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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

One of the big wildcards for widespread consumer use is the social aspect. We can envision what AR might look like in everyday life. What's far less clear to me is the degree to which people will accept AR glasses that are constantly using video and audio to deliver information to the wearer will be accepted. If I know that person I just met has inconspicuously scanned me and looked up all kinds of information that are now being displayed, am I OK with that?

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I think AR almost has to be Apple, not from a tech perspective, but from "this tech is very creepy, invasive, and visibly so" angle. Apple may be the only company that is simultaneously big enough to make the tech happen and charismatic enough to get us to let down our guard to it. Although that latter one is rapidly diminishing.

That's an interesting angle. Though I'm not sure to what degree the average consumer draws this distinction between Apple and Google.

Apple also probably just has about as much brand permission as anyone to create a new category of consumer device and shepherd it through the first couple of versions that will doubtless have shortcomings.

When I say charisma I mean literally being charming, like Google didn't have the tact to role out glass, because glass _looked_ creepy. Apple would have had the tact to know not to. Furthermore I think we're looking at the first couple of pseudo-generations of of Apple AR glasses in the form of the latest iPhones and Apple Watches. Watches are testing the hardware that will be colocated with the UI and the A13 the overpowered chip responsible for doing the more powerful CV functions in like the users pocket.

Yes, I suspect we'll see AR on phones/watches well before we'll see it in glasses and associated wearables. There are some AR-ish apps today but they're very limited.

There are a lot of challenges to get glasses right--both from a hardware and a usability/acceptability perspective. But people are already used to using their phones for things so it seems a very natural transition.

My guess on this is that people will pretty readily accept it if it provides something valuable to them, something they can't really get without it. The amount of privacy that people have given up using internet tech is what leads me to believe that this will be no different. I remember when people were afraid to use their own names nearly anywhere. Then they began to post their real identities in facebook (and elsewhere) feeling that they could choose who viewed the information. Now people post their real identities, pictures of themselves and even their children on publicly viewable instagram accounts. This sticks out to me because I remember thinking in the past that there was some barrier between what people posted publicly vs privately in particular with regards to their children. Not everyone is so open but it is not something I hear discussed amongst my non-programmer friends and a large number of them share in this behavior.

A little tangential, but I hope the answer to this is a resounding "no", and that adoption is sufficient to make a lot of people really uncomfortable. Perhaps this is naive of me, but I still believe that a great contributor to tolerance of our society for massive dragnet surveillance is that it isn't very visible.

Not tangential at all. On the one hand, I can see AR that's extremely powerful and useful given wearable hardware, sophisticated software, image recognition, connectivity, etc.

On the other hand, that would clearly be a step beyond today's smartphones to, as you suggest, potentially always on video and audio that's constantly communicating with and being analyzed by databases.

By contrast, VR seems to me to be a niche.

These "privacy vs features" questions of new technologies keep coming up. Over and over, people seem to shrug their shoulders over the privacy violations while they eat up the new features.

What if last week that person you were introduced to, and gave your name to(or didn't) happened to look you up and do some research. It wasn't handed to them through glasses immediately, but essentially it's the same thing. I would bet it probably has already happened to many of us and we didn't even realize.

ever have someone come up to you and say "Oh your the person who x"

just a thought on your last sentence

Well it would be socially acceptable to be wearing one while working on-the-job for example, a construction worker, doctor, or even a motorcyclist.

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