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.
…but this is a basic mistake.
They just fell prey to one of the classic blunders!
There are also plenty of people who wear glasses who don’t need them. It’s weird to act like Plano lenses don’t exist.
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”.
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 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…
but it’s not direction that tech, the economy, or the world itself is interested in right now…
Yeah great. Capitalist market without socialist values means the elite can overcome their handicaps and live long lives with a physical form sculpted to their wants.
Call me when it’s done without a metric tonne of exploitation.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
Not spying other people. Spying the owner of the glasses.
This was never the concern that caused people to call users “glassholes”.
If the last fifteen years have shown us anything it’s that very few people care.
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.
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).
Could these replace the dashcam in my car?
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.
Ah, yet another bit of technology I’ve been looking forward to for years.
Let’s see @technology dump all over it.
