Meta’s Ray-Ban Display Glasses And The New Glassholes
Meta’s Ray-Ban Display Glasses And The New Glassholes
hackaday.com
Meta’s Ray-Ban Display Glasses And The New Glassholes
119 comments
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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.
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And serve ads directly in your eyeballs
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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.
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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...
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Yes, I have two family members who are blind and they regularly use this app and the meta glasses. It's a huge help to them!
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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.
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...but this is a basic mistake.
They just fell prey to one of the classic blunders!
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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!
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I never thought I'd hear someone mentioning the Bosnian Ape Society, on Lemmy.
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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.
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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.
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Way to belittle people with disabilities. In case you're unaware, I'm talking about a real condition.
Prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, is a cognitive disorder of face perception in which the ability to recognize familiar faces, including one's own face, is impaired, while other aspects of visual processing and intellectual functioning remain intact.
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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.
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I'd want them to use a local database that you've created. After you've met someone, the glasses could be like "remember this person?" and you could choose to save them or not, or something like that.
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Prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, is a cognitive disorder of face perception in which the ability to recognize familiar faces, including one's own face, is impaired, while other aspects of visual processing and intellectual functioning remain intact.
I'm talking about recognising people I've met and know.
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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
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I don't have face blindness, but I can't remember names for the fucking life of me.
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I learned about this recently in a anime!
The Apothecary Diaries - A main character has this disability.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?’
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We're at the point now that we "need" 6 gadgets that do the same thing.
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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.
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To me it seems like a thing that sounds kinda cool on paper, but is not actually that useful in practice. We already have the ability to do real time translations or point the camera at something to get more information via AI with our smartphones, but who actually uses that on the regular? It's just not useful or accurate enough in its current state and having it always available as a HUD isn't going to change that imo. Being able to point a camera at something and have AI tell me "that's a red bicycle" is a cool novelty the first few times, but I already knew that information just by looking at it. And if I'm trying to communicate with someone in a foreign language using my phone to translate for me, I'll just feel like a dork.
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real time translations or point the camera at something to get more information via AI with our smartphones, but who actually uses that on the regular?
Anybody living in a foreign country with a different language.
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Being able to point a camera at something and have AI tell me "that's a red bicycle" is a cool novelty the first few times, but I already knew that information just by looking at it.
Visual search is already useful. People go through the effort of posting requests to social media or forums asking "what is this thing" or "help me ID these shoes and where I can buy them" or "what kind of spider is this" all the time. They're not searching for red bicycles, they're taking pictures of a specific Bianchi model and asking what year it was manufactured. Automating the process and improving the reliability/accuracy of that search will improve day to day life.
And I have strong reservations about the fundamental issues of inference engines being used to generate things (LLMs and diffusers and things like that), but image recognition, speech to text, and translation are areas where these tools excel today.
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Sell your bike to afford them. Easy. It's another pointless gimmick, like 3D TV or the Metaverse and virtual shopping. Zuckerberg had one idea and got lucky, it's been wasting money since.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"Incidental"—this is Meta we're talking about, and you can exchange them with any other technofacist and it still applies.
But I wholly agree with you that they know exactly what they are doing. This is how they get people to "participate" in their platforms and algorithms, whether they want to or not.
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Not spying other people. Spying the owner of the glasses.
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This was never the concern that caused people to call users "glassholes".
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If the last fifteen years have shown us anything it's that very few people care.
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I read "the new assholes" instead of glassholes.
How improper!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.🖕
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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.
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high powered infrared leds at full blast? Just spitballing here
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Pocket high power laser to burn out the camera ? Just make sure not to hit their eyes (or don't). /s
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There's new glassholes?
All I need is a nu-metal revival and we're back in 2008 baby.
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Ah, yet another bit of technology I've been looking forward to for years.
Let's see @technology dump all over it.
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I'll take a crack at it:
- It's a massive privacy/surveillance concern. Look at the issues that come with doorbell cams and now multiply the number of cameras and scatter them all over
- It's another platform for mega corporations to track and sell data to advertisers or any malicious actors, but at an entirely new intrusive level. They no longer have to approximate what's getting your attention when they literally know what has your attention. Good luck anonymizing or hiding your usage when you can't spoof the real world in front of you.
- It's unnecessary e-waste, at best providing the exact same functionality you'd get from your phone with the added benefit of... not reaching into your pocket? You still need a free hand to use it...
- It's a distraction in a way that other tech can't touch. Pedestrians/drivers getting notifications shoved directly into their eyes won't end well.
- It probably has all the same inherent problems as previous generations of smart glasses. Primarily: your eyes aren't designed for extended/repeated focus on an image less than an inch from your face and at the edge of your vision
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Oh man I'm wearing ray bans. I should get a new pair else I'd get lynched for it... again...
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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).
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Imma just wait till a better brand makes em.
I’d use it solely for cooking recipes so I don’t go “ah have to flip page….washes hands… oh shoot I forgot the amount of that ingredient… washes hands…”
The cycle never ends
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Or you can go old school and just have it on a piece of paper sitting right there... you could even reuse it... maybe put it away some place safe so it doesn't get lost with all the other ones you have decided to keep...
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Apps like Crouton have a hands free mode which allows you step through the instructions by winking (right = forward, left = back).
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Could these replace the dashcam in my car?
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Not sure you'd want to be constantly writing to the internal storage of these on every drive like a dashcam - it can be hard on memory to be constantly written like that (hence often using high endurance SD cards in dashcams and having the ability to replace those when they kick the bucket with wear). Plus, a good dashcam would have front and back facing cameras and these would only see what you do.
That being said - I know some people who use the Gen 1 glasses to record things like racing cars and flying airplanes and the footage is bloody awesome from the driver perspective like that. I'd love to see the Gen 2 somehow safely incorporate a HUD for example.
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Both my wife and I own the gen 1 version and we love it. Listening to music and taking POV shots without taking your phone out keeps you engaged in the moment and not focusing on recording.
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Nice. That's what I really want a pair of smart glasses for. Quick capturing a (private family) moment without leaving the moment.
But any Meta software running anywhere near me is too high of a price to pay, for me.
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Ya, I block all packets when it tries to phone home.
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New GL-assholes?
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Yes, that's the joke.
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someone gift a pair of meta glasses to robert scoble so we can kill them off for good.
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Meh
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Maybe "smart" electronics is a bubble. Understandable that some people want their puppet controller devices in every piece of reality. What's not understandable is the motivation to buy those. Though I think Nazi courts did sometimes put the cost of investigation (and surveillance) upon the "criminal", sometimes even make them pay for the bullet to execute them.
I mean, it's not until superprofits from oligopolized companies with their hands in everything exist. Because those superprofits go to clueless VC that also wants to take part in new superprofits.
It's going to fade very slowly, if oligopoly isn't broken.
On an unrelated note, I've just yesterday read about a German company going to produce fully optical general-purpose computers. For all bad things about optical computers (not much history, less density possible) some are very good, and it's not even delays and fields and heat being not a problem - it's production of these being less demanding for enormous very precise foundries like TSMC. And the fact that it's a German company is refreshing, because, well, not USA and not China.
And among alternative bases for computers I like optics more than DNA computing, because DNA computing is good for parallel equations and bad for response, which means it benefits big companies and big data processing if it happens. While for optical computers it's the other way around, volatile memory is a bit of a problem to make cheap, but response is better than anything. So if optical computing boom happens, it might get us back to functional programming and conscious design as opposed to big data processing. I mean, well, that's about plausible general purpose optical computers, while dedicated ones are usable for this "AI" thing too unfortunately.
And I'm probably atrociously simplifying things, just - have read a couple of articles yesterday, one of them describing a general purpose optical computer design.
119 comments
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
I was watching a random short with a guy what I'm assuming is one of these. I didn't hear much of what he said, because I was distracted by the lenses the whole time. It was impossible to ignore as the light catches the lenses as he moves his head around.