Can’t wait to have 3D “personalized” ad billboards follow me everywhere and “pause” my walking directions until I watch a 30-second unskippable commercial. The VR glasses future is exciting no doubt: too bad however that it is being ushered in by two surveillance, I mean, advertising companies (Google and Facebook).
1. Ok, the subtitles are in the lady's bust area, does that mean that glassholes 2.0 will look down there when they talk with someone?
2. The popup on the bottom right corner "Gemini start translate" is black on top of light background, does that mean that these new glasses can display dark on top of light background? I thought this was impossible with current technology. Or was it faked like magic leap faked the jumping whale demo?
How they usually address the fact that 50% of their target market is already wearing glasses? Would they just ignore that 50% in their first iteration and then sell customised smart glasses ?
I always wonder this. I was in the target market for Magic Leap / Apple Vision Pro but I never considered buying either because of (among other reasons) the extra hassle of prescription inserts (both for me and for guests who would want to try them).
I presume someone has done the maths - but it's always killed my interest in these form factors.
They're not as noticeable as Google's. Huge difference. Their basically hidden cameras. Google glass has this huge weird glowy glass brick sticking out and the camera hole is also way bigger (I have the enterprise version myself here). I rarely wear it around others though and if I do I put red tape over the camera so they can see it's inoperative.
Though I mainly bought them as a curiosity (second hand for very little). I find an xreal much more useful.
Boss has started wearing the ray bans around the office and everyone unanimously agrees he's an asshole for it. Also because he talks about them constantly
Sounds like the plan is an attempt to position Gemini as a more useful Siri-like assistant by giving it better input and output capabilities in the form of AR glasses
Will it take off as a general consumer product this time? Probably, for some (unfortunately).
It will create a whole new class of distracted people in traffic, that's for sure. Someone lost in a smartphone screen is at least visually recognisable (“Better look out for that smombie about to cross…”), but someone dutifully following Google Maps directions on one of these could actually look like they are aware of their surroundings, whilst their full attention is fixed on the little map widget.
I think the problem here is traffic and cars. Seems crazy to think that it’s normalised to be in alert mode 100% of the time when out of your home because of cars. Every corner, every cross, I need to stop and double check for cars otherwise my life could end.
I'm really not looking forward to (pure) humans assaulting cyborgs again.
> No shirt. No shoes. No augmented reality glasses. No service. Earlier this month, human cyborg and University of Toronto Professor Steve Mann, claims he was brutalized and kicked out of a Paris McDonald’s after employees objected to his headset and its ability to record photos and videos of his experiences.
> [snip]
> To draw attention to his plight, on July 16th Mann posted an account of the alleged assault on blogspot, causing an international uproar. The incident has so far been covered by more than three dozen major news outlets, including Tech Crunch, Forbes, Mashable and The Verge. A group on Reddit had more than 2,000 comments as of this writing. Sci-fi blog io9 even described the alleged attack as "the world’s first cybernetic hate crime."
I'm kind of anxious about checking the map when I'm riding a motorcycle in traffic. You can get away with much lower situational awareness in a car simply because you're far more predictable and not invisible.
Speaking of which... I'm still waiting for a bike helmet with a back-facing camera/HUD that is neither vaporware nor "smart" (read vendor-dependent and barely working), and doesn't suffer from basic usability mistakes. That would be infinitely more useful and probably easier to make than this.
If road conditions become intense, then passengers will notice, and stop talking to let the driver focus. People on the other end of a speaker phone can't see the road, so will continue blabbing. (Or even try to regain the driver's attention. "Why aren't you responding?") I'm not sure if podcasts are as distracting as someone on a speaker phone, but they similarly don't adapt to the road conditions.
Is that much different from people lost in their thoughts or focusing on their podcast ?
As you point out, distracted people already exist, and new classes of them will appear every day. The problem exists and I don't want to minimize it, but from a driver's perspective the difference sounds minimal, and doesn't affect how you'll handle the situation (someone looking aware might not actually be)
This is not comparable to your two examples which are passive, the new device requires active partisipation will be additionaly distracting in that there will be all of the "gotchas" of modern UI design demanding "engagement".
Face it, this is an attempt to have everything a person sees and hears projected by a corporate entity....."real time threat awareness" and instant sales opotunintues, just look at anything and find out "how much™", .....offer price determined by pulse, pupil dialation, previous comments,buying power and purchases.
good times
The shibuya crossing also has at least 2 giant screens, with sound, and have been there for decades now. All of them have camera, and they probably have been checking the effect of each of the ads since the screens have been setup.
as to the "shibuya" crossing , ya whatever, take it as a given that I have been to many different crossings in big citys and other places...not on any maps
the comanality is to create an almost overwhelming spectacle and engage people in such a way that they open up there wallets....
the internet (phones, now "specs") as an always on
jittering, jiggling, flashing, binging,bonginging, personal , tic tock, shake down street, is though
floundering a bit, as we are all now a bit world weary, short on time, and utterly lacking in a home to go back too and tell our tails of the big city and flashing lights, gaining our own brief spot, at the center of things.
yes?, no?
just check out the fearsom demand for add blockers, calm down and sleep meds, burn out stories, etc, etc ,etc
or ,the very deep sigh when someone I am doing a deal with was commenting on all of the financial shenanigans going on vs/vs trade, tarrifs, and all that, and I said yes....but maybe we will slow down and have a more circular economy, and live better....
You're right, it's not much different at all. People have been walking around with headphones for decades, and the same prejudice existed early on when Bluetooth headsets were all the rage. XR glasses simply expand this to another sense.
Can it arguably be more dangerous? Sure. But we'll come up with more technology and regulation to minimize the dangers. And the prejudice will eventually go away as well.
As much as I think that everyone walking around with these things is unsettling in a dystopian way, transhumanism is inevitable, and this is just another step in that direction.
And it will haunt the Apple efforts to get these worn advertising screens into the market as well.
Good.
Why would one pay for the privilege to have everything they see overlayed with advertisements and every micro-expression analyzed for even better ad targeting?
I wouldn’t use a smartphone (or a browser on my computer for that matter) if it weren’t routed through my private DNS blocking advertising and tracking.
Whenever I see how the internet looks like for normal people, I shudder in horror.
Why one would pay for such a privilege? Because it's the latest new gadget and it's very convenient and its users don't experience any immediate negatives of using it. That's how people will happily let you get away with (digital) murder.
Hasn't it already happened? There are doorbell cameras, CCTV, dash cams, drones, and everyone using a phone is pointing a camera. Cameras are everywhere in public already.
Holding a phone up to film something is visibly different to wearing glasses which are effectively always on. Cameras are everywhere but there's an expectation that if I meet you in a private place or invite you into my home then you will not be recording everything. In the case of a glasshole there's no way to know if this expectation is being broken.
I'm not sure why the distinction with having a dash cam on a public road needs to be pointed out again and again.
Anyone carrying a phone can always be recording audio discretely and home assistant devices exist in private homes. These have already become commonly accepted risks to privacy in the same situations you've described. I think we as a society end up just trusting others to respect our privacy. That said, the glasses have advertised features like memory that aren't all that useful unless always on. If the glasses push to be always on, then there's definitely a risk that it could invade the privacy of others without the wearer's intent.
> Anyone carrying a phone can always be recording audio
They can and that's different than the capacity of the glasses we're talking about. Again there's a distinction here and I think a good faith discussion would avoid intentionally blurring these lines. If we are going to do that then my argument becomes against mandatory livestreaming of every visit to the toilet.
> These have already become commonly accepted risks to privacy in the same situations you've described.
We routinely ask people to leave their phones behind when entering e.g. concert halls or classrooms. Glasses overlap with something necessary for accessibility and can't be so easily removed.
> I think we as a society end up just trusting others
Who are "we as a society?" There are different cultures who will approach this differently. In the United States they ended up trusting one another not to shoot each other while in other societies they legislated against the casual carrying of firearms. We don't have to accept glassholes walking amongst us just because we accept that people have smartphones.
> there's definitely a risk that it could invade the privacy of others without the wearer's intent.
I was actually arguing with the assumption that this was a certain outcome of the technology.
Avoiding phones in some classrooms and concert halls hasn't slowed adoption of cellphones, that's what I mean by society accepting the product and their privacy risks. Simply turning off cellphones is likely enough to stop glasses from being useful on their own as they tether to a phone. We have the same merging of accessibility device and recording device already with air pods which now can be used as a hearing aid and can record audio when tethered to a phone. With on device (on the phone) image processing and machine learning advances they may be able to address the privacy issues to most peoples satisfaction. The only point I've tried to make in this discussion is that I don't think the product is likely to fail due to privacy concerns anymore as we've watched our privacy steadily erode over the last couple decades this has become a much smaller concession than it once was.
> that's what I mean by society accepting the product
Yes, and gun control is what I mean by society not accepting a product. Your logic is that one product has been accepted so we must now accept this different product, but the logic doesn't hold when there are many products we reject.
> Simply turning off cellphones is likely enough to stop glasses from being useful
They will simply sync once reconnected to a phone and eventually they will have all of the telecommunicative capabilities of phones.
> a hearing aid and can record audio when tethered to a phone
I've already said that audio is qualitively different to video. I don't care if someone comes to my kid's birthday party and records them singing songs but I care if they're going to film them in the pool.
> I don't think the product is likely to fail due to privacy concerns anymore as we've watched our privacy steadily erode
It's strange to me that you frame it as an erosion of privacy while in the same breath campaigning for becoming a passive victim of that erosion win absolutely no desire to criticise what's happening to. It gives me a great pain in my heart to see that capitalism she democracy have so thoroughly failed the Western world that we have completely shed any illusion of agency in shaping society or the market to serve us rather than the other way around.
>I think we as a society end up just trusting others to respect our privacy.
No. There are elements in society who can never be trusted and we can't lock them all up. I suspect it's no coincidence that Meta won't ship their glasses to countries which have the strictest laws designed to make it harder for said individuals. As a resident of one I hope it stays that way.
Unscrupulous individuals are more likely to use cameras that are intended to be concealed to avoid suspicion rather than glasses that have a fortune in advertising to make people aware of what they are and what they do. These glasses company have tons of money to lose for mishandling user data. Meta's glasses are available in many countries considered to have strict privacy laws all around the world: (Canada, Germany, Sweden, etc.) : https://www.meta.com/help/ai-glasses/4961066940605960/
Glass had a backlash when privacy still existed. Now we have the Rabbit or the AI Pin, and everyone tells their deepest secrets (even commercial ones like source code) to ChatGPT without thinking about what could go wrong.
Even on HN we can see users saying that AI is better than a psychiatrist.
If it is cheaper than a Meta VR thing, it could be as popular as the latest iPhone.
On top of that they got released more than 10 years ago. We have a new generation of users - I think (might be wrong thought) for gen Gen Z privacy is less of an issue and they are heavy users or tiktok and snapchat (comparing to millenials).
Original glasses looked also more futuristic - new one like raybans looks more like sunglasses so other people less aware about being recorded.
I believe this is the most important argument in favor of local LLMs. There are industries where you can just send some info to OpenAI or Anthropic and just hope it will be safe there.
That's why I'm not involved in the LLMs nowadays. I'm waiting for the whole thing to cool down, and when they have a real local and useful solution for sensitive or regulated industries, I may use it but I'm not in a hurry and I don't believe the FOMO around it.
Its like Google Search. They sold a lot of books for a technology that you could learn in 5 minutes.
The fact that I am not disgusted by those new glasses is worrying me more. Privacy is really dead outside my house and there is nothing I can do about it.
At least it replaced every Google and Apple devices I own with Linux and custom OSes that I fully control, it gives some peace of mind as long as you remember to spend a few minutes to backup your stuff every week.
I understand why you are not in a hurry but I'd like to offer a counter-argument. I have a machine powerful enough to experiment with local LLMs and interestingly enough at least some models are on a par with what OpenAI used to charge for (GPT4). It means I can experiment and see what these models are capable of, whether it makes sense to use them to solve my problem, and if not - why, and if anything can be done about it on my part. And because the API is the same, it's relatively easy.
It's not necessary to be at the bleeding edge, two steps away is also fine, but today LLMs are just another tool in your toolbelt and I reached the conclusion it makes no sense to ignore them, in spite of how irritating the hype (or, sometimes, plain lies) can be.
I tried Glass and it basically didn't work at all. I don't have a strong accent (standard British) and it could only understand half of what I was saying. Given that the only interface was voice... kind of a deal-breaker.
That said, I wouldn't expect this to be a success either. People don't really like talking to devices in public. It's fundamentally embarrassing.
Your examples are the reason I asked. Whatever Meta was thinking the result was a flop in spite of billions spent on research and production. Apple halted the production of Vision Pro.
So I'm very curious - what caused Google's CXOs to think they absolutely have to revive the dead horse everybody tries to resuscitate but nobody succeeds?
I think transparent kinds can be explained by the concept being simply cool.
As for enclosed VR style headsets, I really think Quest must be actively being used by some non-negligible numbers of users for purposes considered career-unsafe to mention that isn't pornography, by which I mean VRChat. This pink elephant theory can explain paradoxical continued presence of Quest inconsistent with apparent total flop status, especially contrast to actual total flop of AVP.
because other companies have done it without it instantly triggering everyone that saw them. Snapchat has Spectacles and Facebook/RayBans have ReyBan-Meta and neither are having customers called glassholes and getting beaten for wearing head mounted cameras everywhere. honestly i think the reason is for whatever reason popular media demonized google glass as evil privacy invading spying device thus killing it in its infancy and ignored snapchat and facebook when they did the same thing.
The public backlash was from apple fanboys and apple PR department. Some of internal apple data got leaked a while back and they talked about their PR plans which included seeding social media with "glasshole".
Google Glass development never really stopped. The enterprise editions where on sale for years. They were shelved around the time work on these translation glasses was announced.
I see that as a dystopian future. Google wants to model entire cities in real time, just like London with all the cameras everywhere, but for the profit of a private company and three letter agencies.
It used to be that in a small village everyone knew what everyone else was doing. Now with cloud connected cameras it will be impossible to have privacy on cities. A google camera will see and follow you anywhere you go. They will recognise you, they will track your movement when you go out of reach of one camera into another.
That is too much power and we should not give it to anyone, public or private.
This sounds to me like the most straightforward trying to solve social problems with (blocking) technological solutions.
You'll only stop that future by securing a democratic government and have it protect citizens with solid privacy protection. Fighting technology is an already lost battle (we already have the means at scale)
Two decades past, here in Australia, I worked on a proposal for a another party to develop uniform ubiquitous CCTV software infrastructure for the UK as part of a tender process.
The people I worked for literally tagged it in house as Panopticon.
Big brother social objections aside the one feature I like was ironing out the wrinkles on buses exchanging their most recent footage whenever they parked up at a stop or at lights within wireless range.
The driving intent, at theat time. as I was told, was to be sure to have useful footage survive in the event of another wave of:
I parted ways not long after that initial period as I expected things to drift in the direction of "Well, now that we have this, how can we use it to increasingly track people other than actual terrorists?"
Many years ago I use to regularly be in southern UK, between London and Cardiff, I think never saw a bad parked car at least in the city center, exactly because there are always a bunch of cameras around.
No way to try out one's luck regarding if a patrol will ever happen to cross that street.
Can’t wait to have 3D “personalized” ad billboards follow me everywhere and “pause” my walking directions until I watch a 30-second unskippable commercial. The VR glasses future is exciting no doubt: too bad however that it is being ushered in by two surveillance, I mean, advertising companies (Google and Facebook).
Reverse “They Live” except we’ll willfully wear the glasses with great enthusiasm
1. Ok, the subtitles are in the lady's bust area, does that mean that glassholes 2.0 will look down there when they talk with someone?
2. The popup on the bottom right corner "Gemini start translate" is black on top of light background, does that mean that these new glasses can display dark on top of light background? I thought this was impossible with current technology. Or was it faked like magic leap faked the jumping whale demo?
How they usually address the fact that 50% of their target market is already wearing glasses? Would they just ignore that 50% in their first iteration and then sell customised smart glasses ?
At Google io, the presenter commented they have prescription lenses in the pair they were wearing
This was addressed in the presentation. The are partnering with eyewear brands starting with Gentle Monster and Warby Parker.
I always wonder this. I was in the target market for Magic Leap / Apple Vision Pro but I never considered buying either because of (among other reasons) the extra hassle of prescription inserts (both for me and for guests who would want to try them).
I presume someone has done the maths - but it's always killed my interest in these form factors.
Aren't these just the xreal aura's? I like AR glasses, but I don't really want a camera in them. Especially because of the glasshole effect.
Facebook rayban smart glasses and snapchats spectacles havent had that effect. And both are largely head mounted cameras
They're not as noticeable as Google's. Huge difference. Their basically hidden cameras. Google glass has this huge weird glowy glass brick sticking out and the camera hole is also way bigger (I have the enterprise version myself here). I rarely wear it around others though and if I do I put red tape over the camera so they can see it's inoperative.
Though I mainly bought them as a curiosity (second hand for very little). I find an xreal much more useful.
Boss has started wearing the ray bans around the office and everyone unanimously agrees he's an asshole for it. Also because he talks about them constantly
Sounds like the plan is an attempt to position Gemini as a more useful Siri-like assistant by giving it better input and output capabilities in the form of AR glasses
Smart Glasses 2: Revenge of the Glassholes
Will it take off as a general consumer product this time? Probably, for some (unfortunately).
It will create a whole new class of distracted people in traffic, that's for sure. Someone lost in a smartphone screen is at least visually recognisable (“Better look out for that smombie about to cross…”), but someone dutifully following Google Maps directions on one of these could actually look like they are aware of their surroundings, whilst their full attention is fixed on the little map widget.
I think the problem here is traffic and cars. Seems crazy to think that it’s normalised to be in alert mode 100% of the time when out of your home because of cars. Every corner, every cross, I need to stop and double check for cars otherwise my life could end.
I'm really not looking forward to (pure) humans assaulting cyborgs again.
> No shirt. No shoes. No augmented reality glasses. No service. Earlier this month, human cyborg and University of Toronto Professor Steve Mann, claims he was brutalized and kicked out of a Paris McDonald’s after employees objected to his headset and its ability to record photos and videos of his experiences.
> [snip]
> To draw attention to his plight, on July 16th Mann posted an account of the alleged assault on blogspot, causing an international uproar. The incident has so far been covered by more than three dozen major news outlets, including Tech Crunch, Forbes, Mashable and The Verge. A group on Reddit had more than 2,000 comments as of this writing. Sci-fi blog io9 even described the alleged attack as "the world’s first cybernetic hate crime."
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/cyborg-steve-mann-det...
[dead]
I am curious, do you have the same anxieties about car drivers using maps applications to navigate?
I'm kind of anxious about checking the map when I'm riding a motorcycle in traffic. You can get away with much lower situational awareness in a car simply because you're far more predictable and not invisible.
Speaking of which... I'm still waiting for a bike helmet with a back-facing camera/HUD that is neither vaporware nor "smart" (read vendor-dependent and barely working), and doesn't suffer from basic usability mistakes. That would be infinitely more useful and probably easier to make than this.
Maps not so much, but the people actively watching TikTok or whatever while driving, yes
What about people actively listning to podcasts?
Whatabout talking to a passenger? Looking at and touching a screen is significantly more distracting than listening to a podcast.
If road conditions become intense, then passengers will notice, and stop talking to let the driver focus. People on the other end of a speaker phone can't see the road, so will continue blabbing. (Or even try to regain the driver's attention. "Why aren't you responding?") I'm not sure if podcasts are as distracting as someone on a speaker phone, but they similarly don't adapt to the road conditions.
If they're listening to the instructions, nope. If they are interacting with the display and focussing on the mini map, yes.
Not anxiety by the way, just a healthy amount of distrust.
Is that much different from people lost in their thoughts or focusing on their podcast ?
As you point out, distracted people already exist, and new classes of them will appear every day. The problem exists and I don't want to minimize it, but from a driver's perspective the difference sounds minimal, and doesn't affect how you'll handle the situation (someone looking aware might not actually be)
This is not comparable to your two examples which are passive, the new device requires active partisipation will be additionaly distracting in that there will be all of the "gotchas" of modern UI design demanding "engagement". Face it, this is an attempt to have everything a person sees and hears projected by a corporate entity....."real time threat awareness" and instant sales opotunintues, just look at anything and find out "how much™", .....offer price determined by pulse, pupil dialation, previous comments,buying power and purchases. good times
I'd somewhat love to hear your thoughts on this crossing at one of the most busy crossing of Tokyo
https://youtube.com/shorts/TvL2SR33XEA?si=F_fnbcvRGrizZ0rQ
The shibuya crossing also has at least 2 giant screens, with sound, and have been there for decades now. All of them have camera, and they probably have been checking the effect of each of the ads since the screens have been setup.
There's a lot to discuss I think.
Any ppl never bump into eachother there ;)
as to the "shibuya" crossing , ya whatever, take it as a given that I have been to many different crossings in big citys and other places...not on any maps the comanality is to create an almost overwhelming spectacle and engage people in such a way that they open up there wallets.... the internet (phones, now "specs") as an always on jittering, jiggling, flashing, binging,bonginging, personal , tic tock, shake down street, is though floundering a bit, as we are all now a bit world weary, short on time, and utterly lacking in a home to go back too and tell our tails of the big city and flashing lights, gaining our own brief spot, at the center of things. yes?, no? just check out the fearsom demand for add blockers, calm down and sleep meds, burn out stories, etc, etc ,etc or ,the very deep sigh when someone I am doing a deal with was commenting on all of the financial shenanigans going on vs/vs trade, tarrifs, and all that, and I said yes....but maybe we will slow down and have a more circular economy, and live better....
You're right, it's not much different at all. People have been walking around with headphones for decades, and the same prejudice existed early on when Bluetooth headsets were all the rage. XR glasses simply expand this to another sense.
Can it arguably be more dangerous? Sure. But we'll come up with more technology and regulation to minimize the dangers. And the prejudice will eventually go away as well.
As much as I think that everyone walking around with these things is unsettling in a dystopian way, transhumanism is inevitable, and this is just another step in that direction.
> It will create a whole new class of distracted people in traffic, that's for sure.
Yes. Transparent glasses are much worse than looking down on your phone.
It took exactly one post for this term to come back. The word was invented by apple PR to ensure that this product didnt take off. Here it is again.
And it will haunt the Apple efforts to get these worn advertising screens into the market as well.
Good.
Why would one pay for the privilege to have everything they see overlayed with advertisements and every micro-expression analyzed for even better ad targeting?
I wouldn’t use a smartphone (or a browser on my computer for that matter) if it weren’t routed through my private DNS blocking advertising and tracking.
Whenever I see how the internet looks like for normal people, I shudder in horror.
Why one would pay for such a privilege? Because it's the latest new gadget and it's very convenient and its users don't experience any immediate negatives of using it. That's how people will happily let you get away with (digital) murder.
It's more interesting that somehow it didn't appear with Meta camera glasses which are very popular.
Meta is fine with HN crowd it seems?
Apple didn't consider them competition, thats my bet.
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Wearing HELSTARs is a political statement now?
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Hasn't it already happened? There are doorbell cameras, CCTV, dash cams, drones, and everyone using a phone is pointing a camera. Cameras are everywhere in public already.
Holding a phone up to film something is visibly different to wearing glasses which are effectively always on. Cameras are everywhere but there's an expectation that if I meet you in a private place or invite you into my home then you will not be recording everything. In the case of a glasshole there's no way to know if this expectation is being broken.
I'm not sure why the distinction with having a dash cam on a public road needs to be pointed out again and again.
Anyone carrying a phone can always be recording audio discretely and home assistant devices exist in private homes. These have already become commonly accepted risks to privacy in the same situations you've described. I think we as a society end up just trusting others to respect our privacy. That said, the glasses have advertised features like memory that aren't all that useful unless always on. If the glasses push to be always on, then there's definitely a risk that it could invade the privacy of others without the wearer's intent.
> Anyone carrying a phone can always be recording audio
They can and that's different than the capacity of the glasses we're talking about. Again there's a distinction here and I think a good faith discussion would avoid intentionally blurring these lines. If we are going to do that then my argument becomes against mandatory livestreaming of every visit to the toilet.
> These have already become commonly accepted risks to privacy in the same situations you've described.
We routinely ask people to leave their phones behind when entering e.g. concert halls or classrooms. Glasses overlap with something necessary for accessibility and can't be so easily removed.
> I think we as a society end up just trusting others
Who are "we as a society?" There are different cultures who will approach this differently. In the United States they ended up trusting one another not to shoot each other while in other societies they legislated against the casual carrying of firearms. We don't have to accept glassholes walking amongst us just because we accept that people have smartphones.
> there's definitely a risk that it could invade the privacy of others without the wearer's intent.
I was actually arguing with the assumption that this was a certain outcome of the technology.
Avoiding phones in some classrooms and concert halls hasn't slowed adoption of cellphones, that's what I mean by society accepting the product and their privacy risks. Simply turning off cellphones is likely enough to stop glasses from being useful on their own as they tether to a phone. We have the same merging of accessibility device and recording device already with air pods which now can be used as a hearing aid and can record audio when tethered to a phone. With on device (on the phone) image processing and machine learning advances they may be able to address the privacy issues to most peoples satisfaction. The only point I've tried to make in this discussion is that I don't think the product is likely to fail due to privacy concerns anymore as we've watched our privacy steadily erode over the last couple decades this has become a much smaller concession than it once was.
> that's what I mean by society accepting the product
Yes, and gun control is what I mean by society not accepting a product. Your logic is that one product has been accepted so we must now accept this different product, but the logic doesn't hold when there are many products we reject.
> Simply turning off cellphones is likely enough to stop glasses from being useful
They will simply sync once reconnected to a phone and eventually they will have all of the telecommunicative capabilities of phones.
> a hearing aid and can record audio when tethered to a phone
I've already said that audio is qualitively different to video. I don't care if someone comes to my kid's birthday party and records them singing songs but I care if they're going to film them in the pool.
> I don't think the product is likely to fail due to privacy concerns anymore as we've watched our privacy steadily erode
It's strange to me that you frame it as an erosion of privacy while in the same breath campaigning for becoming a passive victim of that erosion win absolutely no desire to criticise what's happening to. It gives me a great pain in my heart to see that capitalism she democracy have so thoroughly failed the Western world that we have completely shed any illusion of agency in shaping society or the market to serve us rather than the other way around.
>I think we as a society end up just trusting others to respect our privacy.
No. There are elements in society who can never be trusted and we can't lock them all up. I suspect it's no coincidence that Meta won't ship their glasses to countries which have the strictest laws designed to make it harder for said individuals. As a resident of one I hope it stays that way.
Unscrupulous individuals are more likely to use cameras that are intended to be concealed to avoid suspicion rather than glasses that have a fortune in advertising to make people aware of what they are and what they do. These glasses company have tons of money to lose for mishandling user data. Meta's glasses are available in many countries considered to have strict privacy laws all around the world: (Canada, Germany, Sweden, etc.) : https://www.meta.com/help/ai-glasses/4961066940605960/
Exactly my feeling. In 2025 I no longer have the patience for American businesses telling me what my society needs to accept.
I assume with this stance you don't backup to icloud or google drive.
I don't but its irrelevant. Also it's not a backup anyway, but you should respect people around you anyway, it's basic politeness.
We can't even agree on basic terms, so I dont think we can continue this conversation.
Nope. I use a combination of home NAS and S3 (for compressed photo archives).
Good that you're sticking to your morals, respect.
Also everyone who dresses differently. Or has different hair color.
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I'm wondering what convinced the management to try this idea gain after Google Glass failed as a commercial product.
Glass had a backlash when privacy still existed. Now we have the Rabbit or the AI Pin, and everyone tells their deepest secrets (even commercial ones like source code) to ChatGPT without thinking about what could go wrong.
Even on HN we can see users saying that AI is better than a psychiatrist.
If it is cheaper than a Meta VR thing, it could be as popular as the latest iPhone.
On top of that they got released more than 10 years ago. We have a new generation of users - I think (might be wrong thought) for gen Gen Z privacy is less of an issue and they are heavy users or tiktok and snapchat (comparing to millenials).
Original glasses looked also more futuristic - new one like raybans looks more like sunglasses so other people less aware about being recorded.
> even commercial ones like source code
I believe this is the most important argument in favor of local LLMs. There are industries where you can just send some info to OpenAI or Anthropic and just hope it will be safe there.
That's why I'm not involved in the LLMs nowadays. I'm waiting for the whole thing to cool down, and when they have a real local and useful solution for sensitive or regulated industries, I may use it but I'm not in a hurry and I don't believe the FOMO around it.
Its like Google Search. They sold a lot of books for a technology that you could learn in 5 minutes.
The fact that I am not disgusted by those new glasses is worrying me more. Privacy is really dead outside my house and there is nothing I can do about it.
At least it replaced every Google and Apple devices I own with Linux and custom OSes that I fully control, it gives some peace of mind as long as you remember to spend a few minutes to backup your stuff every week.
I understand why you are not in a hurry but I'd like to offer a counter-argument. I have a machine powerful enough to experiment with local LLMs and interestingly enough at least some models are on a par with what OpenAI used to charge for (GPT4). It means I can experiment and see what these models are capable of, whether it makes sense to use them to solve my problem, and if not - why, and if anything can be done about it on my part. And because the API is the same, it's relatively easy.
It's not necessary to be at the bleeding edge, two steps away is also fine, but today LLMs are just another tool in your toolbelt and I reached the conclusion it makes no sense to ignore them, in spite of how irritating the hype (or, sometimes, plain lies) can be.
I tried Glass and it basically didn't work at all. I don't have a strong accent (standard British) and it could only understand half of what I was saying. Given that the only interface was voice... kind of a deal-breaker.
That said, I wouldn't expect this to be a success either. People don't really like talking to devices in public. It's fundamentally embarrassing.
Meta Quest 3, Apple Vision Pro, Meta Ray-Ban camera glass, XREAL Air, Meta Orion. Google has to respond.
No one wants to talk about how those headsets are used or how are usage breakdowns by regions, though.
Your examples are the reason I asked. Whatever Meta was thinking the result was a flop in spite of billions spent on research and production. Apple halted the production of Vision Pro.
So I'm very curious - what caused Google's CXOs to think they absolutely have to revive the dead horse everybody tries to resuscitate but nobody succeeds?
I think transparent kinds can be explained by the concept being simply cool.
As for enclosed VR style headsets, I really think Quest must be actively being used by some non-negligible numbers of users for purposes considered career-unsafe to mention that isn't pornography, by which I mean VRChat. This pink elephant theory can explain paradoxical continued presence of Quest inconsistent with apparent total flop status, especially contrast to actual total flop of AVP.
because other companies have done it without it instantly triggering everyone that saw them. Snapchat has Spectacles and Facebook/RayBans have ReyBan-Meta and neither are having customers called glassholes and getting beaten for wearing head mounted cameras everywhere. honestly i think the reason is for whatever reason popular media demonized google glass as evil privacy invading spying device thus killing it in its infancy and ignored snapchat and facebook when they did the same thing.
The public backlash was from apple fanboys and apple PR department. Some of internal apple data got leaked a while back and they talked about their PR plans which included seeding social media with "glasshole".
I wonder if there is a case that could be made against for inciting violence as there were people who were literary beaten for waring google glass.
Google Glass development never really stopped. The enterprise editions where on sale for years. They were shelved around the time work on these translation glasses was announced.
It will cost 10 times less.
Seeing Meta sell millions of them?
Putting Gemini in it.
oh come on, Google Glass was so early, it could never be expected to be anything but a hint of a tech demo. no one believed it was a "product"
I see that as a dystopian future. Google wants to model entire cities in real time, just like London with all the cameras everywhere, but for the profit of a private company and three letter agencies.
It used to be that in a small village everyone knew what everyone else was doing. Now with cloud connected cameras it will be impossible to have privacy on cities. A google camera will see and follow you anywhere you go. They will recognise you, they will track your movement when you go out of reach of one camera into another.
That is too much power and we should not give it to anyone, public or private.
This sounds to me like the most straightforward trying to solve social problems with (blocking) technological solutions.
You'll only stop that future by securing a democratic government and have it protect citizens with solid privacy protection. Fighting technology is an already lost battle (we already have the means at scale)
The battle was lost when a generation of kids grew up posting all their photos to Facebook and its successors, normalizing a new attitude to privacy.
It is not only London.
CCTV is everywhere in UK.
Two decades past, here in Australia, I worked on a proposal for a another party to develop uniform ubiquitous CCTV software infrastructure for the UK as part of a tender process.
The people I worked for literally tagged it in house as Panopticon.
Big brother social objections aside the one feature I like was ironing out the wrinkles on buses exchanging their most recent footage whenever they parked up at a stop or at lights within wireless range.
The driving intent, at theat time. as I was told, was to be sure to have useful footage survive in the event of another wave of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings
I parted ways not long after that initial period as I expected things to drift in the direction of "Well, now that we have this, how can we use it to increasingly track people other than actual terrorists?"
Yeah, I don't like the "it's OK to have tyranny for everyone if it means we prevent a few deaths a decade" choice that's constantly being made.
I wish we could just ban CCTV cameras in public areas (banned for use by private or government entities), as the privacy tradeoff is immense.
There's a UK show called Hunted where contestants go on the run and are chased by law enforcement.
It is amazing to see just how quickly they are found because of the all the CCTV cameras.
I can imagine.
Many years ago I use to regularly be in southern UK, between London and Cardiff, I think never saw a bad parked car at least in the city center, exactly because there are always a bunch of cameras around.
No way to try out one's luck regarding if a patrol will ever happen to cross that street.
Honestly we are already there with all the doorbell cameras people have.