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Focals by North

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Am I the only one who doesn't want

- Digital Glasses, Google Glass

- Smart assistants

- IOT devices

- Smart door locks

- Internet enabled washing machines, refrigerators, ovens, etc.

- Push to order dash buttons

- Smart watch

- Smart cameras/webcams

These devices are solutions looking for a problem. The value proposition is overshadowed by loss of privacy, interruptions by social media, potential for security flaws, and loss of control by the end user, loss of repairability, amongst many other issues. They provide little benefit at the expense of aforementioned disadvantages.

Apparently, the general public loves these and Alexa devices sell like hotcakes, Apple watch is a huge success and Google assistant is getting smarter everyday.

I honestly am satisfied without smart things in life. I understand this might come across as a kind of anti-technology view of life, but I love technology! I just don't resonate with the IOT/Smart devices.

This trend is everywhere from my label marker to John Deere tractors. What happens when Focal goes bankrupt and the device cannot connect to their cloud for security updates? Yep, they become normal glasses with thick frame with dead batteries. I want longevity, reliability and durability from my devices. Dieter Rams has a great view on this issue: https://www.hustwit.com/rams/

It takes a lot of detritus to fertilize the growth of good things

Maybe.

But let's frame it differently. I want many of these things, but I want them to work on my own virtual private network—communicating exclusively with my other devices and only communicating off-network according to clear and obvious needs for external data (e.g., weather).

The problem is today's third-party oriented cloud that assumes that all device-to-device communication requires a third-party intermediary. In an alternate timeline, an encrypted virtual private network shared by all devices would allow peer-to-peer on-network inter-device communication without a third-party eavesdropping.

All too facile is the argument that a third-party cloud is required in order to handle the processing demands. This ignores the fact that it's relatively easy to have a personal "compute" node (it would be just a computer like any other after all) that you could run on your own private network (or even lease one from a data center).

So yes, I want smart door locks, smart assistants, and all of these "Electric Dreams" gadgets. But I want them to serve me and not a third-party. In some of these spaces, there are viable options, but I want more companies to explore the opportunity of making money selling privacy-enabling omnipresent personal applications.

The cloud isn't there to meet processing needs, it's there to meet tech support needs. Everyone gets handed the same keys, so if something's wonky you just get a replacement. No debugging and repair costs, no standards adherence requirements, no getting shoved out of the software layer by a competitor - and the price is just the uncool segment of the early adopters.

>The problem is today's third-party oriented cloud that assumes that all device-to-device communication requires a third-party intermediary

Phillips Hue products don't. (There is a cloud, but it's entirely optional).

I don't want a lot of those things, but I really want a couple of them in a different form than currently available:

- Smart driving (sun|eye)glasses.

- Smart plant waterers for when I'm out of town.

- Something that does what Apple Watch does without displacing my real watch.

It seems I'm unlikely to see the second two -- AFAICT plant watering is stuck in DIY mode, and it looks like the Apple Watch business is booming so everybody will pile onto that design.

But I could imagine smart driving glasses actually happening, and I think the road from "neat tool" to "annoying but required car UI" would be plenty long.

For driving, I'd rather have a HUD on the dashboard, but the best still seem to be tiny, expensive, and underwhelming.

The best solution I've seen is a dashboard display with integrated maps, info, etc. BMW does this.

It's not really the same, though, because a well-made HUD gives you infinite focal depth, so you're not shifting focus with it vs the road.

You're still shifting attentional focus. Which has a big impact.

> Smart plant waterers for when I'm out of town.

A low tech way to do it is to use an upside down water bottle with a small hole in the cap. You can also buy spike shaped things that screw into the cap thread and are a little bit more stable.

I've never managed to get those to drip at the right flow.

It seems like there are a tonne of smart plant watering things... https://www.postscapes.com/wireless-plant-sensors/

Thanks for that link! I keep getting stuck on the "needs a dedicated tap" problem but I will investigate further.

>I just don't resonate with the IOT/Smart devices.

Try not to let some of the stupid dead-ends by a new class of tech kill off the whole concept for you. Humans have this great ability to come up with a new nail and suddenly everything needs to be a hammer.

Example; you called out Google Glass. A first gen, pretty hokey bit of hardware that never really went anywhere. Take Google out of the picture for a bit and think of the general concept: It's a HUD. It's AR. Poorly implemented, but you can see kind of what they were going for.

There's a lot of value down that road! Both economically and in the bettering humanity senses. Use a bit of imagination :)

>I honestly am satisfied without smart things in life.

I guarantee you the same thing was said by someone about cars, computers, and the internet. You speak for you, so you're automatically right, but you might be surprised as to how this stuff improves your life once the kinks start getting worked out and we're a couple generations head.

Nope you are not the only one.

As a runner, I used to pop on a garmin gps device and go for runs to help measure my training. Some days I would measure my heart rate with a chest strap to help my training. Apple watch, while generally not as good, it is good enough, and is something I can just wear all the time and provides the same functionality.

It also has a lot of extra features like unlocking your computer without typing a password, allowing you to respond to text messages without getting out of the shower, etc. It really does provide a lot of value.

Allowing you to ping your phone is also incredible when your toddler likes to grab things and puts them in random places.

I'm glad you have the option and whatever keeps you running is a good thing, but I love exercising with as little as possible. It gives me a good time to truly unplug and be alone with my thoughts, I also think it lets my body set the pace.

Anecdotally, smartwatches are quite unobtrusive and pretty quickly reach 'just there' if you wear one the time.

Mine is much closer to a keyring that you pull out as needed than a smartphone that comes out all the time, certainly closer than I'd expected. Of course, the other part may be that as with a normal watch, you tend to glance for a second and be done with it for a while.

Running with nothing is great except if you want to make data driven decisions to optimize your training. Even basic speed work requires a timer and a track. (Or just a smartwatch).

This is overkill for 99.999% of people who aren't at the top tier of competitive running where it makes a difference. For the rest of us, just pushing a bit harder and a bit longer will have all the effect of whatever you would have done with all this data, for far less cost and effort.

Unless the idea of tracking and data analysis is... part of the fun and motivation to continue doing it.

Even amateur's can use the data to make better workout decisions that lead to better outcomes, too. My workouts and quality of life are objectively better by using a smartwatch, and I'm a bit surprised by the luddites here on hacker news of all places.

Oh well, the markets have clearly spoken about the objective benefits of smartwatches.

I'm sure it's my bubble, but all the runners I know run with watches at least. Almost all of them use some form of GPS watches. It's nice to be able to go outside and just run, and not worry about routes when you want to do anything more than a few miles.

> what happens when Focal goes bankrupt...

I'm not being flip when I say : the same thing that happens when other companies go bankrupt. They're products may or may not work anymore, may or may not be serviceable anymore, may decline in value to zero (or not), returns for defects not possible and so on...

Different people - early vs late adopters - will have different tolerances for these things.

> satisfied without smart things in life

Does your home have a thermostat? Does your car have an engine control system, automatic heating and cooling system? Does your lawn-mower have a mechanical throttle governor?

I am being a little flip in this last part - obviously you're not defining those as "smart things" but talking more about the modern "internet of shit" definition ..but my point is "smart things" today are different from what they were in years past and will certainly be different tomorrow..

> Does your home have a thermostat? Does your car have an engine control system, automatic heating and cooling system? Does your lawn-mower have a mechanical throttle governor?

Does your nearly-new thermostat suddenly stop working when Nest cancels the product line? Does your 5-year-old car suddenly become scrap because the manufacturer pushes a bad OTA update? Does your lawn-mower brick itself because someone let a DNS lease lapse? Does your smartwatch stop working one day because the manufacturer was acquired by another company?

There's a ridiculous amount of stuff these days which is deeply coupled with ephemeral online services when it has no need or right to be.

As somebody here on HN once said, internet of things is not going to happen until a local network of things happens.

I do want smarter things. But I don't want them to depend on anything outside. They should be entirely under my control, tightly isolated from the big public internet and the company that produced them alike.

They pose their models in such a way to hide it, but the temples of those glasses (where all the tech lives, presumably) are huge. Which feel like they'd both be distracting to wear and to look at someone else wearing. (Although this is certainly an improvement over the Google Glasses design.)

I would believe that some people would like a little heads-up display in their glasses. Not everyone. But some people. But I also would believe that the glasses would need to look almost identical to normal glasses for such a thing to take off. People don't want weird bulky shit strapped to their faces. Dark and moody photos that hide the actual size of the things won't be enough.

Sometime at parties I wish for a HUD that would show me people's name and the last time I saw them. On the other hand I dislike wearing glasses at social events, since I don't really need them.

I really don't look forward to trying to politely explain why I don't like having my face uploaded into the facial recognition/person-tracking system that will involve.

I do look forward to our cyberpunk future where to "opt out" of certain systems, you have to paint a certain mark on your face, or put a little QRCode sticker on your cheek.

"Sorry, I'm only opted into Google Facemind and FacebookFace; I don't want to be indexed by Amazon Visage."

People have begun studying makeup and hair styles that foil today's face recognition in general: https://cvdazzle.com/

Or wear a government issue spook "ugly t-shirt".

Could be local only. New faces are saved as they're detected. Then later on your computer, add notes to the new faces ("John Smith, met 11/7/19 at Liz's party, programmer at Initech").

When those faces are re-detected, show the info text.

Would certainly be nice if you could do a similar thing without needing a camera on the glasses at all though. How can we recognize a person reliably without seeing them? Maybe by their voice?

I agree. Of course such system have some pretty important downsides. I'll perhaps have to pay more attention to people then.

That would be great for people with face blindness.

Parties in Virtual Worlds are great in this regard, since you can see not only someone's name but also their IM address, profile and sometimes notes you've made about them in the past. So I know I'd appreciate it in RL.

https://assets.bynorth.com/quartz/focalsPage/Product_Banner_...

Yeah, still shot in a way that minimizes the size of the boxes that hold the tech.

Is that huge switch how it detects it is on your face? seems hugely inconvenient.

That may house the projector that throws the display onto the glass.

found this image on their "about us" page that shows a bunch of what looks like employees wearing focals: https://assets.bynorth.com/quartz/aboutPage/Company_Banner_P...

still look like professional photography, but at least shows a few more angles and on a wider range of faces.

If the Thalmic Labs name doesn't ring a bell, they're the former makers of the Myo gesture control armband (which was just discontinued).

By all customer accounts I've seen it was an expensive gadget that never worked reliably enough to be useful for anything, so hopefully they do better with glasses.

These glasses use a physical joystick (on a ring) to control and interact with the display, so it seems they are playing it very safe and this time around.

Of course, there are other ways to screw up (build quality, battery life, connectivity), but by eschewing anything fancy like voice control (ala Google Glass) they're signaling a certain conservatism that is reassuring.

It looks like they have built-in Alexa.

Personally not interested in carrying an Amazon smart device with me everywhere, but it'll probably work for people who don't care.

I've tried the Myo a bunch of times, at hackathons and such. I think it was a good product.

It actually worked.

The thing is that it wasn't that useful and they never found product-market fit. Yet, it was an avenue worth exploring.

If you are curious you can find used Myos on eBay, see for yourself. There is a world between them a leap motion for example.

Interesting. I'm curious, but not $100 curious.

I had one and every single person that tried it had issues with it in the first few minutes. A hackathon is one thing, but it didn't work even close to well enough to be a mainstream consumer product.

> By all customer accounts I've seen it was an expensive gadget that never worked reliably enough to be useful for anything, so hopefully they do better with glasses.

I've seen multiple very cool live performance from artists using Myo

So I saw a reference to Myo on the page, but I don't see any reference to thalmic labs. Looks like they renamed the company.

The thesis of this product seems to be that Google glass failed due to poor design. I think that's an idea worth exploring and the execution here does look promising, but I'll hold off on judgement until other people can review the device. Here are my immediate, unsolicited, uncollected thoughts:

There are many issues that I worry about with this kind of device, but battery safety and battery life are most important to me. Since you are strapping lithium ion batteries to your head, it could be fatal if there is a manufacturing defect or someone can remotely exploit the device. Getting the battery right is likely going to make or break this product.

Social acceptance is yet another large hurdle. People do not take kindly to surreptitious film making. We already have enough problems with people glued to their phones and those are at least stored out of sight.

I would try my best to ditch the ring. This is the palm pilot stylus all over again.

I was waiting for someone to do this, because I'd run the idea through my head and was uncertain of the outcome. I'm not sure if you will succeed, but I think you've made a decent product which is commendable. Good luck.

>Social acceptance is yet another large hurdle. People do not take kindly to surreptitious film making.

I don't think these even have a camera.

There’s no indication that a camera is included at all. It appears to be merely a display device with Alexa and a joystick ring.

Millions of people carry lithium batteries. They’re fine.

I don't think this has a camera, which makes me a little sad. That was probably my most used feature with Glass. I was usually taking pictures of my dog who hated cameras, and I could imagine it being great for baby photos too. The lack of camera is probably a conscious choice to make it less of a geeky gadget with privacy concerns and more of a mainstream device.

I think the ring is brilliant actually. It's a practical solution to the many UI problems inherent with this medium.

Making a battery actually catch fire takes a faulty battery, a serious smashing, or a serious overheating, afaict.

Since the glasses are much lighter than, say, a phone, I suspect that damaging and thus shorting a battery as a result of a fall is less likely.

A bad charger, or a construction defect, may of course destroy the battery and set it to fire. If the phone industry is any indication, this happens pretty rarely, and is more or less a solved problem.

I've read not too long ago that Google glass version 2.0, or enterprise edition, was actually having some decent success/traction among workers.

Here's the Wired article about it: https://www.wired.com/story/google-glass-2-is-here/

Seems to give a huge productivity boost.

The ring by itself could actually be useful.

That said, there's a huge list of failed smart ring companies which /r/shittykickstarters loves shitting on:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBUWxROnqwA

https://www.reddit.com/r/shittykickstarters/comments/8j73df/...

https://www.reddit.com/r/shittykickstarters/comments/6o3xrx/...

These may be great. I see a number of immediate uses for these, if I had them.

Reading books or emails while on a train, without having to hold anything in my hands. Maybe even watching videos that I never have time to watch.

Walking with a map in my FOV, without having to consult a phone.

Taking phone calls, since it has a mic.

It has a remote control, though a limited one, it seemingly allows for operation without taking your hand to your face; you can keep your hands in your pockets in cold weather.

Besides video, all of your use cases are already functional with an audio interface with AirPods for example.

Do airpods put a screen before my eyes? Can they show a text, or line art?

I don't care about the glasses.

The ring controller though - I have been looking for something like that for a while. I want something small and hands-free to control the slides while giving presentations. I had a Creative Ring Presenter but it died and I just really need "next slide / previous slide" buttons.

Useful specs are here: http://www.bynorth.com/tech

not much of a specification of the display system:

>Full color, holographic, retinal projection display

>Positioned in the line of sight

Resolution? Frame rate? Brightness? Color depth?

I'm surprised by android 5.0, I thought newer versions focused on making it more friendly for less powerful devices.

It's the lowest version they accept, afaict.

>0.8 mAh battery

... I don't believe this.

That's for the joystick. The actual glasses have a much larger battery.

They mention Qualcomm MSM8909w processor. https://www.qualcomm.com/products/msm8909w According to its specs it supports resolution of up to 640x480 at 60fps. Kinda sucks if you ask me.

Seems good enough for the kind of data they want to display; you're not going to be playing Battlefield on these.

I'm curious where the display actually shows up in your eye line. One of the nice parts of Glass was the notifications never showed up directly in your line of sight, but up and to the right. Glass was a little too far out of the way, but I'm not sure I want them interfering with what I'm looking at.

I think before we tackle "smart glasses" from technical and social acceptance perspectives, we should explore "smart headphones". Perhaps it already exists, but while I'm walking around with my cordless Bose headphones I wonder why someone hasn't already made headphones that have dual-cameras in both ear pieces, gyroscopes, and accelerators built in. I think a lot of people would be interested in being able to take photos or motion stabilised videos from their perspective with the tap of a button. There have been times where I saw something interesting, took my phone out of my pocket to take a photo/video, but the moment had already passed. Walking around with camera enabled headphones would allow me to capture the moment instantly. I just need to look and shoot.

But maybe I should just enjoy the moment for what it is, and let it pass, without feeling the need to record it...

I guess I've fallen to the other side of the chasm (to use Geoffrey Moore terminology), because my initial reaction to this was disinterest and like it wasn't for me. Thank god for early adopters.

Anyone has any leaks or something regarding what's the pixel resolution of the display? I'm curious if it would be theoretically possible to display vim in some 8x8 font on this...

300x300px as per Verge[1]

[1]:https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/10/23/18010468/...

Cool, so seems not worse than a CGA at 320x200, if that shows up to be true! :) That's something I'm totally looking forward to hopefully be able to use at some point in future. Will probably take some time however till it trickles down to people with my levels of financial affordance. Also, till somebody hacks the software open for installing some kind of FOSS firmware. And finally, I have a sneaky suspicion, that the 3-sec-per-notification display time limit is there mainly to make the batteries last long enough on one charge to call it "a day" ;)

They are using MSM8909w processor which support resolution of up to 640x480. Since there are two screens, I think it would be at most 320x480px per screen.

The biggest issue for me is that I hate wearing glasses, and "wearing" tech in general. I _hate_ carrying things around. I much prefer tech that is integrated into my environment (ex. Google Home, smart screens, etc.). Once we get to brain implants that can display artificial information in our visual field, I may reconsider.

Apparently these will have a $1k pricetag.

Unfortunately, this product has already failed out of the gate just like Google Glass did: it was never the hokey backwards bulky design of the glasses that mattered... it was the price.

Charge me, say, $200 to add this to frames that aren't thick plastic "hipster" glasses, then I'd buy it.

They chose models with dark hair because the huge and thick arms would be less visible.

The price isn't that important in the first round. $1k is not too much for some people to buy them and see if they're useful.

If they're useful, the design will get reworked and the price could come down. It's not very reasonable to expect this to work with any pair of glasses, it's apparently projecting onto the lenses so geometry is important. $200 is probably a stretch for the non-glasses part of the deal too.

Google glasses were expensive, a strange design, not very useful, and fairly creepy. But most of the software became Android Wear.

I don't wear glasses or contacts, so can't see myself ever buying these. I really like that finger ring controller though, pretty innovative.

Slightly-off topic: Does anyone know what percentage of the population has vision that is impaired to the point where they require aids such as contacts or glasses?

About 75% according to this: https://www.essilorusa.com/newsroom/vision-impact-institute-...

Anyone notice how every single model has long hair. It looks like cool tech, but I can pretty much guarantee the large branches will look really really terrible on short haired/no hair folks...

Maybe in a few years the tech will have gotten small enough to have normal looking branches

A 28nm SoC in a severely battery-limited wearable including video output and speech-to-text screams "poor battery life with moderate to heavy use".

I'm going to wait for the next-gen device built on a more modern manufacturing node (like TSMC N7/N7+).

Can you please explain what you mean by "built on a more modern manufacturing node"?

By "more modern manufacturing node", I mean anything more energy-efficient than the 28nm process node used to build the SoC in this device.

Not sure what's more annoying:

A) People looking at their phone/smart watch while I'm talking to them.

B) People looking through me while fiddling with a ring on their finger.

At least I can call people out on A...

Who here is pre-ordering these, and why?

I haven't yet pulled the trigger on this but I'm tempted. My memory is pretty bad and I tend to forget what I'm meant to be doing or what I had planned for the day. This would be a great help for keeping me on track throughout the day.

I wonder if there's going to be a cheaper, 'ad-supported' version.

looks like no camera on the glasses? Guessing a camera will show up soon, or maybe on the loop device? (which might work ok you could preview the pic in the glasses)

I don't see these things going anywhere without AR.

I disagree. They got rid of all the features that were creepy about Google Glass, focused the marketing on fashion, and narrowed the functionality to an easily usable UX. I suspect there are plenty of people that would pay $1k for these.

I see them going to a similar place to smart watches. Both are fashion accessories that provide updates at a glance.

Will SMS work with iPhones?

No SDK as of yet.

Also, no price anywhere.

They're $999 a pair AFAIK

'information ... so you can have peace of mind" Piss off with this manipulative marking crap. Saying this sort of thing hurts people's mental health.

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