Even people who bought Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses don’t want to use them
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
So... I think we should go easy on the dunking. These things must be tried to succeed. Failures like Google glass get so much criticism no one wants to try.
That said, these give us to types of (maybe instructive) failure. Glass looked too much like a headcam to be used casually. These put looks first, but aren't responsive enough.
The application both products targeted is there proverbial deep end. The bar is very high for a device mounted on your face as part of daily life.
Performance has to be flawless. The frustration caused by a small lag, voice recognition or whatnot is extremely magnified relative to a phone or pc. Same for aesthetics, comfort, etc.
All that without a very clear picture of how people will use the device.
I do think there's room to succeed in this space, but I think the innovations need to come in steps. Going for the mass-production, mass-appeal, everyday usage device before you have a successful predecessor... You need to hit multiple bulls eyes.
A sports, adventure or camera centric product has much better odds. Those activities already allow "gear."
The problem is that it's a race to the ultimate product, and making an intermediate may be just free market research for apple/meta/etc.
So will self driving taxis be an experience where the passenger is bombarded with adverts projected onto all the glass so you cant see where you going?
I'm surprised this has not already appeared in the US!
Thank goodness this hasn't become common in my part of the country yet. The only gas stations that do this are the ones near the major hotels that out-of-towners stay at (where the gas is also more expensive), so they're easily avoided.
It has, but on touchscreen displays instead of the windows. It's exceedingly terrible.
yeah, even non-HNers aren't likely to want to use hardware tied to something called "Facebook View" to manage their photos (it actually doesn't sync photos with Facebook unless you specifically ask it to never mind having any means to display ads or inject viral videos and political content into your eyeballs, but if they need to explain that...)
The sales of Oculus Quest units seems to disagree
... and sure it is. I certainly am not hoping for Meta to succeed in owning the metaverse.
That said, the sentiments can add up to an impulsive "roast em!" habit that discourages risk taking, even risk thinking. It's ultimately much easier and less interesting to consider how things can fail than how they can succeed.
I just grabbed a Starbucks that I ordered on the way so there was no wait, exchanged some texts with friends who live 8000 miles away, and responded to an urgent work email that 30 years ago would have been a “drop everything and drive into the office” phone call.
I mean there are downsides, like anything, but it’s hard for me to see smartphones as anything but a net godsend. Do people really think they’re in the same category of bad as Google Glasses?
That smartphones involve tradeoffs means that some people will find the downsides worth it, and others won't.
I used to find them worth it, but starting a couple of years ago, I realized that they aren't for me. This is why my current one will be my last one.
> Do people really think they’re in the same category of bad as Google Glasses?
In the sense of there being tradeoffs, yes, I do. The eyewear form factor has much larger downsides, though. The primary reason why I don't like them is the same reason why I hate using my smartphone in public: it seems very rude. But with the eyeglass form factor, it's harder to slip them into my pocket.
Undercover cops love tech, the apple airpods are a classic example, they are excellent for recording conversations, so when you get a stranger wearing a pair, or meta raybans, or even a mobile phone in hand engaging you in conversation, they are phishing for self incrimination.
So can you really say, they are experimental? Seems like they are being put to good/bad use.
Uber has burned up over $100bn in capital, let's not pretend that hurt feelings is what's holding the smart glasses sector back. Maybe companies don't want to try because they've looked into it and decided that a pair of sunglasses with an EULA is too hard of a sell.
I have started swimming and I am timing myself with a stopwatch on my wrist. I am already wearing goggles because hard contact lenses and freestyle. The watch is hard to see with the goggles on, and I have to 'search' the stop button which adds latency.
I would love to have a stopwatch in-view.
A Garmin watch that allows for all interactions to be done via easy to find physical buttons and well thought out data screens was a huge improvement for my own use cases.
edit: https://www.kish.nl/nl/428539/lorus-horloge-digital-r2365ax9...
FWIW I tried them out, I liked the screen, but the shape of the goggles really takes out your already limited peripheral vision which I couldn't get used to and returned them.
While I do agree with the general point about not judging experimental devices too harshly you're making an assumption there that there is an application for general purpose, wearable smart glasses.
I'm really skeptical. I did some work with Google Glass back in the day and irrespective of the way it looked it was really socially jarring. You could be in a conversation with someone and see their eye drift upwards to read whatever notification arrived on their device. It felt rude. At the same time who can blame them for looking at the flickering message an inch from their eye? Snapchat sunglasses felt socially jarring in a different way: whenever you were wearing them you were constantly pointing a camera at someone.
There's something very fundamental to the nature of these things that makes me feel like they just don't work. I can see them being incredibly useful in professional contexts (IIRC there were trials with giving Google Glass to surgeons, makes a ton of sense) but as a general thing we're all going to be wandering around with strapped to our faces? I dunno.
I would like to extend this to smart watches. So many conversations I have had where someone is constantly glancing at their watch. I know it is just an automatic response to some vibration but sometimes it feels rude.
It is rude, and exacerbated by smart watches; just not unique to them.
Possibly, though my intuition is the opposite. I don't think social norms are "fundamental" in a strict sense. They're just important. That said, the reasons not to jump in the deep end is because it makes fundamental-unsovlvable problems indistinguishable from advanced problems that will be solvable later.
IE, if someone is using smart glasses for work or some other activity where they are useful, they might expand their use into other activities.
You could not have invented Tinder or snapchat in 1994. User density, camera, ubiquity, and other hardware issues matter. Besides technical issuaes, culture also had to develop before people felt comfortable using real names, posting pics and meeting people from online. If everyone already posts on facebook, the world may be ready for online dating, online therapy, etc.
I think we know what the killer applications are, and the problem is that the killer apps for wearables (especially glasses type devices) have deep societal/ethical concerns. The apps that would sell well are mostly "situational awareness" for law enforcement, sales (used car credit checks before rep engages), venue security (don't let people with records/bad social credit in), etc... Connecting face recognition, credit/background checks and putting that at the point of sale or entry. Unfortunately, it's coming. I'm not sure this is going to make the world better.
BTW - UI, design and all of that really matters less than you would think if the application has great utility and benefit (to the wearer/wearer's employer). The problem is a lot of the apps I've seen don't really do anything that is all that remarkable or useful enough to make your "greeters" wear them.
Well... maybe they aren't particularly useful to the average person? I get the feeling that Meta might be ignoring the possibility that this isn't actually a sensible product. You still need to carry your smartphone, the camera isn't as good as strapping a GoPro to you head, many won't be into the idea of varying sunglasses non-stop. It's a cool demo, but what's the use case exactly?
I can see them being useful in a professional setting, like a plumper or a mechanic who needs to be able to show an issue to a customer. I just wouldn't make them into sun glasses, nor would they need the Ray-Ban branding. The reality of products like this may be that they are primarily useful in work environments, but that's not a sexy market to be in for Meta. Maybe they should have teamed up with Black & Decker or Bosch.
I just really hate having to constantly charge things. My phone is enough. It’s half the reason I was disappointed with everyone dropping the headphone jack.
Even if the only thing it would do is vibrate when I'm getting a call, that would be worth it.
I also hate charging things all the time, I'm sure you'd like it more.
I'm pretty confident that iOS 1.0 or 2.0 or whichever would last for a week on a modern-day iphone, even without all the optimizations they've done since then. Battery capacity tripled or quadrupled, and there's been multiple generations of chip design since then.
I bought it at the start of the pandemic after seeing it on my local news, and wore it every day/night for 5-6 months before needing to take it off to charge, and when I did that, I realized I lost the charger.
It was an amazing watch though. Simple and elegant.
With all of that, as much as I hate to admit I like it, but I do like my smart watch. I keep finding things about it that I like the longer I have had it. There are a few things I wish I could do with it, but that's more of the app available on my phone doesn't have a watch version.
You can use them for voice commands, or to take pictures of whatever you happen to look at. That makes them very limited even just as cameras - a fairly large proportion of the pictures I take involve moving the camera (my phone) into angles I wouldn't get my head into with comfort.
If cheap enough they could be fun as "I want a picture too fast to get my phone out and happen to have my sunglasses on" cameras, but that's not exactly something you'd expect to get you huge use. If they were cheap enough and they didn't upload everything to Facebook (which they apparently do; EDIT: someone is saying elsewhere this is optional, which makes it marginally better if I trusted Facebook not to change that down the road), it might be something you'd think is a fun "nice to have" you might not use very often, but hardly something many people will go out of their way to buy at a large added cost.
When it then also costs 3x a regular pair of Raybans (UK prices at least) and if you're happy to look like you're going around spying on people you can buy a pair of cheap spy glasses on Amazon for 1/10th the price, I don't understand what market segment they think they're going for.
As just a camera, if they were detachable and visible enough that you're not looking like you're trying to get away with something, I'd be far more interested. If they're going to be permanently mounted, they need to be invisible.
Something like that would be the beach head into the AR future.
I do wish they were water proof and had more battery life, but. Otherwise they’re great.
It's also true that today AR/VR is a tiny niche market of little consequence. That may change when we have much lighter glasses that enable an AI assistant, but today its expensive R&D not a viable consumer product
Basically the reason I wouldn't want to be friends and hang out with anyone wearing them.
It greatly amuses me that this usage scenario requires the user to wear sunglasses in the dark.
Honestly I'd buy one of these. We already have GoPros on helmets so a camera in a sunglass would be pretty nice. Well as long as it makes good pictures at least.
https://tech.facebook.com/reality-labs/2021/9/ray-ban-and-fa...
I’m imagining something that attempts to record your life so it can help with it.
“Remember you told your wife yesterday you would take out the garbage today”
Driving home from a meeting with Joe: “Glasses, can you get me more information about the thing Joe mentioned?” “Sure, he asked about the viability of selling our widget in Asia, my brief search tells me that there are three obvious competitors to your product there, and they are X, Y, and Z. The market appears to be growing at 10% year over year. Blah, blah” “Thanks. Can you tell me more about X?”…
When you get home: “Glasses, summarize our last conversation and put it in my inbox.”
Get topical reminders: you are at the grocery store, and your glasses reminds you of your grocery list without prompting (when no one is trying to talk to you, so you can pay attention, and when you need to know about the item: so onions and celery in the grocery section, pork butt when near the meat, etc).
You are at the grocery store, and you can’t remember if you have any saffron at home, and you didn’t throw it on the list. Your glasses can tell you because it remembers.
Etc.
We are almost there. The tech isn’t at the level it needs to be in accuracy and we haven’t built the “meta” ai, that can recognize that knowing what food I have at home is valuable, so it should pay attention to that, etc. I just hope there is a self hosted version built by someone when we get there.
This being Meta, there's all the data you can possibly imagine to back up this claim.
https://media.ray-ban.com/cms/resource/image/181530/landscap...
Shocking.
They look like novelty glasses you'd order from the back of a kids magazine.
The article mentions privacy concerns, hardware / quality issues etc. but this does not feel like a coherent explanation. The masses have been conditioned not to worry about their loss of privacy and first adopters tend to be accommodating of usability and quality issues.
Somehow all this "tech stuff on our head" has hit a cultural and/or user experience barrier that is non-trivial to overcome. Yet it is hard to pin down the real reasons: Billions are now entirely happy with "tech stuff in our hands", tech that is privacy violating, has been of varying quality, creates potentially dangerous distractions etc.
Impenetrable the soul of Homo Consumptiens