Navigation app for people with blindness and low vision | Hacker News Reader

Navigation app for people with blindness and low vision

seas.harvard.edu

35 pointsgeox10 comments

For all the talk about Meta Ray-Ban glasses being used by creeps and assholes (no debate, they certainly are), the one anecdote I care most about is that a friend of mine who is blind absolutely loves his pair as a mobility aid. Things worth thinking about.

Came here to say this.

Meta is a terrible company, but smart glasses are a game changer for blind/low vision folks.

Both can be true at the same time.

I have a feeling that Apple will have a better product in the end, one that is more privacy conscious. They can use a front facing indicator, or even keep it to sensors, while avoiding a camera completely.

What you're describing is not a Meta or a glasses problem. It's an asshole problem. IMO, devices should not be responsible for people not being assholes. People should. The glasses become significantly less useful as mobility aids if you decide they're not allowed to have cameras in them.

Yes, assholes should be held accountable for their own actions, but this issue goes beyond that. Having a recording indicator would be a simple fix for Meta.

As for Apple, the camera can be an optional upgrade, but not everyone will actually need one. Apple can already do object tracking with sensors alone. It’s not far fetched to expect a more developed sensor-only experience from future Apple products.

Meta glasses do have a recording indicator.

What I’m talking about is an obvious front facing indicator.

Not a shiny piece where a shiny piece usually resides on some kinds of frames. Not a single LED that can be covered.

People shouldn't be assholes, but if they're passively recording, even for "good" / "non-creepy" reason... still the video that they took of you (that you might not have wanted) can be found in the database of Meta now, and will be used to train their next model, or to use it against you, or sell you ads, etc

The word "people" doesn't stop at the one person wearing the glasses. Don't pretend that Meta's corporate data governance decisions aren't also by people being assholes.

I would love a medicalized version of smart glasses for low vision folks that provided both distance magnification and close-in magnification based on where the user is looking. The existing bioptic glasses with a telescope are very heavy, clunky to focus, and, for lack of a better word, disfiguring.

A friend of mine founded a startup with much the same concept several years ago - while it has matured in many ways the initial concept was to provide the user with spatial audio "sound beacons" / breadcrumbs they could intuitively follow: https://www.dreamwaves.io/

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