I cannot emphasize enough how unwilling I'd be to interact with someone that has these.
Good thing that the kind of person who would were these in public doesn't interact with others much anyway
Cool... now everyone can be a part of their respective surveillance states. While Meta makes a buck on selling your feed to governments and law enforcement.
And serve ads directly in your eyeballs
I can think of one useful function. I have a lot of friends who are totally blind, and there's an app called Be My Eyes, where a sighted person can take a look at something through your phone's camera. But, being blind, a lot of blind people are absolutely terrible at aiming cameras, because they can't see what they're aiming at.
In this case, the object ends up out of the camera's field of view, or at an angle, or upside down, etc. etc. etc. Whereas, I think having a pair of smart glasses on your face would make the camera platform be much steadier.
I can imagine that haptic/soft vibrations could also be used to steer a blind person towards an object that needs more focus by the camera.
As you say, it has a lot of potential for accessibility and people with handicaps like that, but it's not direction that tech, the economy, or the world itself is interested in right now...
most people do not generally wear glasses
I don't know about other countries but about two thirds of Americans wear glasses. A good number of them will be older adults with age-related long-sightedness for which they may only wear reading glasses, but this is a basic mistake.
...but this is a basic mistake.
They just fell prey to one of the classic blunders!
The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well known is this: Never go in against a septuagenarian when blindness is on the line!
For me at least, the killer feature is going to be tagging faces with names. Face blindness sucks.
Edit: For the downvoters, in case you're unaware, I'm talking about a real life disability.
Face blindness, or prosopagnosia, is a condition where individuals cannot recognize familiar faces, including their own, despite having normal vision and intellectual function. It can be congenital (present from birth), developmental, or acquired due to brain damage from injury, stroke, or disease. People with prosopagnosia rely on other cues like voice, hair, or clothing to identify people.
And that's also the main reason I don't want these to exist. I don't want to be identified by random people, and I especially don't want police to have access to something like this. People I spend time with know who I am, and I'm fine missing out on random same place/same time coincidences with people I knew from high school or something.
Yup, can't wait to be tracked without my consent everywhere I go because of other people that want to pay money to become employed for free by private and government companies.
I have this, and I cannot stress enough how much this use case is not worth being recorded and tracked in public against my consent
I don't have face blindness, but I can't remember names for the fucking life of me.
I understand the gripes about Meta, but I don't understand how everyone clowns on this like the core concept is stupid or unwanted.
Easy $1000 sell: cycling / escooter accessory. People already regularly buy expensive sport glasses just for sun and wind protection. With a smart version of them like this, you add open ear headphone, and you add the potential for navigation directions, or even a Bluetooth rear view camera on the back of your helmet to get a virtual mirror.
The core technology is impressive, and has legitimate use cases.
But that doesn’t outweigh the enormous privacy concerns these devices raise. They aren’t being angled as an accessory for specific activities, but as everyday wearables. If smart glasses like these became common they would be unavoidable, creating leave of intrusion that’s concerning even without Meta being involved.
As a cyclist, this is a terrible sell. I already have tech which does all this, and probably does it better, for less.
I don't need a HUD constantly in my face obscuring the beautiful views. I have sun glasses which fit well with a helmet and wrap around my face to keep the wind out.
I have a cycling computer, which offers GPS turn by turn, and pairs to power meters, heart rate and radar light. It is mounted on the handlebars in an easy to view place.
I have bone conducting headphones for music.
All of this is significantly less than $1000, and if something breaks, I can replace it all individually. I also don't have to wear ridiculous looking sunglasses to listen to my bone conducting headphones.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but this reads a bit like some of the comments on those old Slashdot threads clowning on the first smartphones.
‘these things will fail, I already have a camera, a cellphone, and an mp3 player, why would anyone want them all in one device?’
I agree that head mounted displays can be useful, I'm contemplating getting something like it, but just no cameras, please. not in the frame, not backwards, not anywhere.
Smart glasses also raise many privacy concerns, as their cameras and microphones may be recording at any given time, which can be unnerving to people.
This reaction has always struck me as, at best ill-informed. If I search for spy camera glasses on Amazon, I can find much cheaper and less obvious options to record people without their knowledge. If glasses are getting extra scrutiny lately, maybe I'd be better off with a spy camera pen or something like this which can be disguised as part of a button-up shirt.
Of course actually using any of these to record people without their consent in most situations makes you an asshole, but that capability already existed and is continually expanding.
sure, but there the spying is the purpose, whereas with the glasses it's incidental.
you don't buy such gadgets if you don't intend to spy, but people would buy meta glasses for other reason, and meta being able to spy on you is just a side-effect. Plus it' a matter of scale, this has the potential of being much more prominent than some spy camera.
Meta spying is its own issue, and I think a very legitimate concern.
I'm understanding the concern the article mentions about smart glasses in general (independent of who manufactures them) being the user recording people. That's what people seemed to be upset about when Google Glass launched as well.
I think the reason this is a problem with smart glasses but not with spy pens is that smart glasses are more accessible. I mean, you don't just keep a spy pen on your person, or even buy one, in case it will be useful, right? but the smart glasses are just there, on your head. and why not take a few stealthy photos if I can just click and its one, nobody knowing? or even just that you take a photo of something, but there are others in the field of view who have no idea.
and not just with Meta. I don't think other companies either can be trusted with tech like this. Certainly not in this age.
I read "the new assholes" instead of glassholes.
How improper!
That's intentional.
Smart glasses also raise many privacy concerns, as their cameras and microphones may be recording at any given time, which can be unnerving to people. When Google launched their Google Glass smart glasses, this led to the coining of the term ‘glasshole‘ for people who refuse to follow perceived proper smart glasses etiquette.
I wonder what the result of mass adoption of these will be on society - surely there will have to be "no smart glasses" rules set up in places where you would expect confidentiality like hospitals and classrooms. Also what the ability to instantly watch video content or listen to anything with the click of your fingers (without anyone knowing) will do to people's attention spans. Things in public will have a much higher chance of being recorded by someone, for better or for worse. If someone like Elon Musk makes his own with his own "woke free" xAI (which he has so far been unsuccessful in moulding to his viewpoints), people could have an immediate propagandized perspective and answer for anything they see in real life.
surely there will have to be "no smart glasses" rules
They have this rule for ebikes at the lake I love to walk and the kids are zooming by anyway. I think we'll struggle to enforce it and that really sucks. I hope this fails. It's hard not to be pessimistic about it, as much as I can see some legitimate use cases. I just don't trust big tech with it, least of all Meta.
Worst part with Meta Quest is it seems you have to sign up as a dev and give them a credit card in order to sideload (a.k.a., install stuff on the device you purchased). So, you can shell out hundreds for one of their devices and the device and all your data are belong to Meta. I assume it’s the same deal with these glasses. Zuck off, Zuck.🖕
I got a voucher for a free pair of meta glasses. I don't want to order them. I'd need a meta account.
Wife is bugging me to order and resell and I want zero part of it.
Now we need a device that detects Meta Glasses and makes us invisible to them. I know this is a losing battle and it's just inevitable over time but I don't like having information provided to someone about me without my consent. With enough adoption, at some point we would all just need to have our own glasses to even the field.
There's new glassholes?
All I need is a nu-metal revival and we're back in 2008 baby.
Ah, yet another bit of technology I've been looking forward to for years.
Let's see @technology dump all over it.
I'll take a crack at it:
Oh man I'm wearing ray bans. I should get a new pair else I'd get lynched for it... again...
I love this image. I think it should be required on any smartglasses packaging like the surgeon general's warning is on a pack of cigarettes (for now).
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
