreed, I can't even remember to wear my prescription eyeglasses that help me see and not get a headache. No chance I'm going to wear worse, heavier, more expensive glasses so I can take pictures and have AI talk to me 24/7.
I guess I'll move to a cabin in the woods.
The new Google ones don't look too bad.
Why this post was flagged?
Clearly, someone was offended.
I agree that VR goggles hit a ceiling due to simple inconvenience. Whether smart glasses will suffer the same fate is a very interesting question. But the article would be much more effective without the cheap “tech bro” ridicule. Ultimately, after calling every product ugly, the analysis put forward by this author comes down to “short battery life and privacy concerns”.
No, it wouldn’t.
My wife wore Meta glasses (we borrowed a pair from a friend) on a visit to the Vancouver aquarium and they were frankly amazing. You could just hit a button and say something like “what’s that orange fish in the back?” and it just tells you and then you can read stuff off the plate or get more information if you need.
I get that this kind of dunk polemic is popular among a certain crowd but it’s more incantatory than persuasive. For the rest of us who don’t particularly dress stylishly or whatever I guess it’s fine. I can be tacky. Not the greatest sin.
you can already do this with your phone without casually and needlessly invading the privacy of everyone around you
Is the phone's camera more privacy-preserving than the glasses's camera?
Yes, obviously? Holding a phone to film someone is obvious, having glasses that film is just having glasses…
What kind of privacy are people supposed to expect in a public place like an aquarium?
Yes, and now I can do it with my glasses without casually and needlessly invading the privacy of everyone around me - except the fish and I’m not that convinced by an argument for fish privacy.
I read in another thread on another site that the Snapchat SPECs were targeted at developers. If not are they going to market with what Evan is attempting to wear at over $2K ?? Insights appreciated, NSC.
> sold a few million camera glasses for pervs
I stopped reading.
If you want to convince people, try to meet them where they're at.
Ya.. if they can't admit they're fantastic for cycling or other activities where you want hands free access to some of your phones capabilities and don't want your ears obscured, then they aren't being intellectually honest in the argument. I think that's what most people actually get them for.
> sold a few million camera glasses for pervs
I think that’s a reasonable characterisation of what people think of these devices.
Even if not strictly for perving it’s still seriously uncool to go around pointing a camera at people 100% of the time. So maybe ‘glasses for inconsiderate people who are sometimes also pervs’ is a better description?
> I think that’s a reasonable characterisation of what people think of these devices.
It's not a reasonable characterization of the people that wear these devices, and that's what the sentence is implying.
> Even if not strictly for perving it’s still seriously uncool to go around pointing a camera at people 100% of the time.
Isn't it great, then, that these glasses don't do that?
Years ago I lived in a country where your type of comment is precisely what much of society said about smartphones. Taking one out in a social event brought a lot of angry stares.
Welcome to that demographic.
> Isn't it great, then, that these glasses don't do that?
As long as there’s a lens on them the perception remains. Ala panopticon. Particularly the idea that not knowing when you are being watched means you must assume you are being watched all the time. In the case of your glasses this maps 1 to 1. Your camera is there, it is pointing forwards at all times. We do not know what you are or are not filming.
Regarding your smart phone analogy. Which seems to make the point that you shouldn’t argue against the negative aspects of something that may later become popular, I have a story too. Before smart phones were a thing, my school attempted to ban the ‘camera phone’. Which was a pretty reasonable thing to do in that context and at that time. History shows that this was a good idea, even if the levee broke later with the smart phone which has been an absolute negative in school hours.
> Isn't it great, then, that these glasses don't do that?
Are the cameras somehow removable? Is there an obvious lens cap? If not, then everyone in your field of view is at the business end of a camera lens all of the time, and might as well be filming.
Even if I trust the wearer of these glasses to not be constantly recording, I certainly don't trust the manufacturer of them.
What country is that, sounds amazing?
I wasn’t trying to convincing anyone anything. But that these glasses with cameras are pretty popular among pervs is a fact.
I think passthrough has no future. VR games are fun, immersive applications are real, AR adds a dimension to that but without the immersive applications tech bros will keep failing at this one.
VR is for games, AR is for businesses.
I've seen legit-useful AR apps for doctors/surgeons, dentists, firefighters, law enforcement, warehouse workers, etc. Basically anything where you need to be out in the real world doing something that would benefit from having situational-awareness of other non-visual conditions. This is a pretty wide swath of professions, with a lot of potential to save lives. Just having a patient's vital signs projected while a surgeon operates could prevent many deaths on the operating table, along with lots of fuck-ups like leaving a scalpel behind in the patient.
I did quite a bit of work in VR about a decade ago. The VR vs AR delineation was a constant conversation back then too. In meetings, at the bar, and so on: “This VR sure isn’t great but just you wait, AR will be the good one”…
But in reality it’s splitting hairs. Similar to discussing which tone pot values are better for your Stratocaster. Most people just don’t care, nor should they! “Stop trying to make fetch happen” as they say.
I’m inclined to believe in a future a bit less binary and more MR in general. Devices that can handle a variety of experiences from 1% augmented to 100% virtual.
Well as long as we're all stating opionins at each other, I think bikes with 650b tires are the future
In the future, all cars will have fins
> AR adds
what really worries me would be AR ads
If AR glasses could run an adblocker for the real world, that might convince me to buy a pair.
I'd pay top dollar for an adblocker that would replace ads with "They Live" references
This is so much like something of the amazing series Silicon Valley. Fucking billionaires.
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I hope theft deters people from wearing these perv glasses. They're easier to nick than phones since owner isn't gripping them at all. I'd tolerate a fair amount of crime and public disorder as part of this tradeoff, like how we keep predators around to control pests.
The Meta glasses camera has a very wide field of view. You'd need to be quite close to a person to realistically take "pervy" photos, and it'd be really obvious. Seems like it'd be no better at this than a cell phone.