Facebook Sunglasses – No Thanks | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Sunglasses – No Thanks

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42 pointspeterjo29 comments

I would genuinely like a half-decent camera mounted to my glasses. I mean, it's Facebook so it's going to be bad like all of their hardware products, and it'll additionally be tied to Facebook which is a bad thing, but I'm just saying theoretically I wouldn't mind this category of product.

Mostly I'd use it to "take notes" when I need a quick shot, rather than taking out my phone camera. I can't tell you how many times I've been sketching a proof on a whiteboard and then had to take a phone photo for later reference, and it's just one of those minor inconveniences I imagined I wouldn't have to deal with in the year 2525.

(And yes, I acknowledge that smart glasses are a privacy nightmare and there's any number of negative social externalities)

And the ability to act like a dash cam for my head and store 'current time - 60 seconds' footage would be nice as well. When in creative meetings, I have a hard time brainstorming while taking coherent notes of any kind. I also don't want to have to sift through the full hour recording to find the nuggets that are in there.

I can't speak to Portal, but my Quest 2 is a _fantastic_ hardware product.

Is Portal a bad hardware product, or did anyone even buy one due to Facebook's privacy scandals? Say what you will about Facebook's invasion of privacy but the Quest 2 is great hardware.

I remember when I used to be excited by wearable computing that didn’t look awful. I guess I expected it to be my device instead of just physical spyware.

Grim meathook future, as jwz says.

People even used to be very excited about tiny computers inside their bodies and brains or uploading their consciousness into some kind of network. Very naive.

The problem is, until we are post-scarcity or post-money (I don't know what that word is), then the incentives are there to abuse a system of brain/computer interface and uploaded consciousness. That being said, I don't believe we can ever really get to post-scarcity or post-money (again, what's the word?) without those two things being integral.

Removing the 'negative' from a person's life and allowing them to exist perpetually is, I believe, required to avoid the current selfish race to the bottom of hoarding resources and capital.

Post-currency, in all it’s forms. Social currency, karmic currency, hard currency.

We have a perfectly fine model to allow people to make user-friendly devices and software while allowing them to win a life. It's called selling it for a price.

The problem is that while those hyperfounded companies are allowed to dump the same products with and recover the costs by some criminal anti-privacy anti-freedom-of-speech anti-individual-initiative and anti-whatever-else-is-on-my-countries-Constitution ring, the market will be poisoned and nobody will be able to make a honest living on it.

Cameras and no display--clearly shows FB is more interested collecting your info than giving you info. If they were smarter, they would have first got adoption of FB AR glasses, then people would think, yeah a camera is a nice added convenience.

Am i missing something or is it like they didn't learn much from the google disaster?

Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it...

(and i guess even those that do know history sometimes...)

When the necessary technology can be properly miniaturized into glasses format, the revolution will inevitably happen. No matter how many companies failed before, the one that succeeds will have complete new market for itself.

It's like saying that Apple didn't learn anything from Palm when they launched iPhone.

Wearing cameras in your glasses must become socially acceptable. It’s hard to see how technology will solve this social problem.

Miniaturization

Optics imposes a hard lower bound on the degree to which lenses and sensors can be miniaturized.

Take a look at this: https://ee-paper.com/facebook-holographic-vr-glasses-less-th...

Probably, avoid making them look like cameras. I have several sensors in the notch of my iPhone, but only one of them looks like a camera.

When technology is common enough, the social changes follow. Think about mobile phones. It used to be considered incredibly rude to use your phone for calls, email, or texting when you were with other people physically -- you were supposed to be 100% paying attention to the people you were with. But as phones became ubiquitous this stigma went away.

It will have the new market for itself until someone else can get a product with the same technology to market as well. It's hardware, why would there be a first-mover advantage such that they will have the whole market to themselves?

There are dozens of manufacturers building smartphones with camera modules reasonably close to the required form factor. No one yet has figured out the ultra-low-power video recording or ultra-high-power-density battery construction required to put these cameras into a glasses format, but when that does come true I don't see any reason why it will be exclusive to the first one to succeed.

Sure, Facebook does seem to have a stranglehold in some domains due to their network effects and first-mover advantage, but why would that be the case for hardware?

Did you say Palm? I’d KILL for a 5G B&W e-paper screened Palm.

Is there a wave length light (in red or blue) that blinds a camera but is invisible to (and does not damage) human eyes?

I think being recorded by possibly every person passing by is extremely discomforting.

If you go almost anywhere in a developed nation you are being recorded by a large number of cameras all of the time. The number of public and private surveillance cameras in the world is large and you are most likely covered the whole time you are in a city.

Yes now let’s make it worse. And Facebook branded.

I find this extremely discomforting.

Yes. But that is mainly from a distance in a crowd without audio. This will be eye level, close-up and with audio.

The evolution of the "glasshole."

Wouldn't catch me dead in a pair of these.

so there's an LED that lights when its recording, I wonder how soon folks are going to tape over it or something so they can just go trolling for meme worthy footage without their subjects knowing. I wonder if there is some legal problems with disabling the LED?

I'm surprised by the Luxottica partnership, again.

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