Meta RayBan AR glasses shows Lumus waveguide structures in leaked video
kguttag.com
kguttag.com
Anyway, once it goes mainstream and people see what we've done to ourselves, maybe it will open people's eyes and we'll start fighting for our privacy again.
lol
"Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think they're talking to you, but they're actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is standing there measuring the length of Hiro's cock through his trousers while they pretend to make conversation."
So, the average Zoom call in 2025?
Just kidding.
People prefer it. Pure and simple.
Clearly there's a disadvantage to using text in that situation, and I think it's that it almost always takes longer to express thoughts/intents using text. ISTM a sufficiently advanced computer voice interface would have the same advantage.
Am I really having to explain basic stuff like this? Lmao.
It's a convenience/necessity thing, pure and simple.
Zero benefit interacting with voice with an AI. Pure and simple.
Nobody cares about an agent when they are the principal - this is not remotely the same as interfacing with a human that is valued much higher.
I guess I could also follow suit and return your weird toxic/patronising insult here too since you clearly didn't understand my original comment, but perhaps it would be nicer if we didn't do that?
Let's start with text intended to convey information. Good documentation-type text that acts as a one-way communication channel is an example of this. A small number of writers and contributors to something that can be read by thousands or more can be incredibly powerful and can be incredibly information dense and valuable if written well.
Text intended to entertain? Well, that's just art and people will choose to engage in that way when they prefer the medium itself, so that's really just personal preference and enjoyment.
Text as the de-facto replacement for voice/face-to-face feels like something that's been forced into a lot of situations now. It's beneficial (or really required) when it's the only option such as for long-distance communication, and favours slow-changing content. But I think in a lot of cases we've been forced into having to use text over voice for raw human communication (thinking of course about remote working now).
I think text has a lot going for it. It can be incredibly information dense, it's easier for writers to take time to prepare something well, it's persistent, it's searchable, it's easy to make available historically. But I'm not convinced that it's a blanket replacement in every way. As the equivalent of voice it's also just slower.
As for video telephony, well David Foster Wallace had a bit to say about that [1]
[1] https://ochuk.wordpress.com/2015/08/20/my-favorite-pieces-of...
Lots of my friends send voice notes these days. I prefer them. Especially if they’re auto transcribed so the person on the other end can choose how to consume them.
While I accept some will take issue with calling it an "AR device", the current Meta RayBans have sold very well with major YoY growth and I only expect them to get more popular as they get more capable and add more "AR"-esque features in future versions. I see them already as a first step on road to real AR products much, much more than I do the Quest line.
My understanding is the current tech is not sharp enough for serious productivity, is too heavy for extended wear, and has a short life due to overdriving tiny OLEDs, so I'm not ready to purchase one yet. But some day those problems will be solved and I'm absolutely going to jump on that.
This is the one aspect that is hard to find info about online. Everyone talks about the weight and what size the virtual display is, but if I am going to seriously use it for productivity then I need at least 3 files open side by side, fully legible, with 100-character-wide lines at the bare minimum to be considered.
Either way, I'm not going to purchase until they solve the longevity problem, but I am curious if the sharpness is at the point where I can stop worrying about it.
I use them to do work, the issue I have is, having owned three pairs (for reasons), the lenses can be hit-or-miss. The pair I own now is more on the miss side, and some part of the lens is blurry. You don't notice it when watching films, but it's noticeable for text. The other two pairs were OK, this one I got less lucky with.
This one also seems to tire out my eyes if I wear the glasses for more than an hour, and I don't know why (it might be the blurriness). It's not the focal distance, they did a good job there, it's about 5m as far as I can tell.
Anyway, overall I like the glasses. They're worth the 200 € I paid used, but I probably wouldn't pay 400 € for them, I only use them on flights. They'd be great if I watched lots of movies or played games on a Steam Deck, though.
People seem to underestimate how wonderful it to be able to touch and tap an interface and how minimal effort is exerted.
I have an incredibly hard time remembering faces and names. Close to disability level. People I have known for 20 years and interact with monthly can take a bit for me to recall their names and it requires a ton of mental tricks to do so.
I used to go to a decent number of trade shows, and the number of folks who casually knew me and my name but I couldn’t place was embarrassing. And crippling for business purposes.
I always thought if I had someway to overlay a persons name over their head it would level the playing field and allow be to avoid a lot of personal embarrassment.
Now that the future is here I’m not so sure. One of those things I want for me but not for thee.
Realtime on-demand satnav in ar, onscreen messaging, news updates etc, the facial recognition is just one aspect, having automatic connections with people looking at you across a room signifying interest.
This is dystopian to me but I don't see how it doesn't eventually become mainstream.
I guess as long as the data is shared with three letter agencies and data mills, then why not.
With phone calls that would be tricky, so at least they disabled it to protect scammers.
When that feature did work, I was able to get money back from insurer as their sales person misrepresented the policy I paid for. I had it recorded and they had to pay up.
With call recording no longer available, I don't do any calls if I don't have a tablet with me to record it.
Those sensor input-only arn't what would push people to want whole-ass screens & VR overlays. It's weird you think there's a similar power profile to a smart phone and a smart watch. They are not a gradient in use cases.
This is a good point, but my point was more that if a smart watches are doing less than a smart phone and people still seem to be happy to have to charge them everyday, I'm not so convinced that having to fast-charge a set of AR glasses for time-limited use would put people off if they felt it was useful enough.
For context, I was imagining that most of the AR/VR overlays would be time or context dependent. Perhaps when travelling to aid with directions or on a commute for entertainment.
Are people really going to be walking through life with an always-on HUD? If they are then yes, completely fair point around battery usage. Perhaps once a global network of wireless charging is fully operational this will be a problem of the past...
That's not a good case to make that active devices that consume orders of magnitude more power are going to make it on the market if they can't last 8-10 hours on a charge doing active things.
Maybe people misunderstand just how much power AR/VR require and think it's similar to wireless ear phones.
There's just a huge band gap in power requirements. EVs have similar issues in the consumer confidence when it comes to matching range requirements.
No matter how much on paper you explain to people what they actually do vs what they want to do, the salesman needs to sell at what they want to do.
SUVs and Trucks are similar, except inverse: people want to do a bunch of things, but what they actually do is very little. They'd still never drive a small vehicle just because it gets them good range.
So, when I say the tech/battery isn't there for the consumer, it's recognizing the consumer is an idiot, and the nerd-requirements are different than average consumer expectations.
I've heard otherwise intelligent people talk about how important it is we get to Mars because of how dire the global warming situation on Earth is.
I do. Many take advantage of the wheel. There are even full 3d games (it has a decent GPU, considering how small it is).
There's also uBrowser web browser, to help reduce your charge.
Even if you can capture every single bit of extra energy from a tshirt, you'd end up with a tiny fraction of 100W. Certainly not enough to power a mobile device like this.
I know because I was in the background of someone's snapshot and got a ~$500 check out of the settlement. Thanks, Facebook!
How am I meant to opt out of this? A device that broadcasts an (inevitably ignored) do not scan signal? CV Dazzle? Am I resigned to just never leaving the house again?
For now I’m hoping that the major factor against people adopting this is that you’ll look like a wanker. I’m not sure what to do once that becomes the norm though.
As for opting out? I think the only chance you have is to have zero online presence, especially with pictures. Of course, many are forced into this by their careers.
Optionally pulse-modulated in specific ways, to make the software behind those crash by inducing cyber-epilepsy.
IOACM (infrared optically active countermeasures)
I get it could be mildly to very annoying depending on what's available on you online - but not leaving the house ? The only things that come to mind are you have a hit on you and you did an identity change to ditch it or some thinfoil hat level theory.
The way I see this is this is all being done for over a decade now we are just making it more widespread. In some ways I find it a good thing - where previously the government could track you through security infra, now the government servants are also surveiled in all public appearances.
If we're inevitably going in this direction, might as well have the same rules for everyone.
The app in question[0]. I would imagine newer hardware and some Palantir APIs would be all you need to do this very reliability.
[0]https://gizmodo.com/this-facial-recognition-experiment-with-...
https://www.gadgetreview.com/massive-attack-turns-concert-in...
I don't actually see the difference between this and a crowdcam at a sporting event, other than many privacy-oriented publications have reposted pictures of the people at the Massive Attack event, presumably without their permission.
It will remember all your activities, help you find your keys and objects, remember what you bought when and if there's still toilet paper in your bathroom, etc. It will make helpful charts and statistics about your life, help to optimize it, notice if there is some product that it wants to advertise to you based on your activities etc. It's all going to be packaged and sold to ad networks. You will see AR ad objects floating everywhere, depending on what you do.
Presumably only if you wear it.
Things that start as optional and convenience only can slowly become essentially mandatory. And then if you are already wearing it, it will push the ads.
This is partly a holdover from Covid, and just as while there are a few people walking around with Covid masks on, most people aren't wearing them any more, and there are loads of restaurants that don't rely on QR codes. QR codes do have actual advantages, but also disadvantages, so they will - and have - balance against the market's requirements.
A privacy-first version of smart glasses running OSS would make me lean forward in my seat, at minimum.
That is very wishful thinking and will backfire. What will actually happen is normalisation and increased erosion of privacy.
Self-driving cars, they will know absolutely everything, about everyone, all the time, combine that with delivery drones and glasses, the government, meta, google, they will know exactly where you are all the time. Even if you leave your device at home.
In a functional society, these always on, corporate controlled devices would be outlawed.
The highest bidder. And then the next-highest bidder, and the next highest bidder, and the next highest bidder…
Reminds me of my single girlfriends who put every single person they talk to on online dating into facecheck.id.
Unfortunately, while I want to see the technology succeed in the mainstream, it's never going to get there. Period. The AR use-case presented by tech giants to consumers fails to solve any real world problem that a cheaper and more accessible cellphone couldn't. Sure there are niche-use cases and cool demos for consumers, but until the hardware reaches the form factor and durability of traditional prescription glasses consumers will never adopt the technology in a meaningful way.
If we actually want to drive sales of AR devices, we will replicate usecases where AR currently drives value, such as HUDs for aircraft. The same concept can be applied to other high workload environments such as EMS, truck drivers, ATC, law enforcement and handful of military applications. However sales in these domains will be somewhat limited except for military applications which is bad PR for the most of the leaders of AR tech.
So for now its all essentially vaporware to generate hype for the stock market.
Absolutely love them. They're not absolutely essential, but they're a nice-to-have and they're a lot more convenient than putting in ear buds.
The problem though is that I would never have thought to ever buy them myself. I feel this way about these AR glasses.
Some of this is the lack of a killer app and some of this will be generational. At some point the 10-30yos will be more used to being permanently plugged in than not. (we're probably already there in some senses, but will go through the same adoption cycle again for AR/VR imo)
I walked around listening to cassette tapes on my walkman and couldn't imagine why anyone would want an "mp3 player" with all the hassles of loading 100 songs at a time onto a computer and then onto the thing etc etc. Minidiscs seemed cool tho?
~5 years later I got an iPod with 10gig of storage and holy shit it was the best thing I'd ever encountered. All my music. Immediately. All the time.
This was pretty much known since Day 1 (famous dumb fucks quote about people sharing their personal details), and as we all should know at this point people don't change, not for the better at least.
(Warning it is a youtube short)
Every owner will “Share your contacts” then do the work of labeling their friends and family in every which way for Meta. Even if those friends and family don’t want to be on social media it’ll be stored.
In the future Meta will just plan to attend a senate hearing, apologize for the misuse of that data and pay a fine.
Fun for curiosity, but it could be actually really useful for techs?
Lumus is just a company. So “Lumus waveguide” doesn’t seem to tell us much other than the supplier.
But I found his blog a couple years ago and have been reading it ever since. Karl follows VR/AR display tech obsessively, goes to all the shows/conferences and talks with all the companies - then does highly technical, in-depth write-ups of what's new and notable - which often includes his unvarnished opinions. His blog is read by basically everyone in the industry, so all the companies give him briefings and demos despite the fact he'll call it like he sees it. Which is why he's pretty much my go to source when any new VR/AR display tech gets announced.
Even more valuable to me, he'll mention when companies are lagging or falling short of expectations and he'll even speculate about where things could (or should) go. His blog is basically like having a buddy who's an expert industry insider who'll tell you what he really thinks over a beer - which is pretty invaluable if you're someone who's interested and technical but doesn't follow this space that closely. That doesn't mean Karl's opinion is always correct but it is certainly well-informed and usually supported with technical data - although he did say this post was just a quick note that a video was leaked. He'll probably have a real post after it's announced and a deep dive once he gets his hands on one.
Interesting fact: Karl's career was as a chip architect. He designed key parts of the the Texas Instruments 9918 - the first general purpose video display processor which was used in dozens of 80s computers and game systems including Sega Master System (and coined the term "sprite"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS9918 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_%28computer_graphics%29 https://kguttag.com/2025/07/01/tms9918-the-first-sprite-chip... So yeah, he's just "some random retired guy with a blog" but a guy with 150 patents and dozens of published technical papers. But being some random retired guy with a blog, he makes little effort to be accessible to first-time visitors or do design, marketing, etc. You just have to read-in and when you do, you pretty quickly figure out this guy knows his stuff.
The tech just hasn’t been there yet and most of the devices that do this are heavy clunky and hot
Meta is investing billions to get out ahead of this shift and to own the entertainment and data (and thus advertising) layers that sit on top of the real world through these glasses
The rumor mill is abuzz that Facebook finally making a play for it in the next set of smart glasses after a few years of sticking to VR headsets and audio/camera only glasses
Two seconds after I walked out … I was like, “oh, that’s not going to work…” so I just sat around for an hour.
Noteworthy because it's an interesting extra technical insight about a soon to be announced Meta product, if that's your kind of thing
This is the kind of content HN was made for, much more so than the Israel/Gaza or Bertrand Russell stories I see on the front page right now for example.
Do you have any sources on them being a successful product by any measurable standard? I honestly wasn't aware that they were even being sold, and I'm sure I don't know anyone that owns a pair. I'm not exactly their target market, but I think at least some in my social circle are.
Google is also finding that blasting YT with ads of Google Pixel does not work very well.
Even a new model with a screen would only be semi-new, other AR glasses have existed for over a decade - with Apple releasing a consumer-focused product last year.
- Snapchat - has been trying for a decade and has sold ~220K Spectacles.
- Amazon Echo Frames - Reuters estimated less than 10,000 units sold.
- Humane AI Pin - the less said about it the better.
- Google Glass - neat but way ahead of its time, and barely made it to consumers before being quickly discontinued.
- Hololens/Magic Leap - both duds.
- Lengthy list of startups with smart glasses and other wearables that have gained no traction.
Meta glasses are noteworthy because there's finally a company making an AR wearable catch on among a mainstream audience.