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Brendinooo 57 minutes ago [-]
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!
slg 47 minutes ago [-]
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.
websap 37 minutes ago [-]
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.
smokedetector1 54 minutes ago [-]
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
Brendinooo 47 minutes ago [-]
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.
smokedetector1 45 minutes ago [-]
it is spiritually the same even if its not exactly the same
Brendinooo 38 minutes ago [-]
Stating the obvious truth and mocking are, spiritually, two very different things.
smokedetector1 25 minutes ago [-]
no, they’re not
BeetleB 48 minutes ago [-]
I'm not finding it to be any different from "Four eyes!"
zerobees 42 minutes ago [-]
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.
BeetleB 32 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
bigfishrunning 27 minutes ago [-]
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.
Brendinooo 22 minutes ago [-]
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.
bigfishrunning 11 minutes ago [-]
This is why gopros exist.
BeetleB 21 minutes ago [-]
> 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?
bigfishrunning 10 minutes ago [-]
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.
smokedetector1 46 minutes ago [-]
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
soiltype 28 minutes ago [-]
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?
smokedetector1 9 minutes ago [-]
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
BeetleB 44 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
bigfishrunning 26 minutes ago [-]
It doesn't mean that anymore. But having "smart glasses" does mean "jerk".
smokedetector1 44 minutes ago [-]
i know what it means. you’re projecting something completely inappropriate, i’m guessing from your own life, onto the blogs criticism.
vkou 46 minutes ago [-]
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?
tech_ken 28 minutes ago [-]
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.
reactordev 54 minutes ago [-]
Slips past the filters when “Voyeur glasses let you record your creepy interactions with females” gets flagged.
quantified 48 minutes ago [-]
Does it make you feel like getting them out of spite? Real question.
Brendinooo 44 minutes ago [-]
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.
bigfishrunning 24 minutes ago [-]
A GoPro with a chest or hat harness would take much better videos
vkou 49 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
Brendinooo 35 minutes ago [-]
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.)
sdevonoes 44 minutes ago [-]
They are billionaires, so it’s fine for us to make fun of them (because the joke is on us)
toasty228 36 minutes ago [-]
Lack of bullying is exactly why the world is now run by sociopathic dorks like the ones pictured in the article
drdeca 18 minutes ago [-]
This seems implausible.
BeetleB 30 minutes ago [-]
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".
aaron695 31 minutes ago [-]
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entontoent 45 minutes ago [-]
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. :/
Affric 37 minutes ago [-]
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.
lmm 29 minutes ago [-]
> 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?
gavinray 23 minutes ago [-]
> a facsimile of life that you will convince yourself is real
This already describes our base experience of "reality". It's a predictive sensory hallucination.
BeetleB 29 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
apsurd 27 minutes ago [-]
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.
apsurd 35 minutes ago [-]
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.
sdevonoes 41 minutes ago [-]
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
delecti 33 minutes ago [-]
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.
SkiFreeWin3 1 hours ago [-]
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.
YuechenLi 12 minutes ago [-]
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?
Terr_ 1 hours ago [-]
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...
dylan604 58 minutes ago [-]
> * 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
hdndjsbbs 48 minutes ago [-]
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.
vitally3643 48 minutes ago [-]
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.
cadamsdotcom 17 minutes ago [-]
Are you sure?
Wasn’t HoloLens (from Microsoft) squarely aimed at this use case? What went wrong there?
merelysounds 55 minutes ago [-]
In the long run it could spread from commercial to consumer scenarios; perhaps extra fast if there was adoption in the services sector.
contingencies 45 minutes ago [-]
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.
quickthrowman 1 hours ago [-]
It would be amazing to be able to look at an equipment nameplate and pull up a cutsheet, installation and operations manual, etc.
01100011 1 hours ago [-]
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.
quickthrowman 43 minutes ago [-]
That’s a good point, my electricians already have iPads and are wearing eye protection. I’ll have to check out Google lens, thanks!
reaperducer 1 hours ago [-]
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.
optymizer 7 minutes ago [-]
Years ago I was assigned to work on the Meta RayBan glasses. I was skeptical at first, but after wearing them on vacation, I understood the value.
First, it's much faster to take pictures and it feels natural. Compared to that, taking out a phone, holding it in front of you, launching the camera app and pressing a button starts feeling archaic and clunky. Plus, the pictures taken with glasses end up looking exactly how you remember the moment, not at a slightly different angle.
Second, when the battery dies, they're still sunglasses and are useful, as opposed to other devices like my Samsung watch that is useless if I forget to charge it.
That said, it is too easy to capture random people in your videos, both because there is no obvious device sticking out and because people are not trained to look for the white LED. I always tried to avoid filming others as I filmed my kids running around, even if we were in a public place with no expectation of privacy, but the little white LED is not sufficient to let people know you're filming and I could see how it could make people feel uneasy, because of its stealth nature compared to filming using a phone. People aren't always going to be ethical with their smartglasses and they do enable easy stealth recording.
Michael Abrash, who iirc was chief architect behind the glasses, said something along the lines of "we will let society figure out how to resolve the ethical questions", which to me always seemed a tad irresponsible. "Move fast and break things" should not be acceptable when the thing that breaks affects an entire society.
Now I see this exact words said by CEOs about AI. It is actually irresponsible to just focus on building tech, release it and proclaim "deal with it" to everyone at large. The soccer mom busy with raising kids doesn't want to or need to deal with yet another thing.
We need to force tech companies to behave ethically, somehow, because right now they have no incentive to do so.
My impression is that the AR glasses vision will not come true anytime soon, not until they start looking like regular glasses. From an engineering view, heat dissipation will burn your skin. From a user perspective, they dont provide sufficient everyday value.
Also, and that's the elephant in the room: we all know they'll just be showing you ads everywhere you look.
Ratfor 40 minutes ago [-]
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.
31 minutes ago [-]
svachalek 46 minutes ago [-]
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.
Hugsbox 1 hours ago [-]
Why did this site prompt me for permission to send notifications? Did my browser just do something weird? Seems strange
caymanjim 52 minutes ago [-]
Tons of sites do that, because everyone who designs websites is a moron.
BeetleB 47 minutes ago [-]
He doesn't like Zuckerberg's glasses, but he likes using his same dirty tactics!
zachmorrison 1 hours ago [-]
same question
Hugsbox 54 minutes ago [-]
Okay, great, I was genuinely not certain it was the site or something I somehow did
27 minutes ago [-]
gherkinnn 42 minutes ago [-]
These people have no taste.
But I must admit, similar things regarding style were said about the AirPods and here we are.
semiinfinitely 50 minutes ago [-]
links to pages which ask if they can send you notifications should be insta-flagged + banned on hn
dieselgate 59 minutes ago [-]
> Sorry for exposing you to this image
The photo captions are hilarious: "Style icons"; "Ahead of his time"
joemi 46 minutes ago [-]
Since when was looking ridiculous a hindrance to being fashionable?
dools 35 minutes ago [-]
The new Google ones don't look too bad.
janalsncm 48 minutes ago [-]
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.
19 minutes ago [-]
layer8 52 minutes ago [-]
Zuckerberg looks like Woody Allen in that photo. :)
idreyn 43 minutes ago [-]
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.
panny 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Gigachad 1 hours ago [-]
I can just imagine people walking around in a daze while instagram reels play endlessly in their meta spy glasses.
VTimofeenko 48 minutes ago [-]
Folks are already walking (and driving, which is more scary) in a daze, glued to their doomscrolling rectangles
Gigachad 16 minutes ago [-]
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.
throe93934 1 hours ago [-]
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!
rfrey 39 minutes ago [-]
Somebody saying hello to you has you reaching for pepper spray?
recursive 47 minutes ago [-]
That doesn't sound distinct from "isolating themselves". Some people actually enjoy connecting with people.
Hugsbox 35 minutes ago [-]
My brother in christ, what are you even talking about
cindyllm 1 hours ago [-]
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arjie 52 minutes ago [-]
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.
milkshakes 46 minutes ago [-]
you can already do this with your phone without casually and needlessly invading the privacy of everyone around you
AgentME 31 minutes ago [-]
Is the phone's camera more privacy-preserving than the glasses's camera?
frizlab 14 minutes ago [-]
Yes, obviously? Holding a phone to film someone is obvious, having glasses that film is just having glasses…
arjie 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
doublerabbit 55 minutes ago [-]
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.
hdndjsbbs 29 minutes ago [-]
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.
montag 51 minutes ago [-]
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”.
needSomeCoffee 57 minutes ago [-]
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.
PaulHoule 2 hours ago [-]
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.
nostrademons 54 minutes ago [-]
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.
mrkpdl 52 minutes ago [-]
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.
miladyincontrol 1 hours ago [-]
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.
malfist 1 hours ago [-]
Well as long as we're all stating opionins at each other, I think bikes with 650b tires are the future
bigfishrunning 15 minutes ago [-]
In the future, all cars will have fins
dylan604 54 minutes ago [-]
> AR adds
what really worries me would be AR ads
marssaxman 49 minutes ago [-]
If AR glasses could run an adblocker for the real world, that might convince me to buy a pair.
VTimofeenko 45 minutes ago [-]
I'd pay top dollar for an adblocker that would replace ads with "They Live" references
websap 39 minutes ago [-]
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lostlogin 1 hours ago [-]
This is so much like something of the amazing series Silicon Valley. Fucking billionaires.
BeetleB 49 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
mrkpdl 44 minutes ago [-]
> 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?
BeetleB 22 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
delis-thumbs-7e 56 seconds ago [-]
What country is that, sounds amazing?
bigfishrunning 12 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
tracerbulletx 38 minutes ago [-]
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.
_dain_ 55 minutes ago [-]
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.
bjterry 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
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!
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.
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.
So yeah, it's a tiny bit different than bullying a classmate for having bad eyesight.
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.
There are absolutely non-pervy reasons why your hands might be occupied but you want to record a video.
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?
...
> 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.
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...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.
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.
(This suspicion hasn't been lessened by some of the replies I've received.)
I could equally say "Bullying is exactly why Trump is in power and Elon Musk ran DOGE".
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. :/
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 something all animals do with something uniquely human, perhaps the most important thing that sets us apart, is the death of the human experience?
aka the "Digital photos aren't real photos!" argument.
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.
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 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.
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?
* 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...
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
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.
Wasn’t HoloLens (from Microsoft) squarely aimed at this use case? What went wrong there?
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.
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.
First, it's much faster to take pictures and it feels natural. Compared to that, taking out a phone, holding it in front of you, launching the camera app and pressing a button starts feeling archaic and clunky. Plus, the pictures taken with glasses end up looking exactly how you remember the moment, not at a slightly different angle.
Second, when the battery dies, they're still sunglasses and are useful, as opposed to other devices like my Samsung watch that is useless if I forget to charge it.
That said, it is too easy to capture random people in your videos, both because there is no obvious device sticking out and because people are not trained to look for the white LED. I always tried to avoid filming others as I filmed my kids running around, even if we were in a public place with no expectation of privacy, but the little white LED is not sufficient to let people know you're filming and I could see how it could make people feel uneasy, because of its stealth nature compared to filming using a phone. People aren't always going to be ethical with their smartglasses and they do enable easy stealth recording.
Michael Abrash, who iirc was chief architect behind the glasses, said something along the lines of "we will let society figure out how to resolve the ethical questions", which to me always seemed a tad irresponsible. "Move fast and break things" should not be acceptable when the thing that breaks affects an entire society.
Now I see this exact words said by CEOs about AI. It is actually irresponsible to just focus on building tech, release it and proclaim "deal with it" to everyone at large. The soccer mom busy with raising kids doesn't want to or need to deal with yet another thing.
We need to force tech companies to behave ethically, somehow, because right now they have no incentive to do so.
My impression is that the AR glasses vision will not come true anytime soon, not until they start looking like regular glasses. From an engineering view, heat dissipation will burn your skin. From a user perspective, they dont provide sufficient everyday value.
Also, and that's the elephant in the room: we all know they'll just be showing you ads everywhere you look.
The problem is not the glasses.
It's like one of those puzzle images where you're supposed to find 20 things wrong with this picture.
But I must admit, similar things regarding style were said about the AirPods and here we are.
The photo captions are hilarious: "Style icons"; "Ahead of his time"
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.
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 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.
To have eyesight without glasses would be bliss, minus laser surgery.
I guess I'll move to a cabin in the woods.
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.
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.
what really worries me would be AR ads
I stopped reading.
If you want to convince people, try to meet them where they're at.
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?
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.
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.