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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Nice hardware. They're down to swim goggle size.

Then you see what Facebook wants you to do with it - see screens in front of you all the time. One with Facebook's "Recommended" page, and a video of some talking neckbeard. There's a feeling of "we were promised virtual reality, and all we got was talking heads of influencers." The hardware apparently has GPS, but that's turned off. So, no Pokemon Go yet. Not even Hyperreality.[1] It's all about ads and clicks.

It can't draw dark. The workaround seems to be to dim out the world and draw light overlays, like almost everybody else. Will it work in bright daylight?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs

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If they get the hardware right, apps should surely fill in with better use cases over time. The Verge demoed a better scenario where orion picked up on food ingredients in field of view and displayed a smoothie recipe using them.

[1] https://youtu.be/mpKKcqWnTus?t=236

Do they actually provide applications the ability to access raw camera data? They don't allow that on the Occulus.

They can only rely on 3p devs if they allow access to the hardware.

This has been such a frustrating limitation of all the big AR platforms. For years, my company has wanted to make an AR app for a certain industrial use case that scans QR codes. Neither Meta nor Apple allow it! We had to give up and do AR on an iPhone instead. Think about that - the iPhone has more powerful AR than the Apple Vision Pro for every developer except Apple.

These companies do not want to sell you a physical product, they want to own the platform that you are chained to.

I think the preferred term is contentpreneur now, not influencer.

I'm never gonna remember that

You won’t need to. If it’s a thing it’ll be in 10,000 SEO spam headlines, on every other social media everything and repeated on TV newscasts and 1 out of every 2 podcasts.

For some reason I read that as "con-trepreneur" and thought "yeah that fits much better" until I re-read your comnment.

Dan Olsen of Folding Ideas on YouTube has a great video about contrepreneurs as a concept.

https://youtu.be/biYciU1uiUw?si=16FKN4fTFj9kSvNZ

"contentrepanation" - bore a hole into your skull via content.

contentomy

Even if it turns out that the only application of this is to show ads (which will not be the case), the hardware alone is a monumental achievement of engineering.

I would love to see ads on these, at least once. In contrast, I've never had any interest to even try Apple's VR headset. This is one of the most well-put v1 products ever.

Avoid the MKDBHC trap (or however it's spelled). Innovation beats cynicism, every day.

How is this a v1 product when they have oculus?

VR vs AR

If you watch Zuck's product reveal video, he explains how it's almost a completely different tech-tree.

There's a reason why there's no other similar device on the market right now (i.e. same capabilities).

Also, the interaction through the arm muscles is just awesome (two v1s for the price of one :D). I've been waiting for that kind of UI for decades.

Google actually had it developed about 10 years ago as one of their moonshot projects; but they also had Pichai already, who is dumb as a rock. I could believe he's secretly on the payroll of many competing companies, lol.

AR and VR are not remotely the same thing.

See-through AR and pass-through VR are not remotely the same thing.

AR is much harder.

They have quite an accomplishment with those glasses, even if image quality isn't great and they're still too heavy.

I still don't see a problem that these solve at any price, which has been the enduring problem with AR and makes me bearish on if a next generation of these glasses is anything more than an expensive toy.

Assuming you're talking about Rabbit and the Humane pin reviews, those products were garbage and a product reviewer should tell consumers they're garbage, that's literally their job. This isn't the same thing at all because A it's not a product you can buy which they have lied about to get anyone to buy, B it's actually impressive technology.

> Avoid the MKDBHC trap (or however it's spelled). Innovation beats cynicism, every day.

MKBHD? I don't think cynicism is something he's particularly well-known for, but maybe I'm wrong.

Pretty sure the talking “neckbeard” is a video chat..

Further evidence to the truth of this:

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.

–Jeff Hammerbacher

Oh lament! for what, not just the future, but the present, could have been.

Edited to add: But! Even as I have just written that and stand by it, I just don't know if humanity could have done it any other way. One must sell their soul to 'the green', even just a little, to have the time and space for the kind of creativity that will create a better future. Will we forever have to wade, neck-deep, through trash to find each tiny piece of the puzzle that, when enough pieces are put together, forms at least a picture of a brighter future?

If they were the “brightest minds” and they applied their abilities towards advertisement, then they were not the brightest minds.

If it got them financial stability for themselves and family, then it seems like it worked.

It's like binoculars, The brightest minds see further but they also have immense blind spots that leaves them exploitable.

VHS, the early internet, video compression, and other advances were driven by porn.

Now it seems like ads are driving everything. (Sure, including ads on porn, but I highly doubt porn dominates the ad market overall.)

It seems like the widespread adoption that drives and is driven by technological progress always comes down to catering to some base urge. I guess if you zoom out, everything is driven by base urges, just more or less directly?

So far, the puzzle pieces have always been found in the filthy heap of slop the feeds our primitive brains. We have not yet elected someone because they're the wisest, best fit for the position. It's always the person who can stroke our egos and soothe our fears, who lies with a smile that we choose to trust even when we know it's a lie. It's always a lie. We buy the product that makes us feel best to buy. Sometimes these happen to momentarily coincide with our best interests, but usually not, and never after the competition for our eyeballs and gonads has been minmaxed. Rational superiority is never the deciding factor—even when we convince ourselves that it is, it's that conviction that makes us feel good and determines our action.

>VHS, the early internet, video compression, and other advances were driven by porn.

For posterity, this is completely true; people not liking it does not make it untrue.

VHS was not driven by porn, and neither was video compression.

VHS adoption was driven by the fact that time shifting content was a godsend that people loved. This is a huge reason VHS beat betamax, because you could fit more football games on the VHS, even in it's abysmal longest recording quality. People bought VHS recorders well before anyone was releasing ANY media on VHS.

Name a single video compression codec or ASIC that was produced by or for a porn company. Math geeks made compression codecs well before they were viable for software encoding on general purpose computers, and then set top box manufacturers drove the adoption and development of ASICs that could actually use those codecs.

What porn HAS driven is innovation in video streaming platform UI. Youtube has stolen every nice feature it has from Pornhub, who usually deployed them years earlier.

> VHS was not driven by porn, and neither was video compression.

I think you're quibbling over what "driven by" means. Porn was not the origin of any of these, but there's pretty good evidence that its popularity played a significant role in the adoption of technologies ranging from the printing press to photography to streaming video. VHS being cheaper and recording longer caused it to be adopted by the porn producers, which resulted in much more porn being available on VHS, which tilted things in its favor. (Well, that and Sony's ambivalence towards porn on Betamax.) Geeks indeed liked to work on compression, but nobody would have cared without an application for it, and a big chunk of early internet traffic was porn. The difference between waiting 5 vs 30 minutes for a download is pretty influential. Devices with hardware acceleration, including ASICs, were popular because people had applications for them, and a solid percentage of those applications were porn.

I grew up during the development of all of these technologies. I've never been one for watching porn, but even then, it was pretty clear at least in my environment that porn was very influential. Hints and tricks to download and decode compressed video spread very rapidly through word-of-mouth networks, specifically for porn content.

Earlier, the same thing happened for stills, which were more my thing so I have firsthand knowledge. Heck, the standard test image was Lena—what showed up in the research papers was tame, but the extra 2/3 of the image below that is the reason why that was the most popular test image. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

Porn is at least enjoyable

I share this view and have to fight strong negative feelings every time I see another technically great innovation that is just used to make people esp. young people ill and suffering. Most young people already are Insta, TicToc and YT zombies with crippled creativity and full of anxiety. Now, Meta is trying to steal the few remaining minutes they just can be human beings and not being abused as consuming bots. If Zuckerberg had the tech he would inject this crap into our dreams and promise us a better world. (I guess with my last sentence I lost the fight against my negative feelings ...)

> inject this crap into our dreams

Well I just have to reference Futurama now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlCrcMeVZHs

Which is incomplete without: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGklt4BSQ8

It's so sad they felt okay with unveiling these with the horrible aesthetics and no guarantees anywhere in plain sight on privacy.

I mean they are prototypes, not available for purchase. Presumably they can clean up the aesthetics and provide privacy guarantees around it when it's actually for sale.

It's just to show what's possible, and to presumably jump the gun on their competitors

>no guarantees anywhere in plain sight on privacy

Elaborate. Do you mean this with regards to the data that users will generate when using the device? Or the privacy of the people around the wearer?

I could not care less about the the privacy of the weirdos who will try to wear these in public. I care deeply about the further normalization of surveillance capitalism.

I try hard to be kind, but I will have very little patience for any individual who wears always-on cameras that infringe on my privacy. I don't use social media for a reason. Meta just wants to sell surveillance devices so they can collect more data, and will try to convince us it is for our benefit.

>the people around the wearer

You do realise you can be filmed openly in public places, right?

Not in all countries.

> I don't use social media for a reason.

Do you not consider HN social media?

I don't.

Not funded by ads, not about building a network of 'friends'. I consider HN more of a link sharing site.

HN is an ad for YC. The Y logo featured on every page.

HN is as much social media as any other platforms: traffic driven by popularity, echo chamber, bias, or algorithm.

HN is not a link sharing site. The links aren’t organized by natural order such as the alphabet. You aren’t here for the links, but for the comments.

Sure, but you can't "befriend" or "follow" anyone. To me, at least, that is the first thing that makes me think of a site as SoMe.

That was the original definition of social media. Sharing media to consume.

Sites like FB were referred to as social networking. But then the terms got conflated.

Oh come on.

Ive used Meta Ray Bans since October and talked a lot about them since on HN and other places like Reddit. Also, almost half of friends and family have mentioned privacy thing too. Though looking through these comments Im not seeing much of that worry maybe the tide is turning.

Overall i dont care to film or take pics of anyone but what im experiencing in life and those Im with. No doubt that's how what the majority of Meta Ray ban wearings are using their smart glasses too.

A year of wearing them and fairly often smart glasses are the next big thing yet they will not replace the smart phone as these tech dudes say they will. You can not take a selfies with smart glasses and we are narcissistic beings.

>will have very little patience for any individual who wears always-on cameras that infringe on my privacy.

I'm not a violent person but wouldn't rule out using my fists if someone was filming me or my kids. That said, I live in Japan, so they'll more than likely be banned or heavily restricted like other devices used to make covert recordings.

The press release says "unmistakably a pair of glasses". The fact that you're complaining about the aesthetics and not wether or not they're glasses is a testament to the generational leap they've made here. Apple's VR goggles are glasses with "rendered" external pass through. These actually fit the traditional definition of glasses.

And yeah like in the future, these will shrink in size. Probably by half in five years. Remember in 2018 when we were wondering if we'd ever have the compute available to do "inside out tracking"? Now it's expected as a minimum requirement. How far we've come.

> The press release says "unmistakably a pair of glasses".

They look like what army personnel used to call “birth control glasses”. Only extra thick for added protection.

If you wear these you won't need to worry about birth control.

That's the joke. That's why the Army calls them birth-control glasses.

At the risk of being rude, how on _earth_ could get that jokes without realising that that's already the joke they were making?

*could you get that joke.

Ugh. My own petard.

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