Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses
meta.com
meta.com
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.
https://www.ray-ban.com/eu/sunglasses/RB2140%20UNISEX%20orig...
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?
The camera is only 720p. There are probably a couple more iterations before this becomes good enough to not pull your phone out.
Camera 12 MP ultra-wide
Image framing / resolution - Portrait default / 3024 X 4032 pixels
Video - Vertical default / 1440 x 1920 pixels at 30 fps
So, the video is a mix of 1440 and 1080p. (1920x1440, but tall rather than wide).
Your optician will also encourage you to wear sunglasses year-round, UV damage can occur even in overcast conditions.
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?
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.
Apple? Or do you mean Meta? It would be understandable if you had never heard of them, given the recent rebrand!
With the amount of data collected, it should be provided free of charge, heck, you are getting paid too!
The real value to be made here is to get facebook’s data vacuum into a new aspect of our lives.
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
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 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.
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'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.
Sometimes things that "feel" high-quality are actually less robust, but longevity is not always more important than aesthetics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think the GP was bang on.
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!
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 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.
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.
This isn't true, even the best plastic lenses of 2023 are nowhere near as scratch resistant as the best glass lenses of 1993.
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.
Agents barely work as of now. OpenAI’s plugins that ~do~ things like browse are still quite slow.
I assume "help" in this case will mean shoving endless ads your face and feeding manipulative lies to you on behalf of anyone willing to pay for it.
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'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.
The days of open communication about privacy (lol) are long gone!
There is another way...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Assuming you're not parking for more than a month, your photo will be in the trash if you need it, and will be automatically deleted if you don't!
Holy... wow, thank you!
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 ?
This is not today, but no doubt where Meta’s (and Apple’s) major engineering effort is getting pushed into.
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?
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.
> 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.
A perfect summary, I think!
https://phoneia.com/en/android-10-allows-two-apps-different-...
But these are sunglasses and I doubt resolution/focus will be good enough for those use cases.
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.
Rebuilding a junkyard ls (okay yours isn’t a 5.3 ) is like the rite of passage
Does 312 mean anything to you?
Edit: it's you--I stalked your comments. Emacs? Christ, I thought I showed you a better example.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
That would be amazing.
Hands-free video recording, ala J Kenji Lopez Alt.
The benefit here I think is a more literal WYSIWYG - what you see is what you get. You see it, you get the photo of it.
https://media.gq.com/photos/621e6cade2354d618c84380a/master/...
Surely this part is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Digital cameras still exist.
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.
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.
The pixel is very quick to get the camera open, as you say.
I had to look up poka yoked. I thought it was some regional colloquialism but no, it's Japanese.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 feel like I have a good idea when someone is recording or not. Phone orientation and behavior is different.
> 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.
> 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.
[1] https://doi.org/10.3758/s13420-015-0204-z
[2] https://www.physoc.org/magazine-articles/some-recent-advance...
Surely no one will figure out how to disable that light, right?
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.
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.
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.
“At 8:32, you were in the basement and left it on your work bench, it was very close to the edge of the table and possibly fell”
Ah the easy life…
Privatly I only hang out with the same 5 people or so, so there I manage
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…”
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
But it's obvious they don't want that community.
The big question is what kind of development platform will it provide.
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.
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.
Edit: Found the link, here it is: https://mrl.cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ledtouch/index.html
Analog Devices has an excellent article about using LEDs as sensors in this way: https://wiki.analog.com/university/courses/electronics/elect...
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.
Seems not worth worrying about.
Add a HUD like google glass had and you may have a more compelling use case.
If someone could take the epson moverio and make it cordless, that’s more like what I want from smart glasses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF3iysOyelg&t=280s
If this has a better picture quality, like up to the ~2023 smartphone camera standards then I'll buy one. I really like the idea.
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)
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.
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.
Few things are more enjoyable for me than looking at photo albums from trips I took years ago with loved ones.
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.
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.
"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."
So that's nice.
>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.
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?
The return process was also complicated and annoying. Overall, I'd recommend against buying the first generation of these new glasses.
In your own home - sure.
Such is the price of freedom.
I am confused again. How am I free if my own persona is up for grabs by a business?
You can't deny others that freedom and expect to attain it yourself, too.
That you don't exercise that right is immaterial and has no bearing on whether I should be able to freely exercise that right as well.
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.
No. This is an example of reducing the freedom of some in order to increase the liberties of others.
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.
There's no such thing as a "fundamental, universal right" that requires the possession and use of a product.
I completely disagree that this is (or should be considered) a universal human right at all.
No. It's not. Here: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
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.
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.
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).
This knee-jerk attempt to annul judgment has been so heavily bred into online discussions, since roughly 2018.
Our current state of recording is not a counter argument to the concept, it's a stating of the facts.
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.
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".
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.
Just because a Bad Thing is already foisted on us to the point where it's impossible to avoid doesn't make it OK to make that situation even worse.
From a quick search it is complicated and varied by prefecture and type of place.
I would also imagine that Meta is paying them handsomely for the obvious brand risk here - getting Ray-Bans associated with glasshole behaviour.
The Ray-Ban brand is owned by the Italian-French EssilorLuxottica conglomerate. Market cap 74B EUR.
(Meta market cap: 770B USD.)
Compare Windows 1.0 (https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-10/101) with Windows 10/11.
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 what do you assume playing sound reliably is a harder or more priority problem than spying on you?
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.
Not to mention, of course, the intrusion into the lives of the people you’re recording, whose “moment” is not your moment to record.
Their language positively reeks of lies. I’m sure the glasses will be popular, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
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.
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.
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 think he knows.
0: https://www.deaneckles.com/blog/700_docsend_in_snow_crash/
How? It's not mentioned anywhere that this is about displaying content, but it's very clear it's about capturing video and listening to audio only.
Or you want them to put "Notice: No display is included in the device" on the landing page?
> 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.
> (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
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.
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...
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.
They are also called "smart glasses", but they are just headphones and a camera. Nobody calls their bluetooth headphones "smart".
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.
There's a reason over-glasses sunglasses are so big and clunky and ugly.
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.
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.
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 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.
edit: All right, all right! It's a fair cop.
The person wearing them could be on a call, and the caller on the other side would hear what you say.
The person wearing them could be streaming to twitch, and everybody watching that stream would hear what you say.
All while you assume that you are having a private conversation with earbud person.
Which I don't do. If someone is wearing earbuds, that's an unambiguous signal that they don't want people talking to them.
I worked at a such a startup. It was vapor.
At least Glass had an API.
I wonder if any of the VPs at Essilor and Meta who shook on this are still with their companies and if their bonuses are linked to adoption.
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.
That watch can do a lot. Like paying etc.
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
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.
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.
You could stream video from the glasses and then video yourself writing them a note and hope someone else tags them to let them know it was for them.
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.
These are listed at $299. Hardly expensive, compared to how much ray bans cost.
I'm very deeply concerned about privacy, but a simple thing like an "on" or "recording" light on the glasses could alert people that recording is on.
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.
Edit: OP removed their reference to punching people who would dare film them. This thread will no longer make sense to other's trying to catch up.
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 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 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."
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.
If we're already dealing with ubiquitous recording in public, I'd rather give some of that power back to individuals rather than the government.
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.
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.
You'd be giving it to Facebook, though I suppose Zuckerberg is an individual.
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.
How do you reach that conclusion?
> this would be "society filming society"
It would also be a corporation filming private citizens on a very large scale (and government can obtain data from corporations).
> If someone needs the fear of being recorded, and put online and losing their job to not act like asshole, then so be it.
People are attacked and shamed for many things that are private or harmless or even good things.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Which is already "too late", as most of the time the person will be recorded before they've noticed it.
Not sure there's a perfect solution to the problem though, as it's the intersection of several concurrent conflicting requirements. :/
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.
Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27410503> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29612296> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16959819> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21530274>
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 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.
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.
the inner ear is a mechanical amplifier.
a device comparing the incoming acoustic spectrum with the otoacoustically emitted spectrum can see the mixer settings (controlled by the brain).
we could learn to type and communicate with our cochleas (assuming they weren't destroyed by wearing big headphones while cycling...)
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.
Moreover its really hard to upskirt with glasses on your head. mobile phones however are super easy, as I witnessed last year.
As a capture device, smart glasses are a dead end. When they have a display, and a ergonmic input system, then they'll replace smartphones
oh and 100x battery density.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Good thing you've never done anything in your life that could be construed as inconsiderate, so this wouldn't affect you.
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.
> I feel meta's smart glasses partly answer point 1, but fail at the rest.
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.
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.
Why not? Privacy is important to people.
For a long time, the majority of people didn't really seem to care about their online privacy. However, the EU still created the GDPR.
Perhaps a "real world privacy" equivalent of GDPR should happen at some point?
If delivered, augmented reality will be the single biggest technical breakthrough since the smartphone.
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?
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.
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.
But it does sound pretty much like having a laser on the gun no?
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?
Sounds pretty terrifying to me. A real life aimbot, that any human being can use for 1 shot 1 kill.
How does this work?
It has always felt under-utilized to me. Maybe it needs power-sensing hardware that's too sensitive / too fast for most scenarios / costs?
Glasses may be a use case where space is at a premium, though, so it could make sense there.
If I didn't already need to wear glasses, that might change how I feel about it as well.
They look good online but in person, they're absolutely ugly and cheap looking.
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.
Forgot those even existed.
How are these glasses different? I can't imagine the market for this sort or thing has gotten _that_ much bigger since Snapchat's try at this.
[1]: https://mashable.com/article/snap-spectacles-warehouse-deman...
They also look way less dorky than Snapchat's attempt.
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.
Pretty valuable data.
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.
So at least there is that.
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.
Though not many celebs might want to be associated with the Zuckborg, nowadays.
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)
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.
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.
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.
It certainly hasn't disappeared in my neck of the woods.
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?
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
[1] https://www.mysmartprice.com/gear/sensor-shift-stabilization...
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.
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.
Not that I was going to buy that.
A lot of previous product design in this area, has emphasised on shouting the tech and making it super loud that these are "tech" glasses.
Here the tech is "inside" and the form and fit of the glasses takes priority.
This is a big Win for meta
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!
Do they have eye tracking?
Don't wear these around me.
https://nostrcheck.me/media/public/nostrcheck.me_99521193833...
Is my opinion about it.
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!
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.
https://about.instagram.com/blog/tips-and-tricks/instagram-l...
==> no way to order prescription glasses
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.
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.
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.
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 already do this with mine using audio.
This is not an endorsement of these products, I have no idea if they are actually any good.
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.
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.
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 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).
> I could also see some sort of application where the creator is live-streaming a concert or event
I’ve found Apple Watch to be okay (they give instructions on directions via haptic feedback) and AirPods with spoken directions to be even better.
I wear glasses too, but for directions I think I’d prefer haptic and/or audio even if visual was an option just for safety purposes.
The one pain point I have found with biking directions is that sometimes the directions come way too late to be useful (maybe I bike too fast haha).
Not only is VR/AR hard, a camera is still very aligned with their business model :)
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.
> 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?
maybe we're talking about different smart glasses?
Disclosure, I'm an investor. But I share this as a fellow technologist who just bought one.
It's meant for working in VR/AR so it only ties to computers, but it might still work for you.
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.
I continue to play with my toddler at all times but I can also capture critical moments without my kid thinking I’m constantly on my phone.
The grandparents have the footage on loop. This is just a win-win-win all around tbh even without any displays.
[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/metas-ray-ban-smart-glasses-fai...
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.
There is a reason why people get lasik.
But hey if people start wearing more sunglasses outside good for them it's better for the eyes.
Still, Facebook isn't exactly a company that has earned trust to fill that role.
The BWM Connected Ride Glasses are close to this:
https://www.bmw-motorrad.ie/en/wear/Apparel/connectedride-sm...
They're specific for motorcycle riding (vs, you know, a pasta timer), but that's a detail of application.
Other than that, it's a pair glasses with a built in HUD for...HUD things.
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?
Urgh.
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.
Amateur pornography already has huge issues with consent and age verification, and is also more and more being weaponised against women as revenge pornography.
Less about the panopticon of surveillance, but about the ramifications of having perfect memory in your daily personal interactions.
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.
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...
The only "innovation" here is the camera. But while isn't horrible is far from anything I could call "smart glasses".
I mean it isn't like it is even all self contained, it's tethered to a phone. I just don't see what this is really bringing to the table.
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.
Maybe not Facebook, but surely Instagram.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Better looking and more refined tech, but fundamentally Glasshole 2.0. Zuck is the perfect ambassador after Brin.
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.
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.
So looks like you need a smart phone, WIFI, and a meta account.
So much for being useful for sports.
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.
This is also the first generation of mobile wearables. Expect more will come in the next two years paired with other devices.
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.
It's a total letdown to click on a product like this and it's nothing more than a camera, a touchpad, and some crappy speakers near my ear.
Yet society will treat these as 10x less creepy because fashion.
(Ray-Ban is owned by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxottica )
You must be the only one not worried about buying hardware from a company that's synonymous with blatant privacy violations.
(Meta is owned by https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zucker...)
1. https://www.ray-ban.com/usa/sunglasses/RB2140%20UNISEX%20ori...
On what planet would an ad exec choose this over a pair of sunglasses with a screen?
We don’t currently have the technology and/or industry to sell a decent $300 screen on your face. That is why we don’t have it.
I'd use that regularly while working on my truck. It'd be a lot easier than stopping during every disassembly step to snap a picture with my phone.
You don’t control the platform, and *everything you generate becomes irrevocable property of Meta forever*.
Seems so very, very unwise to me.
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.
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…
—Some Rayban Executive, probably.
Why would they write copy like this? Surely it causes a visceral cringe reaction in anybody over 35, say.
Is Generation Z a clean slate for 1980s vague hyperbolic ad-speak?
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.
What i would pay for is minimalist eyewear with a heads-up display. That would be useful
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.
OK, it's probably Twitter; but still, I'm sure as hell not buying anything tied to Meta, either.
The proven benefit for meta outweighs any potential I might be sold.
True professionals at meta.
I just don't believe in the upside being reality.
These aren't really smart glasses, they're just spy glasses.
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)
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.
I wish RayBan would make oled-infused corrected lenses.
Not sure I can think of any pro-social use cases though.
[*] Car dash cam — Check
[*] Bike helmet cam — Check
[*] Drone follow cam — Check
[ ] Face cam
Those of us in the FreeCam community have been dreaming of something like this for a long time.
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!
then i don't want it. what's the point of putting a led there anyway?
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.
Is this confirmed yet? The website just says "If the LED is covered, you’ll be notified to clear it." Note that it does not say the camera won't work.
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!"
>A valid Meta account
Pass.
What do I need to use these?
...
- a valid Meta account
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.
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.”"
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.
Requiring The Rest of The World have 100% situational awareness to look for the glowing specs is also frankly ridiculous.
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.
________________________________
Notes:
1. "Why Zuckerberg's 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn't Fixed Facebook", Zeynep Tufekci, <https://www.wired.com/story/why-zuckerberg-15-year-apology-t...>
2. <https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zucker...>
>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.
Sure, scuba divers still need some specialized gear, but there's tons of room in the sports segment for this kind of product.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
I think that's worth my attention even if I'm not the intended customer.
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.
This is one of those cases where it's really helpful to know specifically what we're optimizing for and what we don't need to worry about: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....