But when I see a headline like "tacky men with ridiculous glasses" I get a sense that the intent is more to persuade via bullying than anything else, which...I dunno. Doesn't feel great!
Problem with the Apple Watch is it does too much. They should have never enabled Apps on the Apple Watch. Kept it super simple. I hope they'll come up with a new version with an improved form factor and better battery life soon.
I have an Apple Watch SE that I got the battery refurbed after 5 years, 95% of my use is a quick check on my next calendar, setting timers, managing the morning alarm, and tracking medication and exercise. Oh, and constantly putting it into power save mode after I take it off the charger.
It's not a cellular model, so the other 5% is basically letting me know my phone has something to tell me. I have in the past tried to put games on it, but purely as a novelty.
no, they didn't; the people who buy Hermes bags still wear Rolex, Cartier, Patek Philippe, ...
It's the "cheaper" Swiss watches -- those in the same price range as the higher end Apple Watches (sub $1000) that have suffered.
In this situation most people don't buy smart glasses because they don't look good or have a killer use case. It's not the same thing.
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/live/snap-specs-launch-live-l...
So yeah, it's a tiny bit different than bullying a classmate for having bad eyesight.
The very first sentence in the article associates people who wear these with "pervs".
So no, this is not merely directed at "the top of the world".
As an aside: VRs were "the cool thing" in the 90's and 00's. They never became practical, and fell out of favor. "Normal" people never stopped mocking those who used them. Now that Meta has made glasses that actually come close to looking normal, tech folks mock back ...? I just don't get it.
Yes, I get all the privacy concerns. But making fun because of very subjective reasons like appearance? It undercuts all the privacy concerns.
People need to grow up.
There are absolutely non-pervy reasons why your hands might be occupied but you want to record a video.
You really just don’t require constant recording of your surroundings, in a way that is not socially acceptable, in order to get around your hands being full.
In the situations where we DO need that capability, we already have solutions, like go pros. What makes this different is that these are for all the time, and targeted at candid strangers in public. Not, like, the mountain bike path. So, to me, that makes them fundamentally perverted.
- any use case I could suggest will be dismissed because other tools exist
- those tools are "better" partly because they're not covert
- which re-asserts that covertness is the glasses' only distinguishing feature
- therefore the only use is being a creep
Am I reading this right? If so, it's circular, and I don't think I can do much more than just point that out.
Have you even bothered researching it?
Can you please go and respond to the comments in this submission and let them know you are denying their reality?
But they're literally the target market. Nobody else needs a hidden camera on their face.
I can't believe people are trying to make excuses for a product that is clearly not ready for consumer applications.
...
> i’m not sure how you got to “four eyes” from there
I'm guessing you're younger than me. In my youth, having glasses meant being ugly.
This shit ain't it.
Why are you trying so hard to shoehorn inappropriate criticism of people with disabilities... Into appropriate criticism of this technocrap?
I can criticize anyone's choices. Needing glasses is not a choice. Wearing Meta creep-shot raybans is a choice i will never stop criticizing
This is an emperor's new clothes kinda situation. You could say 'our royal personage seems to be experiencing a sartorial deficit' or you could say 'the emperor's butt naked.'
But...nah, not really.
I will say though: The only time I know for sure I knew someone had a pair of Meta Ray-Bans was in my kid's youth baseball league; The coach would film the kids batting while he pitched and shared the videos with us. People loved it. There are definitely cases where hands-free video recording would come in handy.
(Edit: I should read more of the comments—someone beat me to it.)
Most advertising persuades you with less-than-rational means. It's just fighting fire with fire.
And it's quite justified, because in this case, it punches up against a technology with a net-negative social impact.
(This suspicion hasn't been lessened by some of the replies I've received.)
I could equally say "Bullying is exactly why Trump is in power and Elon Musk ran DOGE".
I dunno, I'd love to have elf-like abilities to see systems of energy in the world around me that the human eye can't see, like wind patterns, and be able to zoom in on plants and animals in the garden and woods where I hike. I can't wait to see the skins people create for themselves, just walking around the world on holidays with fun appearances. And I'm excited for all the identity crises coming. Philosophy as physical reality.
But I guess this is as diverse of a human experience as y'all are willing to tolerate. :/
But please don’t bring the panopticon to the forests.
At some point, if you've willingly morphed into a living, breathing extension of the FAANG panopticon, you deserve it.
I don't think the people who would make AR avatars would exceed the groups of people who do the more uncommon forms of the above. A very niche thing.
Clothing was niche at one point.
So was plastic surgery.
Image filters are now ubiquitous.
Also, I lived through the Second Life and Warcraft eras. Many people hunger for a form that wasn't just given to them by random chance by the universe.
The internet did eventually become homogenous, but it wasn't always this way, and tens of thousands of people spent a majority of their social life in these kinds of spaces.
I think in the future, there will be costume parties and entire communities where it'll be considered vulgar to insist on looking at someone's unfiltered body, in the same way it would be strange to see them without clothing.
For as much as I love video games, it's really really what happened, though.
I grew up gay in the American South, and the internet and video games were one of the only places I found connection that wasn't threatening. To me, what you're saying only applies to people who were part of the dominating population. Everyone else was alienated.
I am skeptical video games accelerated or deeply altered the way humans have been interacting with one another for the past 70 thousand years at least. There are a gazillion factors in why we act the way we do today, but when I read the existentialists, or mystics from 1200 AD, or the writings of ancient leaders, or Ecclesiastes, I see the same humans with the same nervous systems and the same kinds of goals. Every generation I've ever read about has lamented that the next generation is uniquely devoid of connection and has abandoned the values they had when they were kids.
It’s not elf like, it’s not magic, it’s not a sense, quite the opposite, it’s replacing sensing and processing with reading. The death of aptitude, prowess, and the human experience.
I wonder what you think our eyes are doing, though, and what you think magic is.
What makes it not elf-like?
We are creatures of the field and forest. The things that we invent are of the field and forest.
Are you saying that for you, the symbol translation needs to occur within cells and neurons instead of within a machine? Okay, well imagine we find a way to do that instead. Are we then more elf-like to you, because the senses would become part of our body?
Or are you saying that regardless of the path that we take to read wind and water with our eyes, we will never be like elves? That this could never be magic? Do you believe we need an External Being With Authority to grant us magic? Or a random, chaotic External Force like evolution?
It seems to me that regardless of when you "install" a sensory apparatus, before or after birth, your experience of the world will be similar (unless one or the other is more inconvenient for technical/social reasons).
If we can live in better harmony with nature due to enhanced senses that allow us to see the invisible motions of Earth, if we can identify birds and plants by sound and sight, if we can emit and process sonar, scan resources beneath the surface, better utilize and eliminate invasive species, spot predators from thousands of yards away (so they can remain in our ecosystem without being killed)... I mean that's magic to me?
Elves know and sense, they have names for things, they don’t get told the names of things by something else. There have been people in on earth who read their environment well, who can reliably predict rain from wind and feel.
We perhaps, someday, will be able to create new experiences, senses, that cannot be encapsulated within our current senses, we might be able to expand our current senses (vision in all directions, new colours, new audible frequencies, quieter sounds, et cetera). What that isn’t is looking at a display or listening to a speaker.
I use computers every day. My phone, pedestrian crossing signals, guitar pedals, food, books, the web. Art, work, recreation.
I just don’t think these glasses amount to augmented reality but a distraction from reality.
We can learn to, and I have to an extent, identify our environment and surroundings. The Pokédex is a fun novelty but knowing how to name a creature or a rock or a person based on what we perceive rather than someone or something else telling us what it perceives is simply a higher state of existence and a richer internal world.
And yeah, internalising another language is inherently better than using Google translate.
These glasses ain’t it.
Replacing something all animals do with something uniquely human, perhaps the most important thing that sets us apart, is the death of the human experience?
Not using our senses except to read symbols is the death of human experience.
aka the "Digital photos aren't real photos!" argument.
> a facsimile of life that you will convince yourself is real
Often lately the same people who claim they value "creativity" and "art" seem to believe the the only valid forms of creative and artistic expression are the ones that existed when they were born. Everything else is degenerate art. I guess we've been here historically, though :/
I also can identify a bird by myself, have my own sense of timing and rhythm, and can figure out things about a person myself.
It doesn’t augment reality, it simply puts a display on your face, like the article says.
More practically the people in power need to own real estate. The metaverse, VR, AR, you’re giving these builders way too much credit by connecting it to creative expression.
They want to own the land.
Most of Michaelangelo's working artistic life was spent touring and locking down stone quarries, pigments, etc and collaborating with brutal leaders to do so. Those men only cared about land and power, but the artists of the Renaissance manipulated those leaders to accomplish their own ends. This is what artists have always had to do.
And also... why is AR itself not automatically considered a form of creative expression? Art installations and cathedrals and any constructed space are doing the same thing.
But all of the mainstream glasses are basically just bad earbuds and cameras. The idea of permanent cameras on my face feels creepy as hell, and there are a million better options for earbuds. It also feels ridiculous to get a device with a permanent connection to one single company's AI. It's like a dedicated Hulu button on a smart TV's remote, but several cranked several notches dumber.
I’m a skeptic on the consumer side of this being a runaway hit like smartphones.
Enterprise and industrial and the trades use cases in physical space is big.
The case for them gets even worse for heavy manufacturing industry/trades, since you have to think about safety and liability now: what if these smart glasses fall into the machines and cause an accident? Can these smartglasses can withstand the environmental conditions in the workshop?
* Guiding someone through a complex assembly, it's going to be on pretty much all shift, with effects on thermal management and battery capacity.
* You'll want to swap batteries so that it can be used by another shift, which will take priority over fashion.
* It may also need to incorporate positioning markers and QR codes and external sensor data from a particular environment, sometimes taking preference over any general object recognition.
* Facial recognition won't figure very much.
* Ruggedness and repairability may be prioritized over miniaturization.
* Little to no tolerance for letting the vendor have footage or vague "telemetry" when trade secrets are involved.
In other words, it's like kind of like how the design/use/adoption of freight trains isn't necessarily indicative of the design/use/adoption of pickup trucks. Sure, they both move large things on wheels using diesel power, but...
repairability? in what trend are you seeing that being a thing? they'll just make you buy an expensive warranty/insurance plan for replacements. i really don't see tech allowing for repairability
For an industrial customer, your thing either needs to be repairable right NOW or it needs to be cheap enough that you can have disposable stock on hand. If your delicate widget can only be repaired by hand-delivering it to nude virgins on a mountaintop, you are not getting that 500k unit contract, you're getting shown to the door.
That is unless you're literally IBM and/or have monopolized your class of utterly indespensible widget. Only then do you have the power to tell Amazon to fuck off and send a warranty claim.
What exactly do you envision these things will help me with?
Wasn’t HoloLens (from Microsoft) squarely aimed at this use case? What went wrong there?
By the time that rolls around, this stuff will be available for cents on the dollar, just as Shenzhen showrooms were full of AR/VR hardware in 2015 and the industry has gone nowhere for 30+ years.
Industry has had entire VR rooms since at least the 1990's, when I saw one in use.
AR glasses are toys compared to what the big oil companies have been using to visualize underground strata since before Facebook et.al. even existed.
Pretending that they're going to revolutionize the industrial space is just grasping at straws to justify a gadget that nobody other than tech bros and perverts want.
FYI, every major browser has a global switch to disable notification prompts like my blog did. It works as expected.
The problem is not the glasses.
It's like one of those puzzle images where you're supposed to find 20 things wrong with this picture.
But it's making fun of people who wear glasses
No it isn't. I've had to wear glasses with thick ass lenses since the age of 5 and I am telling you with my 50 years of glasses-wearing experience that these glasses are stupid because they were very clearly designed by people who don't have to wear glasses. Defending these is like saying that people who laugh at bicycle wheels with rounded corners are being shapeist.
It's not about the fashion, or the technology, or even the social applications. It's because these are not ready for market and anyone who makes the mistake of buying them is going to regard them as a $2000 paperweight by the end of week 1.
But I must admit, similar things regarding style were said about the AirPods and here we are.
The tech will make its way into commercial applications and assistive technology. Beyind that, things can go a couple of ways:
- There is a killer application with mass appeal and thise glasses become common in public
- Consumer devices will lose their cameras due to large scale pushback. This will kill one of their major AI-related selling points (images as context). Microphines, although potentially equally intrusive, are more likely to stay.
- Comsumer devices will fade away in their entirety.
The photo captions are hilarious: "Style icons"; "Ahead of his time"
Most people are not "isolating themselves", they have stuff to do and places to be. They do not want to talk about some animal, or current issue of today!
Previously, I thought AVPs were expensive, ridiculous and useless. Now I think they are expensive and still mostly ridiculous and useless.
I saw the immersive movies and the immersive sports experiences. If they had AVP support for MLB/NBA games in my market I would absolutely buy a subscription. I think they have Lakers now but I don’t care about that.
From what I understand, there’s still a chicken and egg problem for Meta and Apple with regards to content and devices. It sucks because both companies are flush and could fix it if they wanted to.
The device itself still costs too much though.
To have eyesight without glasses would be bliss, minus laser surgery.
I guess I'll move to a cabin in the woods.
I get that this kind of dunk polemic is popular among a certain crowd but it’s more incantatory than persuasive. For the rest of us who don’t particularly dress stylishly or whatever I guess it’s fine. I can be tacky. Not the greatest sin.
I stopped reading.
If you want to convince people, try to meet them where they're at.
I think that’s a reasonable characterisation of what people think of these devices.
Even if not strictly for perving it’s still seriously uncool to go around pointing a camera at people 100% of the time. So maybe ‘glasses for inconsiderate people who are sometimes also pervs’ is a better description?
It's not a reasonable characterization of the people that wear these devices, and that's what the sentence is implying.
> Even if not strictly for perving it’s still seriously uncool to go around pointing a camera at people 100% of the time.
Isn't it great, then, that these glasses don't do that?
Years ago I lived in a country where your type of comment is precisely what much of society said about smartphones. Taking one out in a social event brought a lot of angry stares.
Welcome to that demographic.
As long as there’s a lens on them the perception remains. Ala panopticon. Particularly the idea that not knowing when you are being watched means you must assume you are being watched all the time. In the case of your glasses this maps 1 to 1. Your camera is there, it is pointing forwards at all times. We do not know what you are or are not filming.
Regarding your smart phone analogy. Which seems to make the point that you shouldn’t argue against the negative aspects of something that may later become popular, I have a story too. Before smart phones were a thing, my school attempted to ban the ‘camera phone’. Which was a pretty reasonable thing to do in that context and at that time. History shows that this was a good idea, even if the levee broke later with the smart phone which has been an absolute negative in school hours.
Are the cameras somehow removable? Is there an obvious lens cap? If not, then everyone in your field of view is at the business end of a camera lens all of the time, and might as well be filming.
Even if I trust the wearer of these glasses to not be constantly recording, I certainly don't trust the manufacturer of them.
I've seen legit-useful AR apps for doctors/surgeons, dentists, firefighters, law enforcement, warehouse workers, etc. Basically anything where you need to be out in the real world doing something that would benefit from having situational-awareness of other non-visual conditions. This is a pretty wide swath of professions, with a lot of potential to save lives. Just having a patient's vital signs projected while a surgeon operates could prevent many deaths on the operating table, along with lots of fuck-ups like leaving a scalpel behind in the patient.
But in reality it’s splitting hairs. Similar to discussing which tone pot values are better for your Stratocaster. Most people just don’t care, nor should they! “Stop trying to make fetch happen” as they say.
what really worries me would be AR ads