- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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I cannot emphasize enough how unwilling I’d be to interact with someone that has these.
Good thing that the kind of person who would were these in public doesn’t interact with others much anyway
Cool… now everyone can be a part of their respective surveillance states. While Meta makes a buck on selling your feed to governments and law enforcement.
And serve ads directly in your eyeballs
Worst part with Meta Quest is it seems you have to sign up as a dev and give them a credit card in order to sideload (a.k.a., install stuff on the device you purchased). So, you can shell out hundreds for one of their devices and the device and all your data are belong to Meta. I assume it’s the same deal with these glasses. Zuck off, Zuck.🖕
I got a voucher for a free pair of meta glasses. I don’t want to order them. I’d need a meta account.
Wife is bugging me to order and resell and I want zero part of it.
Not to be rude. But tell the wife to fuck off. Fuck Zuck and Fuck Meta.
I can think of one useful function. I have a lot of friends who are totally blind, and there’s an app called Be My Eyes, where a sighted person can take a look at something through your phone’s camera. But, being blind, a lot of blind people are absolutely terrible at aiming cameras, because they can’t see what they’re aiming at.
In this case, the object ends up out of the camera’s field of view, or at an angle, or upside down, etc. etc. etc. Whereas, I think having a pair of smart glasses on your face would make the camera platform be much steadier.
I can imagine that haptic/soft vibrations could also be used to steer a blind person towards an object that needs more focus by the camera.
As you say, it has a lot of potential for accessibility and people with handicaps like that, but it’s not direction that tech, the economy, or the world itself is interested in right now…
I wonder what the result of mass adoption of these will be on society - surely there will have to be “no smart glasses” rules set up in places where you would expect confidentiality like hospitals and classrooms. Also what the ability to instantly watch video content or listen to anything with the click of your fingers (without anyone knowing) will do to people’s attention spans. Things in public will have a much higher chance of being recorded by someone, for better or for worse. If someone like Elon Musk makes his own with his own “woke free” xAI (which he has so far been unsuccessful in moulding to his viewpoints), people could have an immediate propagandized perspective and answer for anything they see in real life.
surely there will have to be “no smart glasses” rules
They have this rule for ebikes at the lake I love to walk and the kids are zooming by anyway. I think we’ll struggle to enforce it and that really sucks. I hope this fails. It’s hard not to be pessimistic about it, as much as I can see some legitimate use cases. I just don’t trust big tech with it, least of all Meta.
There’s new glassholes?
All I need is a nu-metal revival and we’re back in 2008 baby.
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.
high powered infrared leds at full blast? Just spitballing here
Pocket high power laser to burn out the camera ? Just make sure not to hit their eyes (or don’t). /s
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
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…
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.
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.
I understand the gripes about Meta, but I don’t understand how everyone clowns on this like the core concept is stupid or unwanted.
Easy $1000 sell: cycling / escooter accessory. People already regularly buy expensive sport glasses just for sun and wind protection. With a smart version of them like this, you add open ear headphone, and you add the potential for navigation directions, or even a Bluetooth rear view camera on the back of your helmet to get a virtual mirror.
The core technology is impressive, and has legitimate use cases.
But that doesn’t outweigh the enormous privacy concerns these devices raise. They aren’t being angled as an accessory for specific activities, but as everyday wearables. If smart glasses like these became common they would be unavoidable, creating leave of intrusion that’s concerning even without Meta being involved.
As a cyclist, this is a terrible sell. I already have tech which does all this, and probably does it better, for less.
I don’t need a HUD constantly in my face obscuring the beautiful views. I have sun glasses which fit well with a helmet and wrap around my face to keep the wind out.
I have a cycling computer, which offers GPS turn by turn, and pairs to power meters, heart rate and radar light. It is mounted on the handlebars in an easy to view place.
I have bone conducting headphones for music.
All of this is significantly less than $1000, and if something breaks, I can replace it all individually. I also don’t have to wear ridiculous looking sunglasses to listen to my bone conducting headphones.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but this reads a bit like some of the comments on those old Slashdot threads clowning on the first smartphones.
‘these things will fail, I already have a camera, a cellphone, and an mp3 player, why would anyone want them all in one device?’
I agree that head mounted displays can be useful, I’m contemplating getting something like it, but just no cameras, please. not in the frame, not backwards, not anywhere.
If you don’t have cameras you instantly lose a tonne of potential amazing functionality.
If you’re in public you have no expectation of privacy, so someone being able to photograph you or record you with glasses is no different to being able to do it with a camera or phone.
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.
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
There’s no reason it has to be one or the other, you’ve created a false dilemma. It’s perfectly possible to have the feature operate locally without recording / tracking.
There’s no reason it has to be one or the other, you’ve created a false dilemma
Well, there is a reason, specific to these glasses. The reason is Meta.
If someone tells me they trust Meta not to break the law or violate their privacy, I assume they haven’t been paying attention to Meta in the news.
Not a false dilemma at all. I’m not comfortable with being recorded onto some rando’s hard drive either. It’s still recording and tracking me against my consent.
Still a false dilemma. Recording you against your wishes is already against the law in some countries, and not required for the feature to actually function.
How does facial recognition work without recording the faces it’s supposed to recognise?
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.
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.
Its meta so they’ll get their hands on that data the way peoples numbers end up in metas hands despite not having a Facebook account because people gave the app permission to contacts.
I’m not talking about a Meta made pair of glasses. I would never buy those due to the privacy issues. I’m talking about a potential pair of glasses that are open source, or at least privacy focused, and don’t phone home.
Average people will have it phone home for convenience. Just how things play out. I think the tech is cool, but not looking forward to how it’ll be utilized in the end.
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.
Sure. My point is that same technology can and will be used to violate peoples’ privacy, and in some cases could create dangerous situations (e.g. domestic violence victim being recognized by their attacker).
I don’t see how that could realistically happen without whichever company is behind the glasses taking all that juicy biometric data for themselves though.
It’s up to the govts to protect the rights of the people. If you’re in the US, you’re already on the verge of losing all rights anyway. For the rest of the world, there’s no reason to think we couldn’t regulate it in a reasonably privacy-friendly way. Local face tagging and recognition could work without cloud access, so that you’d only have access to information you keyed in yourself about somebody.
You act like America is the only place in the world where tech is being used for mass surveillance.
Your own governments are doing it to you too, whether or not it’s legal.
Wake up, they don’t give a single fuck about you.
For the rest of the world, there’s no reason to think we couldn’t regulate it in a reasonably privacy-friendly way.
You’re totally right in principle.
But the conversation for this pair of glasses is different, because of Meta.
If anyone believes that Meta obeys their local laws, please refer them my way for a pyramid business opportunity…(I believe I could easily rip them off, because I believe they are suckers.)
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.
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.
Don’t take it so personally. I’ll also still stand by what I said.
I read “the new assholes” instead of glassholes.
How improper!
That’s intentional.
Smart glasses also raise many privacy concerns, as their cameras and microphones may be recording at any given time, which can be unnerving to people. When Google launched their Google Glass smart glasses, this led to the coining of the term ‘glasshole‘ for people who refuse to follow perceived proper smart glasses etiquette.
Ah, yet another bit of technology I’ve been looking forward to for years.
Let’s see @technology dump all over it.
I’ll take a crack at it:
- 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
These glasses are actually insanely cool. I’d pay so much for an open source pair and the band.
It sucks that no matter what cool new hardware meta comes out with will always be ruined by them stuffing in “meta integration”.
They certainly are, but they’re also a bit dystopic. I don’t want random people looking up stats about my online presence, and I certainly don’t want the police doing that either.
I can see tons of cool applications, but also tons of ethical issues.
Agreed, I’d totally buy a Meta Quest as well if they didn’t zuck up all their devices with spyware that can’t be removed.
It would be really nice if every country would enact digital privacy laws so that Meta’s business model was just forced to be better. They genuinely have some of the best and most accessible VR/AR hardware available.
It would of course be nicer if a more ethical competitor stepped up in a serious way but no one seems that interested. It’s interesting that the vast majority of Meta’s business model is being extremely good at copying or buying out competitors but with VR they’re basically the only ones actually sinking serious money into making it a thing.
Seriously, an open source version would be awesome. You could connect it to your own server running whatever local models you want without needing to worry about that audio/video being processed by some large corporation willing to sell you out along with your data.
I don’t think the men on this thread realise the impact this world have on their lives via the women in their lives.
Idk how much is geographic, but in Europe pretty much every girl has, by the age of 15, had to use some ingenuity or running skills to get away from a random stranger who wouldn’t stop hassling them for their number / just to talk! / a photo.
I don’t mean like, he didn’t get the hint and she had to be quite rude. I mean she had to approach a shopkeeper or stranger for help, or spin a story about their husband, or make up a number and ring their own phone at the exact right time, whatever.
I had a guy follow me home from school, then looked up my land line from my address, and he had the nerve to call and ask for me by description. I’m not stunningly attracting, but there are a lot of fucking twats out there and 1 twat can harass, what, 300 women in a year without even booking up his weekends.
And in my case, this was back in the 20th century. People have got A LOT less polite since then.
When this is not possible, because any guy can look at you and get your details, girls will absolutely stop going out on their own, and older women will make an effort to look as gross, or as masculine, as possible.
Again, statistically, they will not have much choice. Rape can destroy a life. So can threats. So can staking, or putting people in fear for their life. And it can take a perpetrator an hour, which means he’s free to really, really skew the odds of being sexually traumatised in that town. If you think I’m exaggerating the risk, ask your sister / partner/ friend / coworker when they last felt intimidated by a man in public. Ask when they first had to actively shake off a random guy. You’ll be shocked.
Guys, you want to live in that world? Do you look at the Taliban and think it sounds kinda fun? Well neither did most of the residents of Iran, but thats what they got.
There are some deeply, deeper deeply tragic bastards in the world who can’t attract any women except their mother, and well therefore want to live in a world of where they don’t have to see women in the street or the workplace, and have to feel bad.
They want a world where women are afraid to leave the house. And like most dystopias, it’s a very short few steps away. It starts with giving tech bros the ability to get a woman’s details, workplace, relationship status and address (and, presumably, to generate whatever AI nightmare live) just by looking at her.
If you don’t want to live in that weird, testosterone sweaty world created by losers who couldn’t hack reality, then do not even joke about using this crap for bloody recipes or games. There are already technologies that can do that without ushering in a new dark age.
An open source smart glasses platform would be a much better direction.
But that only provides security assurances for the wearer of the glasses. Anyone else interacting with them doesn’t know how they are configured, and what is being recorded and/or shared.
