Meta along with Ray-Ban announced new smart glasses and the YT reviewers are praising it.
For me, I don’t find them particularly good and being a Meta product, it will be horrible for privacy. Also people can record others without their knowledge with these, hell no!
I love the idea of smart glasses, and would happily buy them. However, it’d 1. Need to have 3rd party app support and 2. Be able to work without connecting to any tech company’s servers. I’ve gotten used to my android phone that doesn’t have google play services, and I’ll never go back to having a device that phones home without my permission. In a perfect world I’d like to have some FOSS firmware and OS to run on them, but I’d be willing to go without as long as I could disable traffic to all major tech company servers.
Unfortunately these requirements will likely mean I won’t be getting smart glasses any time soon
I kinda feel like big tech regrets that we got away with PCs running all foss software. The existence of GNU/Linux saved us in a way, I think some still try to lock us behind Windows I guess but Linux options are not going anywhere and they keep growing stronger I believe. However when it came to smartphones they tried so hard to keep them locked and far from what a natural computer would offer (running anything as long as your CPU architecture supports it). While Android phones got some freedom in the past I believe they’re getting more closed and harder to tweak. Also I was there when iOS jailbreak peaked with all the crazy stuff (it was still hard to switch OS though). Fast forward to smart watches, now these are far more locked than phones and very limited in terms of freedom (even tho some run standars CPUs architectures). I think no way would big tech allow glasses to have freedom and they would make them close to what watches offer these days, maybe worse. I really believe that we should be able to run whatever the hell we want on hardware as long as it is technically possible.
Tl; dr: GNU/Linux saved the PC industry, corpos will not let that happen again with another industry.
No, and I think they oughta be illegal. I don’t want to be recorded.
somebody tried to bring them to our psych ward and argue that they needed them because they were prescription (in fairness they were but bruh). it was a shitshow.
Why would I?
It’ll be a hard no for any smart glasses from Meta or Google.
However, in the very distant and not quite guaranteed future, I would consider smart glasses (again, NOT by Meta/Google/etc) for accessibility.
As someone with auditory processing disorder, it would be a game changer if I had the ability to read live closed captions of what someone is saying, while they are talking to me. That would be my only use case.
Hell nah
Hard pass
probably not unless I’m developing software for one, I think the angle meta is aiming for is kind of dumb but I do see how they could be useful in industrial settings… but then again I guess microsoft tried and failed at that with the hololens
Not from Meta for sure.
And for all the people hating on these there are real world applications that could truly help folks. I’m very ADHD. My brain goes on tangents. I forget mid sentence what I was going to say. I have a terrible time remembering peoples names. These are all things this type of technology could help me with. But they would have to be implemented with the correct privacy guards in place. And I wouldn’t touch anything from Zuck with a 39 ½ foot pole.
These are valid reasons that I’d consider getting one for myself. But big tech says fuck accessibility, let’s cram it full of bullshit instead. And that’s on top of the privacy concerns that they seem focused on shoving under the rug rather than making it obvious if someone’s using these.
Tech isn’t fun anymore. Why do I want to act as a spy camera for big corporations
Made by Meta - hell no.
Made by someone else - possibly.
My main interests are navigation guidance on a HUD, real-time translation, and to a lesser degree teleprompting for speeches or presentations.
Wouldn’t even really care if they had a camera or not - though what I’ve seen from the ones that do, being able to look at something that is in another language and ask it to translate it for you is pretty seriously cool. Can’t imagine I’d use cameras for much else - but honestly with how uncomfortable they’d make everyone around me, I’d be quite willing to just forego them and pull out my phone to snap a pic and translate something that is text.
I was looking at the Even G1 pretty hard but then read some reviews that say the real-time translation is TERRIBLE, and to make it slightly less terrible you have to pay subscription fees, so I unsubscribed from their mailing list pretty quick.
Saw one on a Kickstarter recently that also piqued my interest, but they have cameras and were pretty bulky … I may wait a generation or three for them to shrink down a bit more.
Every idiot wearing this dystopian Stasi shit needs to be punched in the face.
If the data it collects was only on my devices and I can customize the settings to collect what is ant when I want. But that will never happen. It can’t be a tool I purchase and use solely for my benefit, the person who owns it. Fuck these tech fascistsnjunkies, I hope they all fucking die of cancer.
Isn’t tech already creepy enough, how’s this going to make things better, I can see limited good uses cases as opposed to how it’s being used most of the time right now
The use-cases that I see advertised are not things that I do in my day-to-day. I usually place my phone on a drawer or leave it in my backpack - I definitely don’t want it on my face.
So, to me, smart glasses feel like an uncomfortable gimmick at this point. Maybe there is something amazing about them that has not yet clicked with me, but for the time being I don’t see me buying one of these for the foreseeable future.
I would love a pair of smart glasses to augment what I’m seeing… Give me context, keep me informed, allow me to monitor things closely, yet passively, and let me do it all inconspicuously and unobtrusively! Even better if it has eye tracking navigation.
Oh, and make sure the hardware and software are open source and self-hosted. If it has all of that I’m in, 100%.
Open source and self hosted doesn’t protect others from you recording surreptitiously. You’re totally understanding the problem.
Good point.
I also want my smart glasses to shine an IR light on my face to help protect my identity from others recording me.
I’m curious enough about Brilliant Halo to have preordered one, but my expectations are tempered. It’s a lot like what you described.
