Pricing is interesting. $299 for the Wayfarer model when the base Wayfarer goes for $171 on the Rayban website. If (and this is a big if) you assume Luxottica takes the same cut on both models, then Meta is selling a camera, headphones, etc, conveniently packaged into a very small form-factor for $128. If I were in the market for a new pair of sunglasses, it isn't hard to seem me splurging another $128 for something that could potentially replace my airpods for taking calls while I'm away from home.
Personally, not a fan of sticking a camera everywhere I look though. I get why companies want to push that feature (more data!) but I just don't see a reason why consumers need a camera pointing at everything they're doing.
The base, regular Wayfarers were cannibalized and cheapened out by Luxottica a long time ago. I'm fortunate enough to have a vintage pair from the mid-1980's that still look brand new. They have higher quality zyl frames, polarized glass Bausch & Lomb lenses, and, crucially, five barrel bolted hinges. They're built like a tank.
The new ones are so cheap I won't even wear them. Cheap plastic, plastic lenses, spring hinges that break quickly, and obnoxious branding on both the temples and the lenses. Terrible.
I work in the optical industry. I do R&D/quality control for a lens manufacturer and agree Luxottica is an awful company, but your comment is way off base. It's actually quite wrong.
Your "zyl" acetate frames aren't higher quality. Modern acetate is stronger, lighter, less brittle, less subject to warping from temperature change, and more resistant to UV damage which impacts brittleness and color. 40 years of material science progress. No one in the industry would say older acetate is better. It's worse in every way especially because yours are old. They're breaking down.
People don't wear glass lenses anymore for a reason. They are heavy and the only advantage over plastic is less chromatic aberration which is a non issue unless you are comparing to an extreme prescription using high-index plastic. They are also fairly dangerous compared to plastic due to the way they shatter. They fog up more easily. Again, 40 years of material science.
Additionally, there are no low optical-quality plastic lens blanks. This is a solved problem. The only defects you'll get in lens blanks are bubbles and these won't make it through production. What happens after a manufacturer grinds the lens out is a different story but I can also tell you that their lens surfacing is not low quality by any means.
Your hinges aren't any better and get loose over time. You can't actually use these for 40 years, they will wear out too and are harder to replace. Spring loaded hinges are lighter and reduce strain on both the frames and the wearer. I know what they use, they aren't cheap, and are high quality.
I do agree with your point on the branding.
The optimization for optics is all about weight. Your old frames and lenses aren't better because they're heavier, they're worse. As well as being more brittle and shatterable. It's like pining for the old heavy golf clubs made of wood and iron or all steel cars with V8 engines. Yeah, they're heavier! But they're worse in every way.
I will also say that you should buy frames because you like the frames. If you want great lenses, you just get them made. You shouldn't expect high-quality prescription lenses from a frame manufacturer, that's what your optometrist is for. I buy cheap frames all the time and pop in whatever I want.
You may have a bit of a point if you are talking moderate to high prescription ordered from Ray-Ban, but if you are talking about their non-prescriptive sunglasses, you're just yelling about all the wrong things.
Edit: typo and swapped in "surfacing" rather than "production" for clarity.
++ I wear prescription Ray-Ban Wayfarers and they're highly durable and the lenses are pretty good quality. I use them out gardening and when working in the yard. In general I only wear Ray Bans because they're a pretty consistent quality, durable, very lightweight, and never pinch my nose.
> They are heavy and the only advantage over plastic is less chromatic aberration which is a non issue unless you are comparing to an extreme prescription using high-index plastic.
This isn't true, even the best plastic lenses of 2023 are nowhere near as scratch resistant as the best glass lenses of 1993.
I used to have Ray-Bans, but only buy Maui Jims these days. I tried Revos, which I had always thought of as very high-quality, but they were not good (lenses reflected lots of light from behind me, as if they lacked an anti-reflective coating).
But even some MJs are not as good as the price would suggest. I have tried $300 MJs that didn't have spring hinges. They were just like regular lousy hinges.
Costco has a selection of Maui Jim sunglasses for ~$100, which is far below retail.
First of all, nobody (certainly not me) is "yelling." I find the way you wrote this response a bit telling, and that sort of thing actually detracts from your ability to persuade.
I'd freely grant your point about the zyl. But the rest of your response is somewhat motte-and-bailey fallacy to me. For instance, I never maintained that there are "low quality plastic lens blanks." What I was getting at is that for a lot of consumers, the polarized Bausch & Lomb glass lenses are superior in quality and a better experience than the cheap plastic lenses. I also never, at any point, maintained that
I'd "expect high-quality prescription lenses from a frame manufacturer." My comment was framed (pun intended) in terms of off-the-rack, non-Rx sunglasses which was absolutely clear from what I said above.
And your claim about the hinges is simply laughable. I'd dare you to stress-test (in the R&D sense) the old five-barrel bolted hinges against these cheap spring hinges. That's a Pepsi challenge I'd be willing to take any day. Incidentally, as I mentioned above, I have a pair of 1984 Ray-Ban Wayfarer IIs that are a few months away from being exactly 40 years old, and as I said they look and function like new even though they've been worn constantly for decades. Trying to maintain that the spring hinges Luxottica uses on today's Ray-Ban branded sunglasses are "high quality" completely destroys the force of your argument.
Assuming both commenters are honest, I'm going to listen to the person who works in QA in the industry.
The parent just sounds like someone who loves a specific item and is a bit miffed they changed it.
Lots of "cheap plastic lenses" and "cheap spring hinges" type complaints without much backup.
Is carbon fiber cheap and rubbish because it isn't steel? Why does the parent think plastic means inferior?
"Mine are 40 years old and fine!!" Is a bit useless, and a sample of one.
I own a wide range of old and new sunglasses, and in my eyes, the new ones are mostly superior if you buy right. Granted Luxottica are a bad actor in many ways.
"... destroys the force of your argument ..." really? Does it? Does it tho? No.
This is just industry entrenchment. Owning a pair of old vs new raybans just doesn't compare, it's not just the weight. The springs and material are simply stronger, they don't break or get scuffed as easily. The new lenses may have some better technical properties in the lab or extreme settings but the biggest difference is just keeping them smudge free. Old lenses just stay clean and are so much easier to simply wipe down. The new ones are nearly impossible to clean without chemicals and seem to get dirty almost immediately.
The bit about cars is telling too. Yes new cars are better in everyway on paper and in extreme cases. But from an actual consumer usage standpoint it's not the always better... $3500 repair because I bumped a guardrail on the highway one night vs some touchup paint in an older car. High speed collision, sure new car is preferred.
No one at a marina is going to try and sell you on a 1980s Yamaha 2-Stroke vs the new EFI 4 Strokes, but anyone that owns both would tell you they just wish they made a few improvements to the old style instead of going completely modern. Of course the new motor makes 30 more HP and uses less fuel but it needs vastly more maintenance and you need an entire parts store to have a reasonable chance of avoiding being stranded.
The improvements are great, but for most things, for most people, they just want them to work well for their intended typical usage.
It's wonderful the new F225s can operate in 9ft swells at 0F but I would really just like it to have a greater than 50% chance of starting up in calm 75 degree weather which is like 90% of the time I'm boating.
You know the dealers recommendations though, and I'm not joking, is just buy two (or more) motors!
Are you seriously claiming that plastic lenses are higher quality and longer lasting than glass lenses? Plastic lenses scratch very easily; glass lenses don't. Also, I don't need to write a white paper or do a study to maintain that spring hinges are cheap compared to the barrel hinges. I've seen so many of the spring hinges break on glasses people had bought less than a year ago. They are demonstrably low quality.
Do you mean crown glass? High index glass? Polycarbonate?
What grade of scratch? What about cost to replace vs non-resistance? What about the average lifetime of glasses vs cost?
By cheap do you mean take less stress before fracture? How about actuations before failure?
See, you don't know. You're just ranting. Yes, you would need to you know ... at least cite some specifics and evidence beyond your own experience. That's how these things tend to work.
This is just meaningless overqualification, as if you're trying to escape reality. Any kind of glass is going to be more resistant to scratches than plastic, even the kind that claims to be scratch-resistant. By cheap hinges, I mean they take less stress before fracture and fewer actuations before failure.
This is really not rocket surgery. We're talking about sunglasses. As I said above, I don't need to write a white paper or do an academic study to know this is true, it's based on my experiences wearing all these different types of sunglasses over decades and observing how they are constructed and how they respond to various types of normal wear to outright abuse.
I find both comments pretty insightful and have a hard time disagreeing with either. It's nice that the poster you're replying to has deep knowledge about these glasses, but it doesn't actually change the way you feel about a sturdier-feeling product. And, sure, maybe you treat them really carefully, but the fact that they're 40 years old at least proves SOMETHING about them.
Sometimes things that "feel" high-quality are actually less robust, but longevity is not always more important than aesthetics.
> It's nice that the poster you're replying to has deep knowledge about these glasses, but it doesn't actually change the way you feel about a sturdier-feeling product.
This is the entire basis of Beats putting chunks of shitty iron in their headphones. It does absolutely nothing for the audio quality, but it makes them feel heavier and therefore people will swear up and down they are of better quality.
Part of being an intelligent person I feel is recognizing your own limitations, biases and failings. I am a very smart person, and I feel most people who know me would agree. But I am smart about particular things. I know a lot about my field of programming and I'm well educated in the software I make, and I know a lot about web development in a bit of an old school way (was educated formally awhile back, and while I can still sling PHP and use SQL with the best, I don't know nearly as much about newer frameworks and ways of doing things.) And while I'm proud of all that, it doesn't mean I know shitfuck about anything else.
I think a good part of what makes people intelligent is knowing what they know, knowing what they don't know, and being open to finding out if they need or want to from people who do know.
Listening to some of these arguments you'd believe we need to get an expert's opinion and a literature review to gauge the quality of the things we use in our daily lives.
I don't need an expert showing me a frequency curve to gauge the quality of earphones, I don't need an expert on manufacturing to tell me whether my current pair of glasses are more or less solid than the previous pair.
Part of being an intelligent person is also accepting that other people are just as intelligent as you, and not complete fools. People can see what's right in front of their eyes.
Oh man those Volvos from the 80s and 90s... I swear until a few years ago I heard people saying how they were the safest cars.
Or even my mum, I remember how she didn't like how the doors in the Sierra (an European Ford model) that my dad bought to replace an old Taunus (also an old European Ford model) were lighter, she felt less safe.
I once had a pair I found under a house from I’d guess the 60s, the builder must have misplaced them. They felt like something from another universe compared to today’s garbage.
Yeah, I go hiking several times a week and I'd wear these all the time. I like listening to podcasts or music, but want to be able to hear any rattlesnakes or interesting birds, so the speakers seem like a plus. And being able to snap a photo without pulling my phone out would also be great. I probably wouldn't use them in a lot of situations, but hiking seems like a good one. If these end up being decent I'd consider them over a normal pair of sunglasses next time I need a pair.
Bone conducting headphones are great, I use them all of the time on walks, and you can hear everything as long as you don't play anything too loud. If they get loud enough then you don't hear certain things but that goes for any kind of headphones.
Bose had sunglasses with bone conduction audio for a while - but I think they got discontinued. I like the idea but these are, to me, worse. I get why some people would like having a camera, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable with it.
Yes, it's to gather even more data. Ad agencies have figured out how to glorify this. Dell in the UK is running an ad telling the viewer that the tourists photographing and filming coral reefs are helping the scientists help preserve nature.
google is an innovator but they don't really stick with things if they're not immediate hits.
meta has privacy concerns but they've made a name for themselves in XR so this move isn't out of nowhere and with apple joining soon it's more normalized. apple wants us to strap a hmd to watch our kid blow out the candles
Thanks! I wasn't aware of that model; they must be new. Looks like they were introduced back in March of this year. Good to see the barrel hinges. But a couple of questions:
Are the lenses glass? (It says they're G-15, which is supposed to be mineral glass, but I don't know if RB has changed the definition somewhere along the line and replaced them with plastic).
Are these only available in EU, or in the US as well?
G-15 is just the tint color (the gray/green). It’s not the material. I’m pretty sure that only way you’re getting glass lenses from Ray-Ban is if you get the high index prescription lenses.
Yeah, I would take no cameras, less creepy, and longer battery life, if I had the option.
Edit: I do love that they have a transition lens version, though. I haven't seen that elsewhere.
Bose had some Bluetooth glasses, but their website currently says "We'll be back soon". I also can't find them on Amazon, so I'm wondering if they were discontinued.
Luxottica is probably doing very nicely on this partnership, and may well be offering Apple a substantial price cut to compensate. I had never heard of 'Rayban' before this Apple announcement! (Not that I am the target market for sunglasses anyway, in dark and wet Great Britain)
Sunglasses aren't a particularly good investment when there will only be a couple of weeks bright enough to want them :) But awareness of raincoat brands in Britain, now you're talking!
That's a good point; roads can certainly have a strong glare.
I see an independent optician who is fairly old. Although they sell sunglasses, the optician has never suggested that I should wear them. Do you think this is perhaps newer guidance that is shared by more recently-graduated opticians, or maybe something promoted by a major chain of opticians?
To be fair they are barely relevant in my circle and more a fashion piece for the older generation. It's not like teenager or young people around here think it's cool to have expensive cheaply made glasses
> To be fair they are barely relevant in my circle and more a fashion piece for the older generation.
I'm of the older generation (in my 50s), and at least in my circles, Ray-Bans aren't particularly cool either. They're not exactly un-cool, but they do tend to be worn by a particular sort of person.
Omnipresent video input is going to be essential for Artificial Self-Instantiation AGIs early next year. Your personal assistant can’t help you if you need to tell it what you’re doing all the time!
Partially openai’s “chatgpt5 will be done by December and achieve AGI”, partially a wish to stir a discussion here with hopeful language, and partially my burndown chart for my own implementation :)
Hmmm it’s a very hard thing to sum up in one piece, not sure I have a good author… I highly recommend skimming Marvin Minsky’s “The Frame Problem” (TL;DR personal assistants will only be helpful once they have intuition), and Picardy writings on Affective computing (TL;DR computers need to simulate our mental states in order to help us effectively). This is a good reminder to look for more lit though!
Philosophy wise, I’m frustratingly forgetting the two people who write about how one’s consciousness can be said to include things like personal journals, record books, calendars, etc. The idea is that you’re offloading part of your mind into artificial forms, in a very meaningful and real way. Will update if I remember their names soon! In the meantime, this is a great skim on the more general topic IMO: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/
We need to invent something that does the opposite now where individuals could wear something that prevents them from showing up in someone else’s content without explicit digital consent (some sort of personal scrambler). I don’t think the LED feature listed on this product page will often be honored by most people who will use these shades
We're nearly at the "Foundation" levels of surveillance tech, but with no countermeasures in sight to oppose that. Even resisting web browser fingerprinting is difficult.
There are no "hard" countermeasures possible, not technological ones - you're fighting against the laws of physics here, which mandate that everything constantly radiates information about what it's doing, in every direction, at the speed of light. Advancement of surveillance is advancement in being able to discern that information. You can try and introduce noise, but you're still fighting uphill, against the whole fields of signal processing and information theory.
The only "countermeasures" we can have are "soft" ones - social, political and legal. Convince people to treat privacy as core value, and surveillance as repugnant. Make forms of surveillance illegal. Mandate by law to have surveillance capabilities in devices handicapped by design. But this, at best, only solves the problem for regular people and some of the time, while governments stay stable and sane - the possibility of deeper surveillance is still there, just the choice to perform it seems unattractive at a given moment.
A Halloween costume that changes the shape of the body and face should suffice. Let's all dress up as "V" from V for Vendetta. Some would say a persons gait can give them away so we can all walk or sashay like a runway model. The costume needs an RF blocking pocket for fondle slabs. I can picture this happening. Low tech, affordable, concept can be applied to any costume. Optional platform boots to balance peoples height.
I think we still have an option of a privacy regulation that requires explicit expiring consent on any kind PII handling and a private right of action to enforce it (e.g. small claims court).
There are strong incentives for secrecy (military applications), hence encryption which provides solid foundations for private communication in civilian tech. I wonder if counter-surveillance tech could take the same route (e.g. ordinary soldiers can no longer afford to not carry a smartphone -> strong incentive to protect them from tracking; maybe I'm extrapolating too far).
It's more likely that the military would provide soldiers with phones using a special version of Android with less tracking than it is that they'd mandate Google stop snooping on everybody for national security reasons. They take advantage of the data Google collects, the fact that everyone is carrying a mobile wire (mic and camera) filled with radios collecting and broadcasting location info, and that for many people a single device they carry acts as a treasure trove of information on them, who they've been talking to, and what they've been doing.
It’s not so much having a countermeasure but having countermeasures be built in to the system. Similar to a concept called gevulot in the book Quantum Thief.
In the sci-fi novel "The Mountain in the Sea" (highly recommended btw) there is a piece of tech called "abglanz" which is an identity shield mask that flickers in iridescent blurry patterns to protect a person's privacy from camera surveillance.
Check out Adam Harvey's "CV Dazzle" and other related design efforts. CV Dazzle is from 2010 but still very cool, the concept is generally to design cyberpunk clothing and headware that is adversarial to face detection algorithms. Algorithms are always changing, but I'm sure there will always be attacks of this nature. We could see them pop up in military applications in addition to personal privacy.
This sounds like legislation. Mandate (with stiff penalties for violations) that any recording in the presence of a certain BLE advertised value (that's anonymized) means that all people should be removed from the scene with current image generation AI tooling? Not sure what to do about in frame vs out of frame, but perhaps this sparks something.
Yeah. The creepy is back. When Google released its glasses, people jumped on it right away always gave me weird vibes. Why would someone want to do it? What is an everyday function that would be greatly improved by this, aside from some professional application?
These could be pretty incredible if the platform was more open. You get highly available image and voice input, and good voice output.
Imagine if you could take a picture of anything, add a little note, have it filed away. Not necessarily an awesome Instagram picture, but just a picture of some mail you got, a tool you are putting away, any thing you want to record and save. Heck, why not a picture of your computer screen? Pair that with quickly available audio transcriptions and you can also dictate anything, thoughts, small notes, information associated with the images.
That all could be great... if the library of things you made was useful. It's pretty clear how it could be useful now; do some OCR and other detection on images, use a vector store for both that and transcripts, and hook it all up to an LLM assistant. It's a bit complicated, and a bit expensive to run, but at least for a prototype you could make something pretty incredible.
Meta might make something like that... but they aren't doing that yet, and they might never do that. If the platform was open people could explore these things right now. And it doesn't even need to be radically open, you don't need to be able to hack the firmware; but it has to be more open than the preview Ray-Ban glasses, and I'm assuming more open than this revision.
> Imagine if you could take a picture of anything, add a little note, have it filed away. Not necessarily an awesome Instagram picture, but just a picture of some mail you got, a tool you are putting away, any thing you want to record and save. Heck, why not a picture of your computer screen? Pair that with quickly available audio transcriptions and you can also dictate anything, thoughts, small notes, information associated with the images.
I know HN already has too much cynicism for my own liking, so it pains me to say: you can already do this with the phone you have in your pocket. Have a shortcut that enables audio dictation/photo mode/etc., and you're good to go.
The workflow for glasses (either these or some other hypothetical ones) would involve hitting a button and then having to either speak the command out loud or hit some other button to capture video/audio/etc., which seems more cumbersome than the phone approach that exists today.
I am currently in the middle of rebuilding a pair of 6.2L small block Chevrolet engines. By a factor of six these are the largest engines I've ever worked on, and the rebuild is far more extensive than anything I've attempted before too.
During the teardown, part of my process (let's not dignify it with "workflow") has been photographing the incredible amount of crap that's been bolted to the engines as I remove pieces to help me with later reassembly. Sometimes I say a couple of words because the Live Photo captures some context.
I have come to loathe my phone as a camera. Yes it works with gloves on, but every day it ends up covered in oil and grease. Holding it is awkward, you have to do a bunch of swipey things to make the camera work, the 3D Touch (or whatever it's called now) is somewhat random with gloves, and I've lost count of the number of times it's got itself stuck in portrait or panorama mode. Those of you with daughters will understand this ultimate critique - it was worth it to me to bribe my grumpy pre-teen to operate the camera rather than fighting it myself.
All of this is to say, I could _really_ use a pair of camera glasses. That little bit of friction taken out of the process would make a massive difference to me. And if I could record video, I'd be able to add another middle aged man's amateur mechanics channel to YouTube - something that I am certain the world is desperate for.
> I have come to loathe my phone as a camera. Yes it works with gloves on, but every day it ends up covered in oil and grease. Holding it is awkward, you have to do a bunch of swipey things to make the camera work, the 3D Touch (or whatever it's called now) is somewhat random with gloves, and I've lost count of the number of times it's got itself stuck in portrait or panorama mode. Those of you with daughters will understand this ultimate critique - it was worth it to me to bribe my grumpy pre-teen to operate the camera rather than fighting it myself.
Yeah, I wish my phone was like 3x thicker and just had a row of buttons on the side apps can use. Then just bind them to few common camera features rather than fidding with fucking touchscreen.
> Yeah, I wish my phone was like 3x thicker and just had a row of buttons on the side apps can use. Then just bind them to few common camera features rather than fidding with fucking touchscreen.
Surely this part is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Digital cameras still exist.
Or a smaller action cam like the Insta360 Go. It even has a water resistant body with a single somewhat configurable body button you could hit to start recording the clip. It’s a third the size and weight of a GoPro though the video is definitely inferior.
> and just had a row of buttons on the side apps can use. Then just bind them to few common camera features rather than fidding with fucking touchscreen.
Its still offset. If I turn my head sideways to look between something or under a car or anything close to the face really is out of focus or not even in view.
but in all seriousness, I do still bring an olympus tg5 "brick" for my climbing/mountaineering trips, because phones are just too cumbersome to take pictures with, when hanging off the side of a cliff, wearing gloves, at below freezing temps etc.
I’m pretty sure industrial processes are one of the only areas that smart glasses have achieved any real success, and for pretty much the reasons you’re describing here.
For what is worth, on my phone double click on the power button located on the side jumps into camera mode (even if locked). And pressing the volume down takes the photo. Then one click on the power button to turn off.
click-click, click, click.
And assuming the Google software doesn't decide to lag too much, it's quite quick to, and it reduces how much you touch the phone with dirty gloves.
edit: I should add that you still need one hand free to do so of course.
I have exactly the same problem with dirty hands when I take boroscope photos of the engine on my plane. I would love to just see it in my glasses and say blink twice to take a photo.
Headband mounted GoPros are awkward. A helmet mounted GoPro works better, but you're either not wearing a helmet, or if you are you probably need to keep it clear of protrusions for safety reasons.
Not a lot, but the snake orgy of wiring harnesses and the three or four plates of accessories bolted to each end of the heads and block and the specific order they're attached is a different story. Also, a monkey can tear down; putting it back together takes a human.
I had to look up poka yoked. I thought it was some regional colloquialism but no, it's Japanese.
FYI at least on my Android power key can be configured such that double press takes you straight to camera bypassing lock screen and volume down takes a picture.
But I fully take your point that there is a need and use case for hands free cameras. The market for GoPros and to an extent drones highlights this
Take comfort in one thing: you’re rebuilding one of the most popular and prolific platforms for hot rodders in the last 20 years. You can probably throw a rock and hit someone who can legitimately help you, haha.
Rebuilding a junkyard ls (okay yours isn’t a 5.3 ) is like the rite of passage
Yes it's been very easy to get advice, that's for sure, and it's made me want to go find a junkyard core and see if I can salvage it. Not that I have anything to put it in. This is a marine application so not everything applies (or applies differently) so the complexity is in navigating what's legitimately different vs. what's Mercruiser taking advantage of the ignorant.
For example. The engine has EV6 Bosch injectors, a completely standard off-the-shelf part. A seal kit (i.e. a bunch of o rings) for the injectors is maybe $20 from Fel Pro. If you go by the Mercruiser part number for the kit it's - get this - $297. Two hundred and ninety seven dollars for sixteen tiny rubber o rings.
The photographs (just to keep it on topic) are basically all around the accessories bolted to the heads and block. A remote oil filter, the heat exchanger, the particular fuel boost pump it uses, all with weird brackets and spacers and eight different types of bolt.
Do you really want to bloody your knuckles wrenching with sunglasses on? I would last maybe 20 minutes before frustratedly throwing them at a wall... unless of course you are doing engine teardown out in the driveway.
I have the near opposite experience especially having attempted to build the mobile based product you mentioned [https://placenote.com/]
The seamlessness of glasses is really what makes this even possible, especially now that voice is becoming a seamless interface.
I largely like my phone to remain in my pocket (especially when I’m with my impressionable kids) and bringing it out and unlocking, getting my brain to ignore all the notifications, going through whatever button routine is required, then doing the camera localization dance, just doesn’t compare to one click + voice narration once it’s built right.
In addition, headgear is more-likely to be aimed at whatever you're actually observing or manipulating, instead of some direction related to a shirt-pocket or chest-harness.
The cognitive load of the notifications is an interesting point that I hadn't considered; I can see myself being distracted by those in the workflow I proposed in my previous comment.
I wonder if much of this could be solved by OS-level functionality (or at least having it in a developer-accessible SDK) that allows the new "always-on" lock screens to immediately trigger an application on a single tap.
This is on some android phones, double tapping power will open the camera. I use it all the time to take pictures of information that I don't want to write down, package numbers, measurements, error logs, all just tap tap, point, volume down.
I occasionally use it that way for painted labels on parking-spaces at the airport. (I have yet to need them, but it seems a reasonable precaution given how even a small amount of floor/zone/row forgetfulness could leave me wandering the 10,000-spot complex.)
That said, I also find myself wishing I could mark those photos as "temporary", so that they get auto-deleted within a month or whatever.
Not teaching your kids to be glued to a phone is actually a fairly compelling usecase here.
I also like the idea of being able to remain mostly in the moment vs putting a phone in between me and the scene.
Still not sure these justify wearing this device, particularly all the time. But perhaps it could be cool to wear for family outings or whatever, when you expect to want to take lots of photos?
As a glass wearer I am slightly concerned about the weight: that can't be comfortqble for full day wearing, day in day out.
You probably would have a regular pair of glasses, or no glasses for most of the time, and only wear those when you specifically want the smart features, which makes the seamlessness only occasional. Would you optimize a workflow for something you only wear from times to times ?
People already regularly use their phones for this kind of image capture (taking a picture as documentation, not for nostalgic memories or sharing). This seems like a positive signal. Voice doesn't get used this way, but the voice interactions are cumbersome on the phone mostly because the platform is not open enough, not because of form factor issues.
In regards to voice: there's no way to have access to the easy start mechanisms of wake words or quick button access and also control what happens before intent resolution and endpointing (i.e., deciding when the voice interaction is done). You can have your own app with its own "record" button: hard to open but you have control of what happens. Or you use the assistant infrastructure and have to compete with every other Apple/Google product goal and parsing approach, and at best you have a chance to do further recording only after the initial intent has fully resolved, the mic has closed, and you can reopen it.
So yes a phone can do all that, and it ALSO would be awesome, but just like with these glasses you can't ACTUALLY implement this.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I'm not very well versed in this domain, and it's nice to have a civil discussion about wearable tech, especially when previous implementations have instantly become vapourware.
> So yes a phone can do all that, and it ALSO would be awesome, but just like with these glasses you can't ACTUALLY implement this.
>> The workflow for glasses (either these or some other hypothetical ones) would involve hitting a button and then having to either speak the command out loud or hit some other button to capture video/audio/etc
I was hoping to just say "Hey Meta, start recording". Totally hands free, even while driving or carrying stuff. I thought the whole point is to not have to mess with a phone.
I'm sure you'll be able to use voice commands to take pictures/videos hands-free with these. jperras just said that THEIR ideal workflow would rely on a button.
Handling a phone is cumbersome - I'm playing a guitar and want to record to check what I'm doing wrong, I'm building something in the garage, taking something apart, etc. Sure I can setup some mobile stand but I usually won't bother, this would change that.
But these are sunglasses and I doubt resolution/focus will be good enough for those use cases.
> hitting a button and then having to either speak the command out loud or hit some other button to capture video/audio/etc., which seems more cumbersome than the phone approach
For the mass market, perhaps the right place to put the camera is on headphones. (I’m already talking to my AirPods.) This product doesn’t appear to be positioned for the mass market, however, but instead influencers.
> smart glasses will be as ubiquitous as smart phones
This reminds me of the difference between Apple and Google: a sense of style. I have no doubt smart glasses will find their niche in industry and among techies. But what people put on their faces is deeply tied to identity. Until the technology can exist virtually unseen, it’s not going to compete.
Once smart glasses run solidly and can run mind blowing innovation / apps solidly too they are the next smart phone. Such innovations will sell smart glasses like apps drove smart phone sales.
I think my argument is helped by the billions both Facebook and Apple are putting into smart glasses.
What about Google? They realised years ago that the market doesn't really want their product and found other niches to build their glasses for. If it's so obvious why would Google not care and only meta (which has a bad track record in finding trends) and apple follow that 'trend'
Google isnt much of an innovator they will just copy or steal from the market leader who finally gets it right like they did with Android and like many of their other products ..Siri first then Google assistant ...Alexa smart speaker then Google home products and etc, etc, etc
> my argument is helped by the billions both Facebook and Apple are putting into smart glasses
I accept the latter, though discard the former: they were trend following VR. I also think Apple, savvily, doesn’t brand the Vision Pro as a pair of glasses. And it doesn’t look like that’s the vision (no pun intended). It’s something that’s put on and taken off. Not kept on continuously.
By the way, I accept the vision. Just not the form factor of a pair of glasses. Those are closer to another Apple Watch than an iPhone killer.
In zuckerberg's speech he shows one of many innovations that will drive all current sunglass wearers to switch to smart sunglasses which is the glasses keeping score of your tennis, ping pong ..card game ..whatever game and displaying the score in your view.
Though His example really just shows the glasses telling the player the tennis or pickle ball was out of bounds. I've just expanded it to keeping score of whatever game and or counting things in front of you to counting how many in a room to etc etc etc ones imagination can think of. The glasses will make life easier and in a magical way that drives all sunglass wearers (about 75 to 90 percent of the entire global population) to switch to smart glasses.
I mean, the light makes it VERY apparent when it's recording or taking a picture.
Would you be just as uncomfortable eating lunch with someone who had their phone in their hand? It'd be much easier to surreptitiously record/photograph someone with a phone because they have no status indicator when they're recording and people inadvertently point phone lenses at each other all the time.
I don't know. Its weird. Kind of like how people have the "someone's staring at you" sense.
> The biological phenomenon is known as “gaze detection” or “gaze perception.” Neurological studies have found that the brain cells that initiate this response are very precise. If someone turns their gaze off of you by turning just a few degrees to their left or right, that eerie feeling quickly fades.
I 100% beleive we also do this with smartphones. You can 100% detect when a smartphone is looking at you or just being held in your direction. It might not be proven scientifically yet but I know this in my soul.
Similar to our ability to determine what someone else is looking at. We can watch someone's purpils move, and then immediately look at the exact area they looked at.
Also, gaze detection extends beyond humans [1]. Citation mentions dogs, birds, and reptiles having some degree of it. In general, attention detection via gaze or body language would be an evolutionary advantage for any prey animal, and even a predator that is low in the overall food chain. Anecdotally, I’ve seen similar behavior in spiders, though the literature [2] tells me it’s not specifically gaze that a spider is detecting. I have hunted (to trap) spiders around my house who seem to change behavior (eg play dead) based on my attention, leading me to think that they know they are being hunted on some level well below cognition. Which, coming full circle, lines up with the literature on how crazy accurate human gaze detection is, seems like a very old, low-level function.
They don't sit there and point the camera at you for the entire lunch. I don't know what kind of people you have lunch with, but nobody holds their phone vertically and in your face when texting unless they have a serious social skills deficit. They tend to hold it a few inches above the table at a 45 degree angle, or even under the table.
> Would you be just as uncomfortable eating lunch with someone who had their phone in their hand?
the entire time?
of course - and I'd question my decision to invite them
unless they're sharing their screen with everyone (showing pics, etc) or taking a group pic, having their phone out and pointed at you for more than a few moments would be both uncomfortable and rude
I am not aware of a commonly used phone with a 180 degree FOV macro lens, but regardless of how a phone on the table makes me feel, someone holding a phone up, pointing at me for all of lunch, would be rude and discomforting.
I don't see how I could fail to notice that my fellow diner was rudely and discomfortingly holding or using their phone for the entire meal, or that they carefully balanced one end of their phone on top of stuff on the table at a 45 degree angle pointing towards me for no apparent reason
The page says it detects if the light is obscured and notifies the user in thatacse. That's doesn't sound quite the same as disabling camera in that case, but I imagine this is also one bit of metadata they collect and that could change in future versions..
With the macro lens mode on iPhones now, you can take a video of what’s directly in front of you while pointing the camera at a downward angle. There’s no way to tell a person doing that apart from a person who’s texting, other than looking at their screen.
I posted elsewhere in this thread but I think we can still detect this. There is a framing/tracking motion people do when recording that's not present when just texting or using the phone.
> Brain imaging has shown that the brain cells which are activated when a test subject can see that they are being stared at are distinct from the cells activated when the starer's eyes are averted away from the subject by just a few degrees
From Wikipedia[1], but I admit the claim is needing a citation but I feel strongly for the gaze detection argument at least.
Honestly, if someone is using their phone when I'm having lunch (or any social activity) with them, I'd be unlikely to have lunch with them again. They are clearly not interested in being social with me in the first place.
People used to feel all kinds of ways about what is now normal smartphone use. There are probably a lot of remnants of those attitudes in ‘00s media that can still be found.
Everyone either got over it or shut up about it because they (ahem, we) had clearly lost.
I expect actually-useful smart glasses will eventually overcome the same stigma. Actually-useful being the key part of that.
Strong disagree. I think there is still a fairly large cohort of people who feel that e.g. looking at your phone at dinner, or responding to every random ding from your phone during a conversation, is rude and unacceptable behavior.
As someone in that cohort, the number of people that feel the same way as me is nearly non-existent. The only people that seem to share the sentiment are my parents and my older colleagues. I have an Apple Watch primarily to avoid having to take my phone out while still being able to see important notifications (I love the focus mode stuff) so I'm not some kind of anti-tech ideologue either. Most other people are not only used to phones being out and around but the vast majority have no qualms about it.
I got an Apple Watch for this reason when they first came out and found out that people constantly thought I was bored or had to leave because I kept glancing at my watch. Looking at the phone never got a negative response.
If meta had their own mobile OS, taking into account how they have little to zero care for European privacy laws or any privacy really, I highly doubt most people would feel comfortable having conversations with the device nearby.
Maybe I haven't gotten far enough in the thread, but it seems like most people have forgotten that when Google came out with these, the people who were wearing them were called "glassholes".
As long as the activation is overt I don't think it's a big issue. Overt as in taking a picture or recording requires the user to do something that is noticeable to the people around them. The wake word is quite obvious; the button on the stem is a bit less, but together with the light I think it's fairly clear something is happening.
It would be a rare thing that someone would actually be streaming or recording on them, unless you agreed to make a video. Technically someone could record your every conversation with their phone in their pocket or on the table, but no one worries about that, because it goes against the social contract. If one of your friends did that regularly, everyone understands it would likely be the end of that friendship, and others they shared that with would shun them. I think it's the same with these glasses.
Another similar example is reading your SOs text messages. In the past this would be impossible because normal people didn't have a "paper trail", but now most everyone does. But it's not a huge concern for most people, because we know it's socially unacceptable to look at someone's messages without a very good reason.
> It would be a rare thing that someone would actually be streaming or recording on them, unless you agreed to make a video.
I'm not sure how you believe this.
> Technically someone could record your every conversation with their phone in their pocket or on the table, but no one worries about that, because it goes against the social contract.
Even if the social contract prevented this (I don't believe it does), there's little to no risk of someone being caught recording your conversations with them. No risk means no worry about the social contract.
> But it's not a huge concern for most people, because we know it's socially unacceptable to look at someone's messages without a very good reason.
I'm assuming you truly believe this, but to me, this is really starting to feel like parody.
> Imagine if you could take a picture of anything, add a little note, have it filed away.
This is more or less what Vanevar Bush imagined in his 1945 article “As We May Think”, which many consider the origin of hypertext [1].
“On a pair of ordinary glasses is a square of fine lines near the top of one lens, where it is out of the way of ordinary vision. When an object appears in that square, it is lined up for its picture. As the scientist of the future moves about the laboratory or the field, every time he looks at something worthy of the record, he trips the shutter and in it goes, without even an audible click.
…
And there is provision for direct entry. On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. On this are placed longhand notes, photographs, memoranda, all sorts of things. When one is in place, the depression of a lever causes it to be photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film…”
> Imagine if you could take a picture of anything, add a little note, have it filed away.
that's the plan, but for facebook's benefit instead of yours. We're not allowed to have cool new tech that doesn't exploit us in some way for the benefit of some one else.
Facebook loves to spy on other people and businesses without their consent and target its opponents like that, I've worked in a firm in which that happened. After a while the whole Cambridge Analytica fuck up came out and it was an A Ha moment for everyone involved.
Have you heard of rewind.ai? It does exactly that but for your computer screen. I find it incredibly useful. Combined with this, the future looks very promising!
This seems seriously cool. I wonder if its constant recording is going to fill up my HDD.
edit: found the storage option. It defaults to keeping all data, but I've changed that to one month retention -- they say they use around 14GB a month.
It reminds me of having to use screen recording software for a previous remote job. I wished I could use that recording to do something exactly like this. Now, if only one could flip the script, and make the employer request that recording, instead of forcing one to share it.
That... takes like a double-click on a modern cell phone to pull up the camera, with an all-day battery life and no silly designer glasses needed. Also doesn't need to upload all your crap to Meta.
> The Capture LED lets others know when you’re capturing content or going live. If the LED is covered, you’ll be notified to clear it.
Wonder how that works. Maybe the capture LED has a light sensor next to it that detects reflections? It solves an interesting problem, although the prevalence of cheap spy camera glasses on amazon make it an uphill battle.
LEDs can effectively be used as light sensors when wired in reverse - About a decade ago there was a post where someone turned an 8x8 LED matrix into a touch sensor.
It’s probably duty cycled on and off and compared to a photodiode output on the reflection.
Either way the moment that light comes on you’re getting punched if you point it at the wrong person. I’d rather have my phone hit out of my hand. Google Glass was not welcome and I suspect the same will be true of this.
I wonder if one could just replace the LED with a UV one, depending on the tolerances this kind of detection may still work while being visibly "off". :/
That wouldn't work with all materials that could be used to cover the camera. The proximity sensors that you describe are designed specifically to measure the change in capacitance due to proximity to a human; they can't detect something like a blob of glue that causes no change in capacitance.
For some reason this really doesn't work for me. I have also enabled the extra feature of locking the touch screen when in dark places, too. I still regularly get my pocket navigating my browser and my ear starting songs on Spotify mid-call.
Lack of HUD is why I wouldn't get these. I suppose if I was taking more pictures / video I might be more interested, like at the beach or something, but I don't find myself doing these things as much. Maybe this would make it easier for me to capture my life around me (my SO thinks i don't take enough pictures or video of our life), could alleviate having to remember to pull out the phone and such.
Add a HUD like google glass had and you may have a more compelling use case.
Honestly my biggest beef with this isn't the quality but the field of vision.
It's so incredibly narrow and not at all how we imagine a "first person perspective" looks like for a human. (I know we lie to ourselves, and think that our peripheral vision is better than it is, but it doesn't matter)
Oh yes the field of vision is very bad! I liked to take snapshots out when with my wife, and I'd turn my head and she wouldn't even be in the field of view.
You have to turn your head 180 degrees like an owl and have them dead centre in front of the camera side to get them on film.
I bought a pair last year and have taken it on a few trips. It's been great for certain activities where I want to take pictures/videos but don't want to have a phone in my hand (like on a boat or parasailing).
Another thing I noticed is that it allows me to record videos while staying in the moment. I took some videos with my wife and captured some cute interactions and conversations that I wouldn't have been able to record with my phone.
Most of the photos and videos don't turn out great because of the camera/mic quality and because you can't see what's in frame but I got some fun videos from them.
I did that. Unfortunately you'd have your stereo blasting, right? And then the second you upload it somewhere you'll get a copyright infringement notice and they mute the audio. Thanks Facebook.
In my industry, mining, I can see this sort of integration into a miner's helmet working its way into sites as a sort of situation analysis tool pretty easily. It would make a lot of things so much easier for folks on the surface to be able to quickly see 3-D scans (lidar would be amazin) of broken rock, or new tunnel, or cracks, etc.
I am with others for the desire for more opennness. I would never hop on this loaded with proprietary restrictions. 100% data control for personal use would be a must.
At least a year ago when I was playing around with TikTok live it was amazing how much of it was machinists, lumberjacks, or assembly line workers live-streaming their entire shifts. Some of the most interesting content on the platform.
It will absolutely get integrated sooner rather than later. The Microsoft Hololens is still bulky compared to these, but is getting tested out right now by the US military to view the insides of aircrafts [1]. After a few more size and cost decreasing iterations, it will get quickly adopted.
Granted, I'm a tech luddite by modern standards, so as a retail consumer I still fear ads all over my FOV. But for businesses there's absolutely a need, use case, everything for it.
Makes me think of the power dynamic between smart glass wearers and bystanders as a social problem and not a technical one: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ar-glasses
It's better than nothing, but it does put other people in the uncomfortable position of having to ask the glasses wearer to not record. And can you see the indication before you're actually on camera?
The counter is to put on your own pair of glasses that have mirrored lenses, a laser beam scanning back and forth and a prominent shotgun microphone pointed at the other person.
I had the original version of these, which didn't know if the LED was covered, but it didn't matter because no one even noticed when the LED was on, or if they did, they didn't seem to realize that it was a camera. I tried it at a party to get some candid shots with my friends. But in the end, the quality wasn't good enough for the candid shots to actually be worth keeping.
Wow, that is so dirty. They are doing the 2009 "get people to share things privately and then do a settings refactor that now makes the private things public until you reset them to private" Wow, I am sure this ends well for Rayband. :)
I interpreted "you’ll be notified to clear it" in the sense of "You will be notified that this is the reason the camera won't take pictures".
It seems like a logical assumption - what's the point of adding tech to prevent the target-visible warning light from being obscured, if you're still allowed to take the pictures with it obscured?
I had the original version of these (Ray-Ban stories), and I had to return them three times because they kept dropping the Bluetooth connection. I more or less only wore them while running, so my best guess is moisture from my sweating got into them. Given that they were advertised heavily for sports stuff, that was disappointing.
The return process was also complicated and annoying. Overall, I'd recommend against buying the first generation of these new glasses.
Incidentally, I just bought the Gen 1 of these before departing on a trip to Japan a week ago. I gotta say, I'm very happy with the purchase - being able to take photos/videos for memory-capture type stuff (ie I don't care a lot about it being the best quality) without taking out my phone and pointing it at stuff has been great, and the speakers are surprisingly nice to use when I don't want to block out the sounds of my surroundings. To me the benefit is not being able to constantly or secretly record stuff, it's just a nicer way to use a camera to record memories on a trip that does not involve staring at a screen half the time.
Operating such a device in Japan puts you in a legal gray area, and depending on your behaviour could result in unwanted police attention. They will respond to reports of such devices being used near spaces frequented by women or children. Act responsibly.
Are we forgetting that we live in cities with cameras literally everywhere?
Where arguably the real creeps (cops and random security people) are actively watching you all the time.
I get it, if a person takes out his phone to do this it feels more intrusive (if it is or not is up for debate), but let's not kid ourselves here: we're already being recorded at almost all times (at least in most cities).
I cannot tell you why, or if in this specific instance they are forgetting or not.
My point is more of a general one. The hypocrisy of the masses is real. Most only really care about the instances they can perceive and accept all other ones as long as they aren't inconvenient.
I'm not trying to annul any judgements, merely point out that this is, in my view, no different than the already existing surveillance we live under. At this point having a camera in your glasses is merely a more convenient way to take pictures.
And it's not like there aren't already glasses with cameras, for example. If a creep wants to creep, they will do it whether we want it or not. I simply don't understand how this product changes anything in relation to what already happens.
We are already surveilled and creeps already take pictures.
This lowers the barrier to take unwanted photos/videos significantly. Yes, surveillance cameras are everywhere but your everyday person does not have access to their feed (and the publicly accessible ones are not that common and usually very far away). This is different from possibly being recorded by anyone you pass by in high resolution, for their own personal use.
Also, today when a person takes a photo of you it's usually very apparent, hence most people hesitate just pointing a camera at you to shoot a picture. Tomorrow, when these become more and more popular, just a glance at someone will be enough and no one will hesitate.
Finally, this argument is basically: "oh well, we live in a crappy world already, so making it even more crappy is not a problem".
For me it comes down to ignoring valid use-cases because some people might misuse it (but can already do that without this product) without actually improving anything in the larger sense. It feels like a waste.
I understand that theoretically it lowers the bar, as you said. But in my view that's not as drastic as many are expecting. You still have an LED showing the person is taking a picture and they have to command it with their voice (or a button in the glass?) to take a picture. That's apparent enough for me.
That'll be equivalent to someone pointing a phone at you. Depending on the situation it would be even more apparent since holding your phone up is extremely common today.
I absolutely hate the state we are today, but I don't see how prohibiting/shaming this product will improve anything. I can definitely see the appeal of having one of these in trips, shows, etc. Those legitimate use-cases are being bundled up with the paranoia of strangers taking pictures, which already happens today, whether we want to believe it or not.
Imagine having concerts where people aren't fucking holding their phones up all the time again. Now that would be a sight for sore eyes.
Having said all that, maybe I'm simply numb at this point. I know we're in dystopia territory already so might as well have some nice trinkets with it.
In the US specifically, there are protected first amendment rights.
However, plenty of people have genuine reason to be concerned. Stalkers. Witness protection. Etc. Having managed large datasets, these things come up fairly often. There's an incredible diversity of potential problems.
It's not reasonable to tell everyone who has an issue like this: "Well, don't go out into public then"
Its a universal human right, actually, to be able to record anything you can perceive in public ... without that right we cannot exercise political freedom or our rights as individuals for redress.
>It's not reasonable to tell everyone who has an issue like this: "Well, don't go out into public then"
Of course it is. They have equal rights - and equal opportunity, therefore, to express - or not express - these rights.
It is entirely up to the individual to make the decision to exercise those rights and to not deny them to others for any reason, as it is a fundamental, universal human right to record others in public.
If you believe something is a right, and most other people don't, it's definitely not a universal right.
What is an established universal human right is: "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
> without that right we cannot exercise political freedom or our rights as individuals for redress.
Yes. We can. We've done it since long before cameras existed, even. Where I live is moving towards a balance where, very grossly oversimplified:
- Government officials have very little privacy protection, and first amendment trumps privacy
- Private individuals have a lot of privacy protection, and privacy trumps first amendment
That seems reasonable.
I'd like corporations to have no privacy either, but that's not where we're landing.
The Right to Record is clearly protected under provisions of international human rights standards such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Universal Declaration of Human Rights that protect freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and the right to information
You're making shit up. You posted the same comment in several places, and it's false. It's not helpful or constructive.
If you believe a law says something, quote it.
Right to expression doesn't cover this, under any non-crackpot interpretation. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights even has an explicit carve-out from right to expression for the rights or reputation of others to demonstrate which one takes precedence.
If you want to make up your own laws, please go register yourself as a "sovereign citizen," and wait until someone throws you in prison (and perhaps, then, realize it doesn't work that way).
I get you'd like this to be a right enshrined in law, but it's not, and it won't be, and it can't be.
Actually, better thing to do: Go to a Muslim country, start taking photos of strangers, and then waive your claims around. Let us know how that goes for you.
The Right to Record is clearly protected under provisions of international human rights standards such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Universal Declaration of Human Rights that protect freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and the right to information.
The Right to Record is clearly protected under provisions of international human rights standards such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Universal Declaration of Human Rights that protect freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and the right to information.
Corporations are composed of individual human beings who are also exercising their universal rights in the course of involvement in that corporate entity .. will you start making a special class of humans that has those rights and can exercise them, and a class that can't based on their membership in a social group?
Then: Congratulations, you've become the very repressive thing you were resisting in the first place.
Yes, this is the price of freedom: in public, where you can express yourself, and exercise your universally granted rights to free expression (and thus recording) or not - without the expectation of being impinged upon by your peers - so too can others express themselves, and exercise their same universal rights.
Its a two way street and it belongs to the public.
They are, actually. It's a company that makes money off of people's photos among other things. I get it that _you_ have no issue with it, but why would I, having never given consent to that company to store images of me, be monitored by them? They don't have a right to monetize people that don't give consent. That's creepy.
There's nothing illegal about these as long as you're not doing anything illegal. It's not illegal to take pictures of people in places where there's no expectation of privacy.
I live in Japan and see Chinese livestreamers walking around all the time. Stores are allowed to refuse their business, but it's not illegal to record others in public. Whether this counts as a hidden camera isn't up to me, but since it has a glowing LED indicating when it's recording I wouldn't think it would be a problem.
And also teams within the product pushing for different things, like the recent Google Marketing Team vs Google Chrome Team wanting different approaches.
Windows 1.0 was release 38 years ago, microsoft has changed persona at least three times since then.
Not that we shouldnt be suspicious of facebook, but we really must actually seek evidence rather than just decry them as witches. It lets other companies get away with loads simply because they are well liked.
based on engineering a product that has a power capacity of <2 watt hours, to work reliably and is able to play and stream audio correctly.
To spy on someone using these glasses would mean decent audio stack that can actually reconnect by its self, rather than having to power cycle the entire device.
Not only that, but a level of attention to detail that means that what ever spying it does can happen reliably and inside a tiny power envelope.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying don't be suspicious of facebook, What I'm asking is to actually interrogate their level of skill.
facebook are frankly shite at software, just use any of their supporting apps.
o Portal, great hardware, shame that it never connected reliably.
o oculus: They have the power of facebook/instagram/social graph, yet its impossible to join your mate in game. Something Steam nailed in the days of dialup
o Rayban: cannot play audio reliably, pretty tricky to download pictures.
o Advertising: fuck me, its like oracle had a baby with SAP, and force fed it MS access forms.
Yes, yes its an advertising giant. But have you tried to get any usable and accurate data out of it?
Stop building them up like they are an unstoppable genius factory. Its basically a bunch of confused cats trapped under a duvet. The difference being those cats can drive advertising clicks.
Any good argument that anyone can think of for a scenario where smart eyewear will not be as ubiquitous as smart phones eventually? I understand the privacy argument, but that is not going to be enough. The ability to think or blink in a certain way and capture anything you see is too powerful a tool, alongside the augmented reality that is coming.
I was one of the ridiculous-looking people who had a Google Glass when it came out. It was clunky, and lasted a very short time, and your face would get hot, and it had no real AR interaction with the real world.
But. If you could squint at the rough edges, and project forward what this could be like with more advanced tech, it was a no-brainer for me that it will be a far superior form factor for what we do with the phone. For 2 weeks, I tried hard NOT using a phone and just using it. While it was difficult (mostly because I couldn't have a conversation with anyone that didn't begin with them asking what was on my head), when I went back to the phone I so strongly noticed how much I was craning my neck, how annoying it was to interact with tech like that, and it kinda felt terrible.
Wow dang, they really should make this more obvious. If I bought one and discovered that (despite being able to record and stream video) it had no display, I would be pissed.
To be fair the second sentence in the short top description is about staying connected with calls and messages. I don't think many people's first assumption (without any other context/knowing more) would be that that means having them read out.
> Stay connected with hands-free calls and messages and listen to your favourite tracks through built-in speakers.
Which makes it seem pretty clear they're talking about stuff you can do because of the speakers.
Then later:
> No more stopping to answer your phone. Also, make calls and send messages on WhatsApp, Messenger and SMS, completely hands-free – simply by using your voice.
The first part seems intentionally ambiguously worded to be interpreted as:
> (Stay connected with hands-free calls and messages) and (listen to your favourite tracks through built-in speakers)
vs:
> (Stay connected with hands-free calls and messages and listen to your favourite tracks) through built-in speakers
So it's not clear from that wording that there isn't a display, or that the messages are read aloud. An unambiguous wording would be:
> listen to your favourite tracks and stay connected with hands-free calls and messages through built-in speakers
As, well, the below statement is true whether there is a screen or not, and also doesn't specify that the messages are read aloud:
> No more stopping to answer your phone. Also, make calls and send messages on WhatsApp, Messenger and SMS, completely hands-free – simply by using your voice
That plus the image of the screen floating next to the glasses definitely make it seem like marketing is trying to trick people into thinking there's a display without explicitly claiming it
> Which makes it seem pretty clear they're talking about stuff you can do because of the speakers.
That's true. But it's not excluding display stuff.
It's along the lines of some product having multiple features, and some marketing point only talking about the advantages of the first feature. People would expect further marketing points to address the other features, and/or not even realise they'd not seen the other ("assumed to be present") features mentioned later on.
> That's true. But it's not excluding display stuff.
How many product landing pages talk about what you cannot do with the product or what it doesn't include? That'd be a very strange landing page for a product...
I think you're technically correct, it definitely is unusual to talk about what you cannot do.
However, do you really think the marketing team didn't get together and recognize the major limitation of not having a display, and carefully craft the marketing so as to minimize that?
> However, do you really think the marketing team didn't get together and recognize the major limitation of not having a display, and carefully craft the marketing so as to minimize that?
Probably a bunch of people wished it was Google Glass 2.0 because it'd make the marketing people jobs easier/more interesting, but I don't think they'd craft the message to trick people, it'll impact the amount of returns and they'll probably lose more handling that than people not buying it because it doesn't have a screen.
> > Stay connected with hands-free calls and messages and listen to your favourite tracks through built-in speakers.
> Which makes it seem pretty clear they're talking about stuff you can do because of the speakers.
I don't agree at all (I wasn't not quoting to hide anything, I was just typing from mobile with a crappy connection on a train) - that's not clear to me - but ok.
Meta is all about VR. VR means a display. Anyone would assume "meta glasses" are AR glasses. This is just a desperate attempt to boost the meta hype because they have made no progress on actual VR products.
They are also called "smart glasses", but they are just headphones and a camera. Nobody calls their bluetooth headphones "smart".
"To conclude, it’s worth noting that, at least for a time, product managers at Facebook — Russ’ job before starting DocSend — were required to read Snow Crash as part of their internal training."[0]
You can't imagine police departments that buy stingray devices and spy illegally with them to also pay for surveillance data? Anyway for real time tracking, police stations can likely get the feds involved which get that info from your telco, who are best buddies with the federal government.
Yeah... but I am not american, but from a tiny european country. Police makes some requests for data after the fact every year, but as far as I know there are no deals between police and giant american corporations. I'm probably naive.
That's fair, we are on mostly American website after all!
I'm just traveling through France and saw on the news that a woman disappeared. They are trying to find her by triangulating the last location based on nearby cell towers of where she was last seen. So even giant European countries can't/don't use facebook/google to locate people.
I remember having similar thoughts about Google Glass despite never using it and never really wanting to use it.
I mean, the concept seemed amazing, but it seemed clear that it needed to be combined with vastly more AI capability. All of the things that people imagined it doing were basically impossible.
But now it seems like something much more powerful shouldn't be that far away.
I wonder if we will see an inversion of the clip-on sunglasses design but with corrective lenses.
Clip your prescription to a pair of sunglasses instead, or to your smart glasses.
You might have to clip them to the backside to get it all to work out. But in that case variations in lens shape will be less visible, because sunglasses.
These days, at least if you can afford designer, they use rare earth magnets and the frames are exactly the same shape.
Since most glasses only grind the back side of the lens, they fit pretty closely together.
Which is also why you wouldn't be able to reverse the position of the lenses without changing how they're ground (also thick lenses hidden behind the frame conceal just how bad your eyes are, which some people get self conscious about.
Point was, if you wear a pair of glasses that people require you to take off regularly, you still need to be able to see, and that means carrying two pair of glasses. Transitions lenses exist in large part because people can't be arsed to carry around two pair of glasses.
You're missing the point. Corrective lenses have thickness. For the frames that use magnets to add a sunglass layer, they only work because it can go on the outside, with the lens already set in the frame at the right distance from the eyes/lashes. It just wouldn't work in reverse, to take a sunglass lens at the right distance and snap something in behind it. You'd get oily lash streaks all over the corrective layer constantly.
It's even worse if you wear really thick glasses, because sometimes they even have to sit slightly proud of the frame in the front.
Your solution just isn't viable for this problem, as any longtime glasses wearer could easily tell you.
If that's not enough, there's a whole industry of people designing eyewear; you really think "What if you just added the corrective part inside the tinted part?" wouldn't have been done if it were viable?
Take a pair of glasses. Attach sunglasses to them. Move the bows from the glasses to the sunglasses. The geometry of the glasses or frames don’t matter, it’s whether there’s enough distance from the eye.
My glasses have almost always sat proud of the frames. And there’s plenty of distance behind them. (I’ve had sunglasses that brush my eyelashes though, when I was young and they were cheap, and that bugs the hell out of me).
> If that's not enough, there's a whole industry of people designing eyewear; you really think "What if you just added the corrective part inside the tinted part?" wouldn't have been done if it were viable?
First of all, that's an Appeal to Authority, and you know where you can stick that. Two, you think I'm trying to solve a very old problem, which means you missed the point.
Putting something on your face that vastly outsizes and outcosts your glasses is a brand new problem.
Scientists get eyepieces for microscopes with prescription lenses. That's not on your face. Skiers just buy goggles with prescription lenses, which cost almost as much as VR goggles. That's basically a luxury market, not a consumer market.
Also the whole fuckin' point is that none of these solutions (to people insisting you take your glasses off) work because a rounding error of people are going to carry two pair of glasses with them, and even the workaround is unwieldy. You're lost in the weeds talking about the physics of it, which aren't a problem and aren't the real problem.
What you actually said was:
> Clip your prescription to a pair of sunglasses instead, or to your smart glasses.
You might have to clip them to the backside to get it all to work out.
And what does "Move the bows from the glasses to the sunglasses" even mean? Bows?
You can't take a glasses frame that is designed to be worn at a normal distance from the eye and then clip something to the back side of it, between the original lens and your eye. There's not enough space to add a corrective lens back there.
Even if there were, it's still unfeasible, because the part you have to take off is the smart part or the tinted part not the prescription part.
Never mind that it's only a rounding error of people who are willing to carry around a clip-on layer either, because it requires nearly as much protection as a full pair of glasses to avoid breaking it.
Making the prescription part the clipping part is inane on every level. Nothing about it works.
I found google glass to be great. It had real world AR in directions. I used it several times in other cities to move about. I never really had any heat issues. I do wish we could have gotten a couple iterations, but that's Google for you.
That same ability might lead people to ban people wearing smart glasses from participating.
If we were having a party, we’d almost certainly not allow people to keep their smart glasses on because the complete lack of friction would mean certain individuals who are decently in the public eye would have to basically spend the whole evening just making sure there’s not even a suggestion of a still picture capturing something that may go wrong.
You will almost certainly be required to remove your smart glasses before entering any sort of medical institution, and even a building containing a medical institution would probably have you removing it on entering the building itself.
Thanks a lot for this viewpoint. This type of surveillance tech is extremely scary to me. I have no doubt a big enough minority will want to embrace it, without a moments thought to what the people around them might feel like.
But it's very comforting that in many places they will be outright banned.
I will do my best to get them forbidden in as many places as I can.
"Would you favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce domestic violence, abuse and other illegal activity"
In the 18-29 age range, 30% said yes.
I agree with your sentiments but we have already lost. You just have to enjoy what we have now because it won't last forever. Someday everyone's entire life will be filmed and watched over by AI. To me, that is absolutely obvious at this point. If that was not going to be the case we wouldn't be where we are now.
Why glasses? I’ve paid a lot of money not to have to wear glasses.
I might use some kind of camera attached to my head if it was something most people used. Would be nice to be able to capture moments instantly.
I haven’t seen a use-case for low quality augmented reality that would make me use glasses daily. Then again, I personally don’t find smart watches worth it and lots of people use those.
I think the Apple Vision kind of illustrates what it’d take for really compelling augmented reality. If it can replace my TV I might actually use it. But then they clearly don’t intend for you to use them outside. And I’m still not sure if it’s worth the discomfort of wearing tightly fitting glasses.
> Why glasses? I’ve paid a lot of money not to have to wear glasses.
Because it's the only socially acceptable way to point a camera at people without tipping them off.
That's one reason google glass didn't take off as well. When you show up at the party waving your camera around on record, people tend to find a way to distance themselves.
It means that either this line of product will ruin glasses (false positives of people assuming your thick frame glasses are a hidden camera) either people really aren't tipped off and we'll have a moral panic about private footages overflowing in the media.
I see a future in smart glasses, in particular for notifications, but they absolutely need to tip off people when the camera is pointed at them.
The tendency for people to be creeped out by your surveillance glasses.
If anyone around me wore these, I'd promptly tease them playfully about it, making it clear it's creepy.
I understand that there are folks like yourself that are comfortable with it, but most people are against others walking around and recording.
I hate that they are trying to hide the fact that the glasses are modified. Clearly they understand that the camera must be hidden for it to be socially acceptable.
Cops have to wear body cams that are recording continuously (or at least we hope they are). Dash cams are popular...even standard...in places where insurance fraud is rife. How long the hold out will be until wearing a headset recording device is considered normal rather than creepy?
I see your point, but dash cams are recording the road, which is not a place that most people consider private.
An always-present personal recording device is different. People enter and leave areas that others feel are private. In some cases, there are even laws protecting what can be recorded (two-party states in the U.S. for example).
If something like these glasses started to take off, I would expect public backlash and legislation that restricted or prevented its use in certain contexts, which would essentially make them useless (the point is that you wear them all the time).
Depends on the culture, really. Dash cams (& ring doorbells/private security cameras) are illegal in quite a few countries with strong privacy protections.
Even on a public street people have a right to privacy in my country, I couldn't just start taking pictures or video of someone without consent.
I think a single trip down Reddit's r/PublicFreakout should be enough to convince you that the ubiquity of cameras doesn't stop people from acting like assholes.
Thats a small minority of incidents. There are a lot more day to day behaviors that people do that are inconsiderate, and if there is a chance of you getting on video, being identified and losing your job, Im all for it. There is no immediate reward for acting good, and very little to no punishment for acting like an asshole.
>There are a lot more day to day behaviors that people do that are inconsiderate, and if there is a chance of you getting on video, being identified and losing your job, Im all for it.
Good thing you've never done anything in your life that could be construed as inconsiderate, so this wouldn't affect you.
Eyeballs are pretty optimal for getting data out of a computer and into a brain. I think professionals will continue to use a high-resolution large-format desktop monitor, but a high-resolution large-format display on a pair of glasses is unambiguously superior to a phone screen, no matter how much resolution they pack in or how much larger than a pocket they get.
What I wonder is where the keyboard is going. I have an imagination that can draw and abstract things with (I think?) about as much fidelity as my eyes can take in, but there's nothing that even comes close to that for getting that data out of my brain and into the computer. Not keyboards, not mice, not touchscreens or pen/tablet, not game controllers, not voice-to-text. Not my Leap Motion gesture sensor or Spacemouse, though those are interesting products. With lots and lots of training, I can get hundreds of WPM of text into a computer, with exotic, high-information-density syntax if required (text entry speed doesn't really seem to be the bottleneck for productive work, but that's beside the point IMO).
The optimal input mechanism is definitely not blinking, though I can imagine that eyeglasses with gaze tracking tech (and some training for "wink to click" or similar) may someday be of comparable or greater utility to a mouse pointer. But how close can we get to "think to text" or "think to image"?
I’ve been imagining the future will be smart glasses paired with mini pocket keyboards, like the bottom half of a blackberry. Or who knows maybe everyone will lean heavily into dictation.
I think there’s also a future where hand tracking gets so good you just type on a full sized floating keyboard. That’s seems to be apples approach with the Vision Pro.
> Or who knows maybe everyone will lean heavily into dictation.
Impractical, as lots of input is hard or even impossible to do with dictation; saying "next" or "go back" every time quickly becomes tiresome, and never mind things like games.
For pure text messages and the like there are loads of scenarios where you don't want to be talking out loud, for reasons of convenience, privacy, and not being a nuisance to others.
It's looks cool on Star Trek and all, but voice control will never be the main interface to computers. Absolutely great accessibility tool and like many accessibility tools useful for everyone from time to time. But the default for regular people? I'm not seeing that happening.
As someone who wears glasses, my argument was always that most people don't want to wear glasses all the time, even if they were adding no extra friction vs your regular sunglasses (weight, looks, cost).
But, I had the same argument for Apple watch - no one in my circle was wearing watches any more. However, that didn't prevent people to start wearing an Apple watch.
So, I can definitely see a future where people who don't wear glasses choose to wear smart glasses.
I do agree that I wouldn't have assumed that the watch is used that much but after it got its own esim and can be used instead of a phone, it can replace a device.
And for sports it's actually practical.
Glasses? I still think nope. It's still not a beauty thing
Cost and interface mostly. Also to some extent privacy issues.
Phones being $1000 is already an issue, and they're by default more robust. Glasses, assuming we can get them to a similar cost, are probably even more likely to be lost or broken. For comparison think of foldable smart phones, which exist, but are mostly seen as a trendy luxury item due to their durability issues.
The interface, I think is huge. Smart phones took off because apple figured out a good interface. People like to rip on them for just copying an idea that already existed and hadn't taken off, but they ignore that apple nailed the hell out of getting it so the average person could use it.
You need it to be clear, obvious, and responsive.
All the examples i've seen of these smart glasses (website isn't loading for me so I can't check this) are the sorts of things that nerdy people like me (typing on a cornish zen) would find fine, and will never be smooth enough for the average user, ESPECIALLY at current costs.
While things like the air pods pro have changed my opinion on the average user adopting tactile controls, I still think that voice activation and mostly reference-less tactile controls is NOT mass adoptable. And this is before we get into just the hassle of glasses (smudges and the like).
From what I can tell, these are basically just "headphones + camera" on your face. So it's not displaying anything, at which point this is like airpods with a camera. Is there a group of people who want that? Sure, this looks tailor made for luxury influences. Is that a use case for the average person? I don't think so.
Not a feature I like or endorse, but one that's clearly in the interest of both device vendors and much of the online advertising and commercial sector.
In a world in which credible attestations of interest and potential commercial value are difficult to assess without the manifest signals of a high street address and the visual assessments made possible by physical presence, owning a < 2 y.o. piece of $1,000 kit is a highly reliable market segmentation signal.
This is a key reason why websites (especially commercial ones, but also anything advertising-related) are on such a relentless treadmill of ever-escallating resource demand. Got to keep those undesireable old-cheap-Android and 15-year-old desktop plebes out somehow.
This comment may eventually seem as outdated as asking 'what's the point of Dropbox,’ but it seems we’re approaching the limits of human-computer interaction. It feels as if we’ve reached a point where technology, originally a 'tool' to serve humans, is beginning to erode essential aspects of our humanity, manipulating our core motivations. People may start to opt out, not necessarily due to a lack of useful features and functionalities, but because the overall cost to our humanity outweighs the benefits. This is something we’re gradually coming to realize more fully.
I kind of agree with your first part. For a while now, I've considered the possibility that a handheld device like an iPhone is actually pretty close to the ideal way humans actually want to interact with a computer. Even though it seems cool as an idea, I don't think people want their experience with a computer to be too immersive--handheld device might be the sweet spot.
I can't imagine willingly introducing any more "smart" devices into my life given the baggage "smart" comes with. We have to cede a little autonomy and privacy to unaccountable central authorities for every new "smart", cloud-enabled gimmick we buy into. I'd be happy to invest in tech that treats me like I own it, but that way of doing things is on its way out, at least for the average person.
No. Wearable AR tech is the future. The trend has been "get this device as out of my way, and integrate it into my life as much as possible." e.g: big iron -> desktops -> laptops -> smart phones enabling greater mobility and flexibility of use.
We're just starting to see the next state of it with wearable tech. Smart watches. Airpods. Many people have these. Many people wear them for extended periods because they're comfortable interfaces to the services they care about. A family member has a hearing aid that's connected to their phone's bluetooth. Comfortable enough to wear all day & discretely listen to phone audio whenever. I think that's the next step (obvious evolution from airpods). Glasses -> AR displays shortly after.
"Smart" glasses erode everyone's privacy unlike any other technology. Cameras and cell phones have to be held up to record. Glasses can stream effortlessly and continuously, without anyone's consent. If that is not reason enough to object what more do you want, my fist in your face?
By the time I am close enough see that puny light you've already recorded me. It's an opt out mechanism, not opt in. Maybe if there was an unobtrusive way for me to prevent recording through a wearable, like a ROBOTS.TXT file, or a universal gesture (a middle finger, or a grimace) to indicate my desire to be erased from your recording, I would consider it. I would also want some assurance that my request is honored. Given how unlikely this all is, I am simply saying "nope" today.
It's fine in situations where consent is obtained in advance; e.g., events.
I should add that I take more pictures than the average person, and used to be a street photographer, so I have been in situations where people did not want their likeness captured. Also in countries where people objected to photography altogether on the grounds that it stole their spirit. I always had to make a decision with my trigger finger, so I was able to apply human oversight. My stance is informed by experience.
Try taking your phone out and start recording when talking to some random people on the street or in shop at cash register, or when talking to policeman etc. and see if none of them will start getting very annoyed or even aggressive - even if it's not (maybe) illegal people won't like it.
People are allowed to be annoyed. If you punch someone, or break/steal their property for recording, there are actual LEGAL consequences that could befall you. People record others all the time, there is this whole Karen phenomenon that is kinda hard not to know about..
Don't squander your right to record in public on something as mundane and personal as a civilian minding his own business. Record a crime, at least. Otherwise the law may change and you may lose that "right".
I don't like being recorded all the time when out in public or in stores or hospitals or other places or institutions. The thing that I find completly unacceptable is having the recording sent off to meta or google or somewhere to be analyzed and monetized without my consent. Not only do I not benefit from this I consider it a profound abuse of my privacy and autonamy. before all this invasive corporate surveillance being seen in public was a localized and ephemeral experience and privacy laws were adequate to cover this. This is no longer true. Not that I think this will happen any time soon (or ever) because, you know, money; and not enough people outraged about this or that feel safe enought to express thier outrage, but a simple fix would be that if I am not a consenting user of a corporate service like meta or google or ticktock or whatever then that service is not permited to retain or use that (personal) information in any way. So when the service recieves video it must remove or completely obsure any individuals image and audio from the video that are not current users of the service. Better yet and more feasible would be to just flag and delete the video, which puts the burden on the person making the video, where it belongs. Of course this would apply to any and all information conected to all non users of the service. To motivate compliance an automatic award of, let's say, $10,000 to an abused party would probably do the trick. If this sounds extream to you I just consider it a good start.
> there are actual LEGAL consequences that could befall you
There are, but they are extraordinarly unlikely. People push and shove each other all the time over minor insults and disagreements and almost never end up in front of a judge. Most cops would just say "you should have put the camera down when he asked you to, now stop wasting my time."
I didn't mean that this is ok to punch someone. My point is it will annoy a lot of people and some will eventually punch you. There are many legal things that if you do you are just asking yourself for a problem.
I also think in some countries it might be illegal to record someone either video or audio without explicitly telling or asking for permission. Even at the airport (at least in many I have been) it was not allowed to do video recording
There is a big difference between actively choosing to film, showing you are filming someone and a passive camera always on. The first one can be easily avoided, the second one not so much.
That is a technicality; I object on principle. I extrapolated current capabilities to underscore the argument, because more people will lifestream/lifecast the easier it gets. Tomorrow it may be a neural link.
Then what else have we got left in order to confront those very rude people that film you without your consent? It's pretty clear that the law is not up to the task.
The copy claims the glasses will complain audibly if you cover up the LED, but doesn’t say whether or not it stops recording. It’s also not clear how easily circumvented this is, but they’ve obviously considered the angle.
Nah, earbuds and phones could do audio recording just fine and for longer. Adding video does not make it "unlike any other", so this is rather a minor erosion on top.
> Glasses can stream effortlessly and continuously
For a rather limited time duration and with a glowing light and with actually quite a bit of effort.
> without anyone's consent.
Why? You still need the same amount of consent as with any other camera.
Correct, and people do have expectations, albeit reduced, of privacy in public too. Moreover, this expectation is thankfully backed by the law in various jurisdictions. I would very much like to see those rights beefed up for the machine learning age, after reading all these comments.
Or would you like to live in a panopticon like the Chinese? Hey, you're on PUBLIC property, citizen! Smile for the camera, and don't think we can't read your lips. Like for real; we got software for that.
It is not the norm everywhere and, in any case, we should push back. It gives me no joy to walk past video surveillance cameras. They stick out like sore thumbs to me and make me feel treated like a potential criminal.
I believe we reclaim no power by recording our fellow citizens going about their daily lives. We merely augment the corpus of corporations and governments.
My beef with these smart glasses is that while they can be used to document crimes, I estimate they will typically be used for mundane purposes, while eroding the privacy of law-abiding citizens. More so than cell phones, which require you to at least hold the thing up and press a button. You will do so to document a crime, but not to mindlessly and continuously record everything you see. This changes the balance.
if you are in public, you have no expectation of privacy outside of physical interaction in your immediate space outside your body (and even then, on crowded public transport, this is not the case). If someone can see what you are doing, there is no difference between that and them recording it. If someone can hear what your are saying, there is no difference between that and them recording it.
If you don't agree, you are essentially saying that you are entitled to do and say what you want, but gathering any evidence of you doing so is not allowed, which not only doesn't make sense but is also pretty indicative that you are looking to be up to no good.
> If someone can see what you are doing, there is no difference between that and them recording it. If someone can hear what your are saying, there is no difference between that and them recording it.
There is all the difference in the world. This is what we're debating here. According to your binary logic, everyone is within their right to record and retain in perpetuity all public activity, with arbitrary high fidelity. And if that's fair game, I suppose you'd be okay with unifying them into one view and mining it? Like China, but even worse. I would be disgusted and ashamed to live in such a society. Fortunately, the law does not say this.
For this specific product. If successful, you will no doubt get some i-glasses, goggles, galaxy glasses, ... and probably some infighting for openglasses and libreglasses.
First, just because China did it doesn't mean its necessarily wrong. The real bad part of Chinese system are the laws that govern what is bad and what the punishment - the surveillance in itself alone is neutral at worst. More information never hurts.
Secondly, this would be "society filming society", without the government being involved.
I really see only positive with the mass adoption of these things. When I go out in public, I drive respectfully, I don't cut in line, I clean up if I make a mess, I don't play loud music or have an obnoxiously loud car, I don't talk loudly, and am generally not an asshole to people. If someone needs the fear of being recorded, and put online and losing their job to not act like asshole, then so be it.
Because the hypothetical damage a bad member of society could do outweighs the potential risk of private life details leaking (and any effect resulting from this) for good members of society.
Say you live in a neighborhood with 50 people, and nobody knows anything about each other. Then one day, a hacker comes in an publishes a lot of private details about every single resident - grocery shopping lists, movie preferences, political leanings, website search history, even private videos and photos. However, it turns out that one of the residents is a serial rapist, while another one deals drugs. Getting information on those two is extremely valuable to the neighborhood, even if it came at a price of reduced privacy.
>It would also be a corporation filming private citizens on a very large scale (and government can obtain data from corporations).
I get the whole "government bad" liberterian sentiment, but this never really plays out in reality. I mean, lived 4 years under a literal fascist and came out largely ok. There is enough due process in place and good people in the government to avoid misuse of power on a wide scale. Furthermore, the government is a combination of incompetency and not enough man power for the average citizen to worry about.
As for corporations, most people are ok with data being collected about them and used for things like advertising, because they still continue to use the products and apps, because the value add of those is worth more than privacy (which many people don't even understand what it is).
> However, it turns out that one of the residents is a serial rapist, while another one deals drugs.
Hypotheticals are easy to populate with supporting examples, but also in the neighborhood are the political enemies of the government, minorities, targets of oppression (e.g., LGBTQ), etc.
> I get the whole "government bad" liberterian sentiment
Spare me your bullshit dimissal. Do you have anything substantive or is that all you have?
> this never really plays out in reality
I think cracking open any history book or reading the news will show the horrors inflicted by dictators. I'm glad you were ok.
1. Outward appearance. People don't like wearing glasses if they don't have to.
2. Tech issues: e.g. short battery life, weight, need for charging, UX.
3. Compelling features that make them worthwhile to use. This point is harder to explain, but a device needs to provide features to the wearer as they wear them and not indirect benefits. These features need to be particular to the device's unique position on the face. It needs to solve the question: what can a device on the face do, that one in the hand can't.
4. Recording content must be a secondary feature of such devices. We let smartphones into private places, such as change rooms, because they provide an enormous set of features, and only bad actors would use the recording features in an indecent way. If the main purpose of smart eyewear is to record others, then they'll not only be banned from such locations, but those around the wearer will become unnerved by them. People need privacy and downtime.
I feel meta's smart glasses partly answer point 1, but fail at the rest. They are a lop sided product in their efforts: the main feature is to produce recordings, this means there's no compelling reason to always take them out and their primary purpose is bested by the smartphone they need to be paired with. The smartphone has better cameras, better battery life, the ability to easily review and retake photos, and doesn't need to be worn on the face.
I can't understate how wearable tech needs to deliver features to the user as they're wearing them, and in a way that only that position on the body enables. Meta's product here doesn't really offer anything that they can't get in a better form from other products, products that the market already owns:
Recording content: The phone is infinitely better.
Shortcuts/listening to music: BT headphones/Airpods are simpler, have longer battery, more private and provide all of the same features such as handling calls, volume and playback control.
With al of these obvious shortcomings, the only rationale I can imagine is that Meta are just doing their fast-follow strategy. They couldn't acquire Snap, so they copied Snap's stories and now these are a copy of Snap Spectacles.
> Any good argument that anyone can think of for a scenario where smart eyewear will not be as ubiquitous as smart phones eventually?
I see 2 potential scenarios:
1. Some series of safety/privacy mishaps will lead to social/media hysteria which will push politicians towards a ban for such devices.
2. Initial price set too high will cause vicious circle of: low userbase -> lack of interest from developers -> lack of valuable features -> low userbase.
I won't argue that these are very probable scenarios, but quite possible imho.
But these aren't good enough to see mass adoption. It's possible that the tech needed to create an affordable smart glasses product that is actually usefully is for whatever reason just physically impossible to create.
I don't want to typical mind the world and assume very many people feel the same, but I'm at least chiming in with the few here who have already they don't like wearing any kind of jewelry or really non-essential accoutrement of any kind. I have thankfully never needed corrective glasses, but I don't wear sunglasses, either, nor a watch, nor hats. I don't even wear my wedding ring except when I'm traveling and my wife nags me enough. I get that a wearable probably feels less obtrusive than a phone to someone who actually uses their phone a lot, but I don't. It's not obtrusive sitting in my pocket and even less so when it's on my bedside table charging and I'm somewhere else without it. Anything I'm wearing is inherently there. I don't particularly want to be that integrated with a digital world. I don't usually feel much of a need to record or augment my environment.
I'd go for musculoskeletal enhancement, given how much it sucks to get old and have more or less at least one active chronic joint injury at all times no matter what, but thankfully, for now, my eyes and memory still work pretty well on their own.
Is there a good way to text someone with smart glasses yet? How about cropping a photo before posting to instagram? What's the experience of doomscrolling twitter/x/whatever? I really don't think they're going to be as ubiquitous, as smartphones without being as good or better than them in at least some of these
Eventually? Sure. Maybe. It wont be a capture story, it'll be a consumption and interaction story.
The biggest thing preventing that future is hardware, and considering how you're brushing up against hard physics, I honestly don't see smart eyeglasses that look like normal eyelgasses playing out in any serious capacity for a looooong time.
I don't think it will be as ubiquitous as smart phones for the same reason smart watches are not as ubiquitous as smart phones.
The reason I do not wear a smart watch is not because they're not useful, but because it's simply not comfortable for me to be wearing something on my wrist. It's not a big deal, but I prefer to not wear rings, watches, bracelets, etc.
Similarly, I prefer contacts over glasses because of a 1) glasses reduce your field of view / quality of vision, 2) the touch / feel of having something on my face, and 3) them inevitably falling off or being grabbed by my baby.
Smart watches got as ubiquitous as normal watches, and smartphones got as ubiquitous as wallets (and other things you might keep in a pocket or purse). I expect smart glasses will become about as ubiquitous as regular glasses.
David Brin's 'Earth' novel (which feels very prescient in some ways) has elderly people wearing sunglasses that continuously capture live video which is monitored by (private?) security companies. If I recall correctly, in the novel this effectively eliminates street-crime.
We already do this with dashcams; when the form factor allows, I expect it'll be just as common for walking. For mostly the same reasons. It might actually improve city street life.
Comfort and looks: In recent years I have seen lots of people move from glasses to contacts or even to laser surgery. And smart glasses will necessarily be even heavier.
Battery life: The announcement says 4 hours. That puts it at "gaming laptop" levels of inconvenience. It will have to be at least day long to be that ubiquitous and improvements of that scale will take many years.
Usability: touch gestures on the frame or a smartphone app make this very non-effortless. The "think or blink in a certain way" is definitely not there yet and I doubt it will be in the next 20 years. Also, that UX would be the innovation, not the glasses it is affixed to.
Banal reason: Look at VR, 3D, google glass,... . Much hype and then nothing. Why should this be any different?
I mean, sure, there are plenty: regulation, battery life, ruggedness, the creep factor, the fact that this does not provide me with anything similar to the value of a smartphone.
Not all of us spend our days walking down urban streets, having a desire to have the things around us augmented. My smart phone spends 98% of its life in my pocket because I don't want or need any application most of the time. I've tried adopting a smartwatch on multiple occasions and never found it offered me any value. All it did was convince me to turn off a bunch of notifications I didn't need to be getting to begin with.
You have a presented a great argument on why you will not be using smart eyewear. Nothing convincing about why it won't be adopted by the general population. Smart watch doesn't have and will never have anywhere close to the capabilities smart eyewear eventually will.
My point is that this view of the "general population" is extremely skewed. I would wager that more than half of smartphone users do not have any use case for their phone aside from calling, texting, and scrolling social media. Despite years of the technology existing, no one has come forward with a use case for "smart" glasses that has even had remotely broad appeal with the general public. It's all hype backed up by descriptions of niche uses.
The argument is that many people go through the hassle of contact lenses as to not have to wear things on their face.
The bigger problem is that most of reality is just not that interesting. We are already well passed the marginal utility of additional photos/video.
Augmented reality has been right around the corner for many years now. There is obviously all kinds of fundamental flaws with these ideas that those with vested interest pretend do not exist.
The same argument I make against smartwatches: they are great for people who regularly wear the dumb version, but uncomfortable for people who don't.
Smartphones became ubiquous quickly because by the year 2007 almost everyone was used to having a cellphone in their pocket, smart or not. Personally, I find regular sun/glasses uncomfortable and I don't see myself ever buying smart ones.
> Any good argument that anyone can think of for a scenario where smart eyewear will not be as ubiquitous as smart phones eventually?
Yes, if it is clunky and doesn't look like an ordinary accessory people would wear anyway.
Smart watches are popular enough as people might wear a watch. Smart glasses could be popular if they look like actual glasses. Smart pants? Sure, if they can be worn like pants, thrown in the laundry and so on.
I recently saw an ad, probably on facebook, for a camera with a form factor the size of a USB stick, that you could clip on your belt or lapel or whatever, and record whatever was around you with a wide angle lens.
The only argument that I have is that wearing glasses kind of sucks and is pretty inconvenient. And glasses are kind of a fashion statement so unless these manufacturers can come up with a way to easily swap out parts like the frame (just like people change phone cases today) and lenses (to support people with prescriptions), it'll be tough to reach the mainstream.
I’d say “comfort”. Glasses aren’t comfortable for many people and neither are contact lenses. I have a mild prescription but the discomfort of the glasses (arms, nose bridge, turning head more) is greater than the discomfort of my vision not being ultra sharp (for me). So a future of putting on glasses for the tech really isn’t for me.
Glasses are uncomfortable to wear all the time. They are hard to control because they have very limited input methods. Nobody wants to charge their glasse. Every "smart glasses" product ever has failed - nobody wants these.
"Capture anything" aka recording videos is exactly one use case compared to a smartphone which can do that and..basically anything else. So I don't see how smart glasses will ever approach the ubiquity of a phone.
People spend thousands to avoid having to wear glasses or contacts all the time.
Now you can wear them all the time again, but now with more ads?
EDIT to add something less snarky: phones were a "here's another thing to carry in your purse or pocket" additive thing to lifestyles, which wasn't too big a burden, and then gradually got more and more useful. Glasses and contacts, on the other hand, have decades of evidences of people actively avoiding them except for situational stuff. So them getting as pervasive as phones would need a lot more behavioral change.
For those who enjoy reading sf short stories and wonder about the implications of recording one's entire life, I can recommend the remarkable short story 'The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling' by Ted Chiang.
Great recommendation, I feel like most people on this site would enjoy his two short story compendiums. I’m not even a big SF reader but they’re among my favourite books I’ve read.
As a shooting enthusiast, my first thought is what this does in pistol competitions.
Shooting a pistol is, perhaps unintuitively, more difficult than a long arm, because the rear sight is effectively floating around "out there", and you need practice to get your rear eye in the right place (even if using a flip-up red dot reflex sight). When moving around, re-acquiring always takes time, and it slows you down.
With the smart glasses (and a teensy tiny accelerometer-thngy on the barrel), your point of aim is always in your field of view, and you don't need to slow down or even acquire. You could hip-shoot accurately from a dead sprint. It's gonna be pretty rad. They're gonna have to do eyeware examinations, or else it's going to be dominated by smartglass shooters. Like, "dominated" as in "someone is using a cheat code" dominated.
Seeing a laser dot at any serious range is pretty much impossible, at least in my experience. There's also a lot of airborne material at shoots as multiple rounds impact the target/ground/etc. They consistently time slower than reflex sights, and sometimes even iron sights.
That's not considering the problem that in fog/dust, the beam is a "HERE I AM" arrow. Not a problem in competition though. But it underlies the primary use of lasers: IR beams with nightvision. THAT'S the golden ticket for lasers, and you can see where your buddies are aiming too. Now, if you're fighting someone else with nightvision . . hey, good thing we can choose who we fight, right guys? Guys?
Honestly the idea of some asshole dead-dropping an armed sentrybot is far, far scarier to me. A couple of giggle-switch Glocks with drum mags, hooked up to a "Blast Anything That Moves" gimbal, would probably be deadlier than the same weight/volume of high explosive. Bullets don't care about the inverse square law.
I would guess there is photocell next to the LED and comparing the amount of light to the ambient light the cameras get. They might also be doing something clever and using the LED itself as a photo diode.
It's actually not that hard to use LEDs in this way. I think it's not done a lot because in applications that need a light sensor, a purpose-built light sensor works a whole lot better, and it's rare that space is such a premium that having one is an issue.
Glasses may be a use case where space is at a premium, though, so it could make sense there.
Probably the most convenient thing I can think of is just putting my whole phone in my glasses. By my whole phone, let's say I'm talking about my whole dumb phone. So calls, texts, camera - this seems reasonable. And if I can ask for information and get quick answers that's a bonus. Disregard privacy concerns for the moment - that's obviously important and will be a bit sticking point. I would replace my phone with these if it was standalone. Or maybe this + watch in tandem would be neat.
If I didn't already need to wear glasses, that might change how I feel about it as well.
They look way better than expected, almost exactly like the regular models. Issue being that the cameras are clearly visible and make the impression that you are either a voyeurist or a secret agent
I am wondering how they will build out Wifi-Index for positioning(GPS sucks in cities) assuming they want to do location based targetting for any number of purposes(ads, recommendations, location based geo-fencing etc). The critical piece for attribution is linking Wifi based position to a PoI(for location based anything).
This takes a few years to build. Google has a great map blue dot has good fidelity with location because they have a phone collecting all that Wifi data for many years..
They can but remember, having location always on, collected when the app is backgrounded, is a deeply buried permission, once turned off it's hard to turn it back on(or in apples case reminding user with a map to tell you "xyz app has collected your location"); Google is poised to make it more difficult to activate.
Now the Thing is even though background collection is bad in principle because apps must indicate purpose of use for such a sensitive permission and it's hard to think how apps can make a case for it; Google and apple apps still do it for their own apps by default!(Apple does not even have a wifi scanning API)
The only way to get any location based notif while backgrounded for 3p apps is Geofencing which is narrow and not workable for location targeting.
Used these for a year. Great content, but the stabilization is trash. That and exporting without using the Snapchat app made me question if it is really worth sharing the most intimate moments.
Did Snapchat's have really good audio quality that doesn't
disturb the people around you? Pair that with modern AI assistant breakthroughs and it starts to seem pretty compelling.
They also look way less dorky than Snapchat's attempt.
Yup after what they forced us with oculus quest I'm never buying a meta device again. Also they are very poor on repairs and parts. I broke one of the quest controllers and never got a replacement.
I got a pair of the original Stories and they are my most favorite device released in the past decade except for the AirPods.
Countless times I've wanted to capture something with my kids, or on a drive, or on a bike ride. I can just tap the button on my glasses and that's it. I'm not taken out of the moment at all. It's great.
as for the other stuff, Bluetooth speaker included, I wish they would rip it all out.
Reminds me of google glasses and the "glasshole" mentality. But because these are pretty stealth people won't realize it.
It does have strong surveillance state vibes, everything I look at is recorded and replayable. Gonna take the cancel culture (in both the positive and negative aspects) to overdrive.
In any case, let's see the price tag. When that tag goes sub-$100 we'll see some real stuff happening. Also would be interesting to see the cultural shift as most people may end up wearing glasses with AR built into them.
"Bystander privacy -
The Capture LED lets others know when you’re capturing content or going live. If the LED is covered, you’ll be notified to clear it."
I much preferred Google Glass's futuristic but minimal look that could fit into a bunch of different models.
Personally I've never liked Wayfarers/Headliners (they also fit atrociously), so it's disappointing to see them take center stage here. At least the pricing is ok I guess? Fingers crossed for future models.
I'm not interested in this particular device, but after almost being hit by cars several times this month while walking my dog, I am starting to warm to the idea of some form of "dash cam" for walking.
To play devil's advocate: be careful what you wish for. With the way that things are going, police will probably have zero issue getting whatever video from your "dash cam" they deem necessary to do their jobs.
Haha a guy wore them in a bar in downtown Vegas in 2013, and I watched multiple people approach him and tell him to take them off and stop recording everything. I never saw another pair IRL again.
If I were working for the Zuckborg, I wonder how I could make these things socially acceptable. Host an event with A-list beautiful people and pay them to wear these things and post all over social media, to make the glasses be desirable for the influencable?
Though not many celebs might want to be associated with the Zuckborg, nowadays.
Like the college student at open mic night who can't sing but has a gaggle of supportive friends and family who applaud profusely, there's a cult of toxic positivity surrounding him who refuse to be honest, adult supervision.
Sounds a bit like Tony Hsieh, who got us all out to the bars in downtown Vegas in 2013 in the first place. Does seem like Zuck has healthier hobbies and a different sort of discipline.
That said, yes, the first time I met Tony he was sitting at a bar with a meat grinder, yes I spotted him swinging around Slim Jims in a mariachi suit atop a mecha grasshopper shooting flames out its mouth one time, but I guess I don't image he ever killed a mammal for no reason and served it cold to a vegetarian (he loved his llamas! RIP)
I have to give it to Meta on this one. These look stylish and cool and they are at a price point that I could justify. About $400 Canadian. That means a lot of people can adopt this technology. I think Google was just a bit premature for peoples comfort level but I really wanted to see it expand.
The con I see is pretty soon there will be no privacy. Facial recognition will make a record of where you are and someone will have caught your face on camera. But in a world heading towards deep fakes maybe this will be a good thing.
These are going to also be awesome for Youtube videos I can not wait to get a set and start doing motorcycle repair videos where what I see is what you see so you can know exactly what I am looking at.
The only appealing thing for me with smart eye-wear is a personal display. Doesn't need to be big or rich, enough for notification filtering much like smart watches give me. A camera on these is frankly still kind of in the creepy realm to me, but I do get it and it'll probably be a necessary component for any kind of proper AR.
The Meta AI integration is also a massive turn off to me. To each their own, but I want to keep the smart bits mostly in the smart phone. The assistants so far have been anything but assistive on my devices and usually both get in the way (since for a while everyone was really pushing you to use them, only Google seems to have not gotten that particular message) and are privacy nightmares in their own right.
I have the original model and they're fun, if not super expensive. Unfortunately the audio quality is some of the worst you can have; if there's ANY external noise you can't hear any of your music playing at all.
This one says the audio is improved but I'd have to hear it before splurging again.
I had read that bone-conducting audio is better so I'm a bit disappointed to see that this one doesn't have that.
I really hope it'll be possible to use the cameras in voice calls. First person PoV would be way better than phone camera PoV, and it would free my hand from carrying the phone in front of me.
Any word on whether they will let custom code/apps run on this, or is it a walled garden? Whisper + LLM with these would be nice. These glasses could also be great for vision impaired folks.
It sounds like they have that planned in the short-term, and from the presentation, multi-modal AI "sometime next year" (e.g. answering "What is this building that I'm looking at right now?").
The 4 hour battery life will probably save us for a bit, but do you really want to walk around in a world where a bunch of strangers are taking pictures of you just by looking in your direction? I don’t. Who cares about the LED.
>but do you really want to walk around in a world where a bunch of strangers are taking pictures of you just by looking in your direction?
given that the social stigma of phone photography and who it targets has just about disappeared, I think the "I don't want to be photographed' ship has sailed.
This is a USA doctrine, and fewer than 4% of people live there.
Just because this is a fact of life in the USA doesn't mean I want ALPR devices on every street corner telling Zuckerberg et al every time I go out of my driveway and where.
> *Feature requires 5G Wi-Fi or mobile data and minimum ambient temperature condition of at least 5°C. Performance varies based on user location, device battery, temperature, Internet connectivity and interference from other devices, and many other factors.
Connection is understandable (although in some cases 4G will actually be faster). But that temperature requirement for operation is actually quite strict. Any idea why that might be?
Just thinking out loud. Battery damage at a guess. Video streaming can be pretty power hungry (you’re running the camera, encoding the video, and flinging those bits over the air) on a device that sits on your face.
Depending on the construction of the device you can rely on the heat from doing that work to warm the battery up so not so bad (think your smart phone, which also spends most of its time in your pocket while outdoors so doesn’t get “that cold” to begin with), these glasses could have their battery further away from the electronics (thinking out loud prob battery in one arm, electronics in the other) and are probably more prone to be uninsulated form the elements while out and about.
> Battery damage at a guess. Video streaming can be pretty power hungry (you’re running the camera, encoding the video, and flinging those bits over the air) on a device that sits on your face.
I thought about that, but surely internal battery resistance would be lower at lower temperatures?
The other thing I thought about is some movable part of the device, such as a lens that has some actuation. You might just refuse to work at near freezing temperatures to prevent damage to that?
Its been a while since I did any major research on the matter (Thankfully I only deal with batteries indoors these days) but iirc when I used to build homemade RC airplanes, the internal resistance does start increasing the lower the temp gets and that the anode starts getting damaged (at least it wears quicker) discharging the battery at lower temps.
My guess as to why they do it, is to maintain the "expected battery life cycles".
>The other thing I thought about is some movable part of the device, such as a lens that has some actuation. You might just refuse to work at near freezing temperatures to prevent damage to that?
Very possible.
EDIT: However, if it was mechanical, why doesn't there seem to be such a restriction while taking photos?
The same selling points are reiterated over and over again without much detail.
It has a camera. It has speakers. It integrates with social media.
I guess there isn't a HUD or anything AR-related? It's just a smart watch, except glasses? That is...marginally useful, but not that interesting considering what google glass was doing like 10 years ago. I just don't see a use for these.
It's kind of underwhelming as a product. I don't see the average individual desiring this so they can take pictures or livestream to Instagram and Facebook. It could've been a cool tool for streamer if it allowed streaming to Twitch, Kick, etc, but Meta technologies limits its viability for that.
Think it's pretty clear that they're trying to make AR glasses in this form factor, like Apple has been trying to both are hitting up against technology very hard limits.
Apple's approach seems to be now, make a VR headset with extremely high quality passthrough and hope they can solve it down to glasses over the next decade.
Meta's approach seems to be make a really good stand alone VR headset (already done) and now make a glasses form factor with whats possible today and hope to make them meet in the middle some how eventually.
Both these product roadmaps are from a pre-ChatGPT world and seem strange now especially Vision Pro. I fully expect Meta to move more into trying to retool the glasses into a AI assistant led product and slowly move the full AR Glasses to the backburner.
The company that delivers an ability for me to just randomly capture video/pictures "in the moment" has my VR/AR/Glass-hole vote from Day One.
My kids will (and I approve, to be honest) REFUSE to repeat what they just did for the camera, and if they see it out, will sometimes shutdown whatever AMAZING thing they just re-invented.
The supercomputer taking "T3h B3st P1ctur3 Ev@R" in my pocket cannot solve that problem, but some rando "glasses"/"contacts" solution that could has been just out-of-reach for this use case for what feels like decades ;)
That wonky carousel breaks the whole page: https://i.imgur.com/TkTKE06.png
I wonder how many more millions of $ and megabytes of frameworks it would take to just make a decent web page which isn't broken.
Hm, might be useful when capturing fishing videos. Instead of strapping a gopro or insta 360 to your body, just wear these and you get the added plus of polarized glasses. The video doesn't seem to have any stabilization yet though, so maybe a few generations later would be better.
Hardware stabilization is superior to pure software stabilization. Software (aside from real fancy neural nets) can't fix pixels which are blurred from the camera rapidly moving while the shutter was open. My Panasonic GH5 has optical stabilization in the lens as well as a five axis linear motor system to move the camera sensor, and these systems work together to keep the image pipeline frozen in space even when the camera is physically moving. Makes a huge difference in image quality and overall camera system capabilities.
I was curious if this is in use in smartphones. This reference [1] suggests that all iPhone 13 models have sensor shift stabilization, and I assume they have continued with this trend on newer releases.
So yeah, proper stabilization is a hardware thing.
Hardware stabilization is better but it takes space. For pure software stabilization, it can be done by PC or powerful smartphone so it's better to not to have on glass frame for saving battery.
Whether or not it is better depends entirely on what the end images look like and how important the pictures are. If it’s meant to act as a camera to snap and share the fun you are having, then it might be a real turn off if it is noticeably worse than your smartphone, which does have hardware stabilization. If customers stop using the camera on the device and reach for their phone to get the best possible picture, then the glasses lose 1/3 of their major features in the eyes of the customers, and it makes it harder to justify the price.
I’m not convinced software correction is enough, but maybe it is fine. It just depends on what is possible, what matters, and how much people are willing to pay for it.
I like it. It's a pity about this stuff, though, because it's the equivalent of holding your phone camera up to everyone you're talking to. The form factor is so useful but the camera lens just makes everything weird.
I tried the previous ones. Those were chunky, cheap looking plastic like a kids toy, inconvenient, and expensive. There's no display, they're basically just worse than earbuds.
I have a set of original rayban stories. They are excellent hardware hampered by shite, shortsighted software, both on the glasses and on the app.
1) The killer feature is not the camera, but the sound. Having bluetooth audio with you, without stuff in/over your ears is really really great.
2) The physical button action is swapped. single press is video, long press picture.
3) the touch pad is hard to find and there is no texture difference. Not only that but its really easy to trigger music playing by holding them in your hand.
Over all the hardware is great.
Firmware, however, is utterly shite.
For the first year, the maximum time you could get them to play music was about 15 minutes. They'd just stop, disconnect from Bluetooth and need a power cycle to get back again.
They would randomly disconnect for shits and giggles. worse than cheap bluetooth headphones. Whom everlet them out the door in such a poor state, then compounding it by not actually fixing the problems, just shitting out half backed features, should be told off (I'm looking at you Boz).
Then there is the assistant. Functionally limited, I don't use them because you have to say "hey facebook" as the wake word. I'm not saying that in fucking public. who though that was a good idea clearly has been with the company too long.
The app is called "view" its now only just been integrated into the ios photoroll. for the longest while it had its own photo gallery, and you needed to manually sync the photos you wanted.
Whats even more odd is there is no integration with either instagram or facebook, so getting the photos and videos into either of them is a multi-app multi-stage faff.
TLDR:
Great hardware, shit firmware, lots of promise squandered by a total lack of QA or attention to quality or detail in basic flow.
If they made these without the camera and just kept the call functionality I would definitely be interested! My only concern is do they require a facebook account ?
Amazing, after scrolling 75% down the huge-a$$ page, they finally show you what they look like after all the nearly useless features were showcased. Neato!
Why should I care about any technology of a company that was founded to nonconsenually rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and then a whole lot worse?
You remind me of Edward Thorp, who counted Blackjack cards and later became even wealthier with his hedge fund. He has envisioned of wearables making counting easier.
I don't wear glasses. I don't live in a sunny country. Unless I'm wearing flat and clear lenses I would infrequently wear these casually.
I like the concept. Just not sure about market fit outside a people who wear glasses, sunny locations and hardcore fans. Although that's a lot of people!
Feeding Meta more video and audio is the least interesting use case for smart glasses. The hardware looks like a nice start for smart glasses but the lack of AR display and required tethering to Meta makes these undesirable to me.
The livestreaming usecase is honestly incredible. I really wonder how they managed to pull it off given the insane battery and size constraints and the technical details. I would be surprised if it could do more than 20 minutes of continuous livestreaming at an acceptable resolution.
Smart glasses are obviously a massive security threat for industrial espionage. You can ask people to keep their phones with security. Getting people to switch to contacts out of the blue, is much more difficult.
James Bond's job is trivial with these. Elon Musk would lose his legs, if his nation-state competitors (whom probably build these glasses) walked into SpaceX and copy pasted the billion dollar plans to his rockets.
American tech is the leakiest abstraction.
If a President's daughter is caught doing something diplomatically controversial with these (or caught because of these)... they won't last long!
So when Google Glass came out, people using them were "Glassholes" because of the ability to record surreptitiously, albeit for a very short period. And there was no mistaking Glass. Meta's look normal and I doubt the LED indicator will draw enough attention this time around. Plus as others have noted, by the time you notice it's already too late and anyway the onus is on you to ask the wearer to stop. And this is worse, as it streams directly to social media. There should be some (legal) way to jam these devices within a certain proximity radius.
Ignoring the fact that I don't like this kind of product due to privacy implications especially in places like Switzerland and Germany.
What I find sucks here is that meta is able to create such products but no one else can because instagram and facebook live are locked down. There is no way for me to live stream to either platform without using meta's proprietary apps.
At least over at google and twitch I can send my live stream from any device.
The technology for displays (resolution, battery/power needs, field of view issues) is so many years away that it makes sense to try and go with basic touch/swipe and audio UI now. There are great use cases for a device like this...no doubt with a display ability it would be truly incredible but no reason not to be working on this today.
Aside from being glasses with tech and a camera, they're very different. Google Glass had a screen, for one thing, so it was an early attempt at AR. It didn't have lenses, and didn't look anything like regular glasses. This is designed to look and function like regular glasses or sunglasses, with the addition of a camera and speakers.
I don't want cameras strapped to my head, I want a lightweight display I can wear unobtrusively and doesn't make anyone near me nervous (doubly so since this is from a company known for invading privacy), even if it's a fairly low resolution one. Version 1 could even be 4 lines of text and I'd still pay for it - I already wear glasses every waking moment of my life anyway.
Pair it with my phone, give me driving directions which don't require me to take eyes off the road. Remind me of things when I arrive home or get in the car. Let me read texts. Overlay that 9-minute pasta timer in a corner of my field of view until it runs out. Blink in a corner to remind me that my lawn sprinklers are still running, so I don't go to sleep forgetting to turn them off (ahem).
I'll probably learn to use a swype-style keyboard while keeping the phone in the pocket and looking ahead through the glasses.
Come on, I grew up awed at the HUDs of Robocop and Terminator, give me a damn HUD, it's 2023.
PS: added benefit that when I don’t pick up my phone to get to the camera constantly I conveniently miss the attention destroying notifications most times from other Meta products
PPS: Caveat: I live in a sunny location so sunglasses make sense most days.
Yeah, that’s just not what the product is. It’s not targeted at helping people navigate roads, it’s for giving creators a more seamless way of getting footage in their everyday life.
Meta spent a crazy amount of money hosting a giant party at VidCon (a YouTube/TikTok/Instagram focused convention) and I haven’t really seen them pushing these glasses anywhere else. Casey Neistat did a review on the first-gen version in the context of how it helped him film. This really seems like a tool for creators at this point, even if it may morph into something else later.
Interesting - this is pretty insightful in terms of product market fit.
It seems more of a convenient GoPro POV camera form factor that allows more freedom from extra equipment (sunglasses versus some sort of helmet strap/chest strap) and less pre-planning.
I could also see some sort of application where the creator is live-streaming a concert or event to Instagram reels and getting feed back via the headphones from the internet audience on where to go/what to do next.
Definitely can see how it fits directly with FB/Insta in that it gets more people "creating" content for the rest of us (ergo more content to monetize for ads).
Well, the integration into social media is novel too. When I did a demo I signed into my account and when I filmed something it went directly as a post to my IG.
If there were more ability to do more editing and get access to the raw footage that would be helpful; I haven’t tested this version though so I don’t know what it does/doesn’t offer.
how many "spy cameras" allow you to live stream? "the only thing" here is your lack of imagination. not that I'm a proponent of these devices, as they are on the verge of creepCentral, but i'm not going to make an outlandish comment about them "only" being branded.
True, but the first version was garbage, the resolution was like 2007 Razr quality. I feel like the better image quality, battery life, and form-factor this gets, it will become a lot more compelling a product.
I would never have bought the last version, but with the image quality on this one it may be worth it (plus the call-related stuff, although I normally have AirPods with me).
It would probably be pretty awesome at navigating roads too. I remember citibiking in nyc and basically having to memorize directions and street names, or constantly pull out my phone and figure out where i'm going. Having audio through the glasses would work great and still be able to hear your surroundings.
I mean, this is obviously where its going, but the tech isn't there yet without seriously compromising on some axis (looks, size/weight, etc) I think its a great way to get people used to the paradigm of smart glasses and further develop the other components that are already mature on phones (camera, compute, speakers, etc.)
Google Glass was released almost a decade ago, I'm not convinced the tech isn't there. I also had a RECON Mod Live HUD for my Snowboard Goggles which was released in 2011 which had a unit size not that far off from the Google Glass.
It's disappointing that in 2023 there isn't something even remotely close (or better) to tech that was available 10+ years ago in the case of the RECON Mod Live.
...which is why its available for the already chunky wayfarer frames and not the svelte Aviators.
Past camera spy glasses were so chunky as to be obvious if you know to look what to look for. Can't say how unobtrusive or obvious the lens is for the Metas but the Temples are not discernably thicker or different in appearance from non-enhanced Wayfarers.
Wishing they'd Add an inertial sensor making them quite useful for tort / crim evidentiary purposes.
Imagine that while you're driving, a big line of text that you can't see through appears on your windshield.
Worse yet the text is opaque but you have to concentrate on it to read it.
All this would do is give drivers a false sense of security in your directions example. You'll be concentrating on the text regardless, meaning your concentration is off the road.
Even that autopilot sense where you drive your daily routine for 30 minutes and don't remember minutes 20 of it still has your subconscious aware of obstacles in the road, etc. This would require your concentration to be on the text. Whether you want it to or not.
HUDs like this are already common on fighter jets, and even some passenger aircraft, precisely so you don't have to look away to check gauges. Are you saying riding a motorcycle requires more concentration than flying an FA/18 Hornet?
In the jets, are all parts of the HUD always visible and they train to work around them as if it weren't part of the window but rather a permanent obstruction, or does the text pop up unexpectedly while they're flying?
> Are you saying riding a motorcycle requires more concentration than flying an FA/18 Hornet?
Are you saying that building strawmen is more important than the visibility of an FA/18 Hornet?
the BMW motorcycle HUD doesn't have text that pops up unexpectedly, as far as I can see from the demo video. quite the opposite: the HUD stays in one place, and it only displays speed and navigation info, and it doesn't seem very obstructing.
maybe we're talking about different smart glasses?
In that case yes I believe I envisioned it differently than you. If the text is correctly sized and in a box that's always there, where you expect information to be and doesn't block your view, I don't think that would be distracting.
sometimes audio is not enough, e.g. when driving motorbike/scooter in big city (Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur) audio navigation is not enough to on time figure out which lane ramp you have to use at some intersection.
It is impossible to have a good display with a transparent lens, because you have to overlay the light that passes the lens with an even brighter light. Unless they find a way to dim shapes on the lenses, this will always be sub-optimal.
What will work is a camera on your VR device, that will give you a quasi-AR device, but those are still clunky and as you can see with the iGlasses they look a bit spooky from outside.
It is extremely bizarre to advertise with typical Mixed Reality use cases (with display elements overlaid in your field of vision).
Is this actually true or do the people here who say "it lacks a display" mean something else? That it's not suitable for VR or non overlay applications?
A readier-to-access camera means I could take pictures I can't now, since by the time I get my phone out the moment has passed.
To me an always-on display in my glasses, on the other hand, seems like a ramp-up of screen-time-interruptions and very diminished gains compared to a phone or watch.
Cameras like this have been available for years. They're typically sold as "spy cameras", because that's how they're perceived. Amazon alone lists a few dozen models of various degrees reasonable appearance and features, most of them in the $40-$100 range.
This is old enough that at least one startup has already failed to get traction for trying to establish a standard to clip cameras onto glasses...
What you're paying for here is the Ray-Ban branding, not innovation.
I seriously hope this doesn't take off and fails spectacularly like Google Glass. I don't want a society where the people I'm interacting with are always recording everything around and giving it to a private profit corporation who can change their minds about what they will do all that private data any time they like.
Actually I find the idea of recording everything (or maybe not everything, but seamlessly recording whenever I want) quite attractive. I have a bad memory and would love to be able to rewatch good moments of my life.
The part about all that data being in control of powerful corporations, though... that's what makes me thing that I'd prefer it to fail as well.
I wish we could have this sort of tech outside of the framework of modern capitalism.
For personal use I kind of agree with you but I would be very concerned about the stalking potentials. We're already seeing huge issues of women being targeted by guys making and distributing "creepshots" and now deepfake based harassment. Constant recording is both a tool to increase access to women in public places as well as to separate the user's feelings from the world they're inhabiting.
Edit: I note that someone else is in the thread already saying "It's going to be awesome for amateur porn" without any caveats about the rampant consent issues of amateur pornography, revenge porn or age verification.
I wonder if using less of memory-recall capabilities of the brain will lead to loss of other important capabilities. So, I worry if using too much tech crutches is going to be detrimental.
Amateur pornography already has huge issues with consent and age verification, and is also more and more being weaponised against women as revenge pornography.
I can't help but feel like "smart glasses" is really pushing what this is? I feel like the vast majority of people when they see the words "smart glasses" they probably think some sort of AR tech, or at the very least some sort of screen.
And yet this is really just glasses with something like AirPods stuck in it with a camera connected to your phone. Super smart.
Society is far far from ready to answer the privacy questions of something like this, but when has Meta ever cared about that so why not just release it...
It is absolutely incredible to me that Facebook thinks it still has the social capital to pull a product like this off. To me the question of whether smart glasses are a good idea in general either socially or commercially is somewhat secondary to the elephant in the room: "would I wear glasses made by Facebook?" And... no, of course not, of course I wouldn't do that.
I guess people buy Oculus still so it's not like Facebook has zero success with its hardware, but I think a big part of that is that it's the lowest-priced option on the market and is aiming at a product category where consumers are not particularly privacy-conscious: ie, games. And from my perspective I look at Oculus with its required account links and all of the privacy and TOS drama that has come out of that hardware, and I just can't imagine buying a hardware product from Facebook at all, let alone a hardware product that has a camera attached to it and requires me to install an app on my phone to use it (which is likely a bigger data-trove for Facebook than the camera is).
It feels like almost any other company would be better equipped to try and build a market around this.
> It is absolutely incredible to me that Facebook thinks it still has the social capital to pull a product like this off.
I'm surprised you think they don't. Average people don't know who Meta are and that they own WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. Their properties have billions of daily active users and WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are _seperately_ two of the biggest messaging platforms in the world.
Most Quest users have never heard of Oculus. Remember the Quest 2 sold 10s of millions of units.
Sorry to tell you, but most people don't have the same concerns that you (and I) have, and even then many people will still put their trust in anyway.
Is the Quest's success more about ignorance of its relationship to Facebook or is it more about it being a low-priced entry VR set for a market segment where privacy doesn't really matter at all to most people? I don't mean that to be dismissive, I'm genuinely not sure if I can make a strong case in either direction. But if the success boils down to "my kid wants a VRChat headset, who cares who makes it", I'm not sure that attitude will carry over to a product category with more social implications.
I don't personally think that the Meta branding is distinct enough from Facebook to pull that trick off in the way that WhatsApp or Instagram does, but I'll admit I could be out of touch. And I think Facebook's continued success has a lot more to do with inertia and lock-in than a lack of general consumer privacy concerns, but I could be projecting there.
I just think my instinct is that any of the social backlash that Google got over Glass is going to be hugely amplified for a Facebook product regardless of whether or not they hide behind the name Meta and that backlash seems likely to shape the narrative and how people find out about the product. But :shrug: maybe I'm wrong.
I actually agree on all points, but still think Meta has the social capital needed to do this.
Price point for VR is for sure a factor for VR uptake and would make a decision more difficult for a privacy concious parent. However critical mass is the key - same as Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. If all of your 13 years friends are on the Quest, that's what they want. Just like many of us retain these awful messaging platforms as that's where our friends communicate.
Glass did have a massive backlash. But 2013 was a long time ago. Big single ear bluetooth headphones were mocked, COVID hadn't happened, Netflix wasn't even around (or at least, not in any form recognisable).
I think the Google Glass was a victim of being too early. We have adjusted rapidly to ubiquitous technology around us, people are embracing AR daily. Hindsight will tell, but now or very soon is the time for AR to be embraced by general users.
Fair, that's a really good point. I don't distinguish between the companies and I don't think they're tangibly different in regards to privacy, but definitely agreed that Instagram has a better public image than Facebook does and I could see that making a pretty big difference.
I guess they're launching this under "Meta", they're not using either Facebook or Instagram as the branding. I don't have any data to know whether people are more likely to see Meta and think of Instagram or Facebook.
This technology creeps me out. I can’t imagine interacting with someone who’s wearing a pair of these, much less have a conversation. It would be like trying to talk with someone who’s sticking their smartphone in your face.
Better looking and more refined tech, but fundamentally Glasshole 2.0. Zuck is the perfect ambassador after Brin.
I hate everything about this tech. It invades people's privacy in-exchange for monetization and there's no way to opt-out. People made this happen should take a long walk and think about what they are doing with their lives.
Just to clarify the cameras are very well fit into the profile of the glasses, so it doesn’t look like “camera” glasses in person. Ray ban did a good job here.
But on the flip side it’s very obvious when you’re filming (bright white light comes on), so it’s less creepy.
Oh and obviously unless you’re an influencer and streaming the camera aren’t always active. I agree it’s weird to hang out with streaming influencers.
The way this + my Apple Watch has reduced my phone usage when on the go I truly appreciate. I wish Facebook sold it with that point in mind but they won’t for obvious business cannibalization reasons.
The UX for the page is terrible, or else I'm too used to reading reference manuals. I can't figure out if the glasses can be used standalone, or need constant connection to a smart phone, nor battery life.
Why? I actually think they might be quite useful for e.g. sports, where the athlete doesn't have a hand free for camera/smartphone.
We should really give it to Meta for their tenacity. While Google canceled its projects left and right, including Google Podcasts to celebrate their 25-year birthday and Google Glass, Meta perseveres and pushes the state-of-the-art.
This looks to me like a rehashing of 2016's Snapchat Spectacles combined with the bone-conduction bluetooth temples available on numerous cheap AliExpress sunglasses.
Am I the only one who doesn't understand the obsession with ramming tech in to existing accessories?
Why must sunglasses also be a camera? Or Alexa?
It's not for lack of knowing the answer. Because you're already taking your sunglasses with you everywhere, anyway. Because there's no way you're carrying around another thing. Because it's the most convenient way of securing a more intimate relationship with customers.
I'm with the others: I thought the future would be more exciting than this.
Because there is no way meta can challenge Google and Apple's dominance on the mobile platform(e.g. look at how the they have monopolized location services and apple has dented their ad market) and they are desperate to redefine what the next generation of communication and mobility devices look like.
This is also the first generation of mobile wearables. Expect more will come in the next two years paired with other devices.
> This is also the first generation of mobile wearables.
is it? Google Glass was like a decade ago, and Snap Spectacles were released sometime after that. they keep trying to make this happen every few years and it never seems to stick.
Am I the only one who doesn't want this dystopian future? "Designed for living in the moment"?...no, this is definitely the exact opposite of living in the moment.
As a google glass early adopter, I must say that these glasses are 10x creepier because they are totally inconspicuous, higher quality camera, directly configured for immediate and even live internet upload, lets you cover the capture LED, has AI built into it, and is built by Facebook,
Yet society will treat these as 10x less creepy because fashion.
These seem almost worth trying. I'd love to play with them if:
1. It's completely open for me to write my own apps to interface with it.
2. It had even the most rudimentary display (text only would be fine!)
3. It had nothing to do with Meta.
I'm excited about the use cases, and leery-but-cautiously-optimistic about tying the experience to meta, but am I the only one worried about buying hardware from a company that's synonymous with monopolistic price-gouging?
Ray Ban Wayfarer's are $171 without the included tech.[1] The included 12mp camera, 5 mic system, network connectivity, battery, microelectronics small enough to be hidden in fashionable eyewear all seem to add up to more than $128 worth of value. It seems to me that these are subsidized by Meta. I'll leave it to the reader to speculate on why Meta would do such a thing.
This is the most insightful comment on this topic.
Ubiquitous visual and audio recording makes an already self-absorbed, anxious and self-conscious youth (and adults for that matter) MUCH worse.
You put body cameras on police, whose adherence to uniform policies & procedures is in the public interest. You don't equip the general population with 27/7 cameras where the many mistakes of being human - mistakes we all make - are now fodder for the voyeuristic consumption of the masses, and the nefarious/political motivations of self-interested bureaucrats and politicians.
What I hope happens is that a few people with actual power are caught on camera by one of these things, and feel their privacy was violated, and then consent laws around recording in public change as a result. The ones we have are pretty old, and not ready for the future that is already here, let alone the one that is coming. I'm not holding my breath for this, it's just what I can imagine being the best outcome.
The issue with that is that it's a very slippery slope. Same laws could be used against people recording police interactions in public, for example, or other interactions where a private citizen is harassing another private citizen. It really needs to be carefully worded to avoid those pitfalls and I have a feeling that a lot of lawmakers would want to keep it intentionally vague.
Imagine the creepy stuff people will be doing with this and deep fake tech? Taking a bunch of video of the cute girl who works at the bar and converting that into whatever sick fantasy you like.
Imagine all the intimate footage you’re sharing and will lose when Facebook eventually gets hacked…
Kind of keen for someone to develop a portable EMP device…
I see a lot of people complaining about display. These are not meant for that use case. Maybe someday the tech will be available to have a display. That said, I have v1 Rayban Stories and use them as my daily driver sunglasses. I use them mainly for answering calls or listening to music but take occasional photos.
Meanwhile: Apple's internal teams already acknowledge this... by showing [digitally, with outward-facing LCDs] the wearer's "eyes" whenever they are able to see [and where they're looking, approximately?].
I'm no fan of either company but the general concept is that Meta specializes in software not fashion, so partnering with Rayban will allow people to feel fashionable while using Meta's device (and of course allowing meta to follow their every move).
They look amazing but it feels like a huge mistake to even include a camera (unless it's only inward-facing).. they should focus on Audio + AR + AI.
The camera quality will be terrible compared to what you can get from the phone that's already in your pocket, and it just going make a huge portion of the population feel creeped out by it.. whereas there would be no real pushback against a HUD that provided real-time transcript (big win for deaf people) and translations powered by Llama.
Wearing Google Glass made you a glasshole. Snapchat Spectacles spectacularly never took off. I hope these Smart Glasses make you look dumb and nobody buys them. I think the major issue is the camera, for me ...
What i would pay for is minimalist eyewear with a heads-up display. That would be useful
Fuck Luxottica. One of the jerkiest and most abusive companies on Earth. They bought Ray-Ban and every other glasses company, and then enshittifyied each and every one. The worst.
It's unfortunate FB has chosen to bed together with such a trash.
Nobody wants to be around someone in social situations who might be surreptitiously filming them. Wearing glasses with a camera on them is a great way to be labelled a creep by everyone around you.
Anyone notice that these meta links open a new tab, then close the tab you're on, not allowing you to use the back button to navigate back to the previous page? Horrendously user hostile behaviour.
That might be Firefox's Facebook container's fault. I don't like this behavior either, you lose the tab history and the ability to recover it, unfortunately.
If you want to secretly record people in the bathroom there are a hundred more discrete ways of doing so than these glasses. Someone's shirt button could be doing it right now.
The animations on that page are misleading. They show some sort of detached floating HUD next to each person using the glasses, but I don't think the actual product has anything like that? At first I thought it projects an image onto the actual lenses, but that doesn't seem to be the case. It's just (deceptive) marketing =/
These aren't really smart glasses, they're just spy glasses.
No but also all of us are rapidly approaching “old man yells at cloud” on this issue.
Major video social media has settled on vertical. That’s what folks in that world expect.
I don’t think that trajectory has a chance of changing until something replaces the cell phone (which’ll probably me some kind of glasses, assuming it turns out to be possible to build a version of them that’re any good as a replacement for a cell phone interface)
I feel like's it's inevitable that these types of devices will eventually become useful enough and stylish enough to start catching on. Companies have to start somewhere.
Google Glasses were a neat toy, but pretty far ahead of the tech's capabilities. One could make a similar argument for these new glasses as well, since they have no AR component.
Really shocked by the lack of controls around privacy. Its absolutely crazy that someone can now be filming my family members with a very inconspicuous device. On top of that it could be streaming or uploading live! Where is the outrage?!?! Am I missing something?
Now if Meta would only get that website layout of theirs working on this Chrome browser that runs on my two year old Samsung Android phone, they would be a whole lot credible to me.
It's entirely fictitious – it was an attempt on my part to use satire to bring attention the various products in market designed to passively capture and record video.
If such a community were to exist I'd imagine they'd fit somewhere in the Venn diagram between smart-home enthusiasts and the quantified-self movement. Apologies for misleading you!
Google Glass offered customers a face-mounted camera in 2013. Snapchat released their Spectacles in 2016. This is not a novel concept, even in the consumer electronics space, to say nothing of Steve Mann's work which stretches back decades.
There's cameras literally everywhere already. If you leave your home, you get recorded. That's just the world we're in now.
If somebody wants to record anything covertly, there's surely better options out there already - there's crazy stuff like cameras concealed in screw heads.
I don't hate them. I just wish it were almost any other giant company that was making them. If someone showed up at my house wearing them, I think I'd make them take their glasses off before they came inside, in much the same way (and for the same reasons) that some people don't allow shoes in the house. I don't want someone tracking Facebook into my living room.
Maybe the only worse maker would be Twitter. If a friend came over wearing Musk glasses, I'd probably rip them off their head and stamp on them for their own good. I definitely would not allow them into my house.
> Maybe the only worse maker would be Twitter. If a friend came over wearing Musk glasses, I'd probably rip them off their head and stamp on them for their own good. I definitely would not allow them into my house.
You might have gotten caught up in an ideology. I make fun of Elon and what he's doing to Twitter as much as the next guy, but... What do you imagine would be so harmful about them? Tracking, like with your Meta/Facebook example, or "omg those are Musk glasses, they must be destroyed!"
Musk companies have a proven track record of handling private data inappropriately. For example Tesla employees were caught sharing footage from vehicles on private property with their friends. https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sens...
That was exactly it. It's not a matter of animosity, but of privacy. I wouldn't want Twitter hardware in my house or on my Wi-Fi, even less than I'd want Facebook gear.
Fortunately, I feel that the vibe shift related to this bleakness has already got going, and people seen wearing these abominations will instantly get branded as not-cool and worse. Come to think of it, Ray-Ban was also on its way down well before this.
This page has an original way to force the user to accept cookies : present the cookie banner in a way that blocks the content. If the user clicks "Refuse optional cookies", just reload the page and present them the same choice again. That is illegal in the EU now.
Did Facebook (er, Meta) completely overlook the extreme backlash to the same concept 10 years ago with Google Glasses? Just look up articles from that time, e.g. https://nypost.com/2014/07/14/is-google-glass-cool-or-just-p... What makes them think it's different this time?
From 2014:
"“Glasshole” has become the term du jour, and outrage has spiraled so out of control that San Francisco has seen a series of reported attacks on users.
New York City’s not immune to the backlash, either.
Gottfried chased down a man who had stolen his Glass right off his face. (He also had an incident at a San Francisco bar where drunken patrons accused him of recording them. He insists he wasn’t.)
In April, a techie war erupted when East Village restaurant Feast kicked out Glass-user Katy Kasmai after she refused to remove her device. Kasmai vented online, and hundreds of Glass groupies rallied against Feast on Google, accusing the eatery of discriminating “against people who are into new technology.”
Feast co-owner Brian Ghaw is unapologetic. He says Feast’s no-Glass policy is for guests’ peace of mind. “They just felt uncomfortable about having somebody who could potentially videotape them,” explains Ghaw. “If someone were sitting at a table with their smartphone constantly pointing in a certain direction and you didn’t know what they were doing with it, you’d feel pretty uncomfortable as well.”"
This isn't true. For one, it'll not be secret. The LED will be on. Also, these glasses do not match the appearance of their "analog" namesakes. I just compared the Wayfarers on that page to the pair I have right here, and the thickness is quite noticeable. These things are chunky!
I think having it to record snippets of my golf game would be neat. Every par 3 I tee off is a hole-in-one opportunity, and how cool would that be to have that moment captured? Or grabbing some footage of a concert without holding my phone up like a dick. A lot of uses cases for chest-strapped GoPros will switch to these for sure.
I guess. Meta claims these will know when the LED is blocked, but that's probably circumventable as well. And little hidden cameras also already exist, and people filming in public is already a thing, so I don't really see how this specific product will change things in any significant way.
This specific product is backed by one of the largest corporations on the planet led by an absolute ruler who is at best amoral if not absolutely immoral, and has a long, long, long, long, long history of violating privacy, breaking promises regarding privacy,[1] and of refusing to accept responsibility of the consequences arising from doing so.
There are other amoral and immoral players out there, certainly. Few have Facebook's resources, however.
"The trust me, dumb fucks" still seems to be his guiding compass.
As for hidden cameras and unauthorised video: regulation is required. I'd suggest attacking the trade, transfer, and publishing of such video, as well as a strong right-to-privacy legislation. I'm not holding my breath, however.
Is there a market for this? Stealth smart glasses that force you to indicate you are recording? Are live-streamers going to use this? Don't people want to be using their phone anyway?
>The Capture LED lets others know when you’re capturing content or going live. If the LED is covered, you’ll be notified to clear it.
They are not "stealth smart glasses", they are the first iteration of AR glasses. Recording is one of the many things they do. And I'd buy them in a second if it means I don't need to take my phone out every few minutes (and if I had the money, I expect them to be uber-expensive); or I don't need to look away from the road to check directions as I drive; or I don't need to reveal in-shop that I'm checking online prices for an item. There are a lot of possibilities beyond capturing, if not in this generation in the next one with displays.
You seem to be forgetting a lot of previous products. If anything these are a really late reply to Snap's Spectacles.
Also, these don't have a display. Many of your listed use cases don't apply unless you count audio replies, which we already have, all over the place. Please read about what a product does before correcting someone in the future...
Yea there's for sure a market. Beyond what others have said wrt GoPros, many people photograph/stream shows/concerts/etc. Studies have shown you remember events better when you take the intentional act to photograph it, but fiddling with a phone in the moment can be distracting. Why would people want to be focusing on a phone, or be seen with a phone, when they could just watch the event AND get the recording?
I attend concerts a lot, and often post snippets to social media. There's always a tension I see among myself and others of trying to catch those particular lines of a song, while still not missing the show to mess with your phone.
Will I buy these? Meh, maybe. But the appeal is there.
Why do you think people would prefer to use their phone over something like this? I assume people use their phone because that's what they have to use now. I could be wrong, I'm not representative of the average person, but if I could use my phone less and still engage with tech, I'd do it.
My assumption is that people like to be seen recording and/or recording themselves. I'm guessing 'terminally online phone' people don't have the impulse to use their phones less and keep it in their pocket?
I don't think so. Do people at a concert hold their phones out to be seen recording? No, they just want to record and that's the only way to do it. They'd love to be able to do it hands free for sure.
They do this generally while doing some kind of movement based activity, the kind of activity where you need to strap a camera on, not wear a set ofglasses.
Can you list activities that you're thinking of? Because a lot of active sports are compatible with "wearing glasses". Surfing, snowboarding, rock climbing, water skiing, mountain biking, etc.
Sure, scuba divers still need some specialized gear, but there's tons of room in the sports segment for this kind of product.
> Because a lot of active sports are compatible with "wearing glasses". Surfing, snowboarding, rock climbing, water skiing, mountain biking, etc.
I would not say any of those are compatible with wearing fashion-style sunglasses. I've lost pairs of glasses paddleboarding and kayaking before. I'm a mountain biker as well and crashes can be violent, I wouldn't trust glasses to stay on your face. All of those sports require firm attachment for a device worth more than say $100.
Ok guys you know what to do. Mercilessly ridicule and degrade anyone who wears these to continue the very justified stigma against wearing a discrete camera on your face.
> Capture life's best moments and live-stream to Instagram and Facebook. Now with a 12 MP camera and 5-mic system. Stay connected with hands-free calls and messages and listen to your favourite tracks through built-in speakers.
I have a very different idea of what "living in the moment" means.
How is privacy dealt with? I am not sure, but we are already tracked by meta without even being signed up, are we going to be tracked even offline for taking a walk? Is this piece of disgrace company and the piece of shit that work for it just so uninterested of what their products to do people? Is it possible to inject some common sense in big tech?
Can dang do something about the corporate spam that keeps popping up on HN? I don't think meta, or Apple, or the rest of these companies need help advertising products.
The test for a good HN post isn't whether something is corporate, it's whether it gratifies intellectual curiosity. I of course agree with you that most corporate PR and advertising doesn't remotely clear that bar, but occasionally it does and such posts are fine on HN.
1. Flag content you feel isn't appropriate for HN.
2. Email mods at hn@ycombinator.com requesting that specific sites be deprecated and/or penalised.
As for the latter, I'm aware that general news and ideological sites are deprecated. I'm not aware that any mainstream corporate sites which have not engaged in vote-juicing practices are penalised.
There are those who share your weariness of promotional material from ... a certain commercial toothed segment, let's say.
I dislike Facebook as much as the next guy, probably more, but this stuff is news for hackers. And it's not even particularly beneficial for them to be featured on HN, we're a rather critical audience.
Personally, not a fan of sticking a camera everywhere I look though. I get why companies want to push that feature (more data!) but I just don't see a reason why consumers need a camera pointing at everything they're doing.
Kinda cool nonetheless.