Do yours actually sound decent? Maybe I need a new pair. Or maybe I’m just too picky.
I think a lot of people don't want to "feed the beast" and reward Meta for their terrible impact on society.
Videos are limited to 3 mins, up from 1 min originally.
He says you can't hear the audio or use them for anything useful if there is much noise around you, i.e. in a busy area they become completely useless.
I still think they hold great promise, the main letdown is the awful software. Amazing miniaturization.
Many earbuds, like Airpods, have transparency mode. The end result is the same…music while hearing background noise. In fact airpods are better because of the ANC mode that tunes out noise except conversation and other “important” sounds. I can also wear airpods indoors without looking like a dork, so that’s also plus. I’m not seeing why this is novel or interesting?
> I've recorded some of the most amazing videos of my baby with them.
This seems like a compelling use case. How is the video quality?
Probably not a very loud speaker but if someone is next to you then surely they'd hear it.
I kind of have different ethnic background than MKBHD, so, it kind of makes me wonder how that design got the shape it got and how it stayed that way.
For those like me who weren’t familiar with the moniker, it refers to Marques Keith Brownlee, a YouTuber who reviews technology devices.
but i understand the concern! sometimes it’s sketchy haha. Like riding a bicycle.
Many of the shots you want are very fleeting moments that you won't get after you took your phone from the other room. Then holding a phone will often redirect attention on the phone or hide your face, and again you'll have lost the moment.
The best alternative is someone else taking the picture (that can include auto photographing devices, like the one Google made and discontinued), the second best is you taking the pictures/videos with the most intrusive and practical device you can get. Smart glasses sound pretty good for that.
On the music part, I see a niche where glasses are unbeatable: most buds need to either stick into the ear canal or hook on the external ear, or both. If you hate things in your ears and also wear glasses, having the glass act as headphones is the best of both world.
None of that is mainstream IMHO, but there will be a sizeable public clamouring for these.
Will happily try an alternative from someone like Valve or, heck, even Apple — although not for a few generations when the price is reasonable.
The biggest problem with 1984 is that Orwell didn't foresee us actively welcoming Big Brother into our homes.
For example ads for diapers while looking at your baby etc.
The negative comments are about Meta the company. Many here don’t trust them, and with good reason, let’s not forget Zuckerberg literally called “dumb fucks” to people who trust him.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/17/facebook-...
> I've recorded some of the most amazing videos of my baby with them.
Those are now property of Facebook, inarguably one of the most privacy-invasive companies in history.
> Listening to music is fantastic as it's different from regular headphones since you can still hear the world around you
> I haven't enabled any of the AI or smart features on the glasses
Oh, don’t worry, they’ll do it for you. Whatever they want to get, they will.
People never learn. One day your children will be your judge when they are grown up, when they realise what you did to them. I hope it was worth it.
And being sensitive sweat is kind of a deal breaker when you are working out.
Really? Does nobody remember the "Glasshole" debacle with another equally large FAANG corporation who tried to push a similar technology? There were incidents of people getting physically assaulted JUST for wearing the things.
It used to be considered extremely rude to pull out your phone during a conversation, now all the under 20 do it.
Google glass isn't that old though. It started in 2012 with selected testing users and in 2014 it became possible to just buy one.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/guy-ruined-google-glass-showe...
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/10/robert-scoble-writes...
https://onemanandhisblog.com/2017/10/scoble-utterly-tone-dea...
For all but the most security-conscious companies, that ship has probably sailed. Bringing a camera into many companies used to be an exercise involving forms, approvals, and so forth. Now everyone has camera, video, and audio recording in their pocket.
Imagine you take your kids to the beach and people are wearing these things. So even the beach won't be safe anymore.
...unless part of the package for the improvements are things like "more likely to catch fire"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45141433
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45054986
I don't want to ban you because you've also posted good things, but we can't have people posting egregiously like this here, so please fix this.
I had the idea of wearables to solve this, as many years ago I had the Myo gesture control armband. They were very early with this product too, and from what I had read, most of that team got acquired/absorbed into Magic Leap
At one point I was tracking a company researching beaming images straight on your eye. I think they were MS related, but not sure. After a while they stopped updating, so I guess that went nowhere? It seemed really promising.
This isn't going anywhere.
I mean... have you ever used a phone?
Yes, mobile phones use touchscreens, and billions of people have smartphones, that is correct. Yes the audience of HN is far removed, not gonna argue that. Because that's not what we're talking about.
Grandparent very correctly points out that mobile phones haven't replaced traditional keyboards, in fact there's probably more keyboards being sold now than at any point in history before, that's because phone touchscreen haven't replaced keyboards, they're just a new interface for a new device. 15 years later other devices are still using other interfaces, and the actual places where it has been replaced are not that many. Only point of sale machines and cars come to mind having replaced keyboards (and I'm being very generous, honestly I wouldn't even call that keyboards) with touchscreens, and some car brands are even starting to walk it back.
It has replaced all of your keyboards every time you ever input text on your phone.
NVIDIA, obviously and Meta are definitely on this list.
But Meta's business is clearly getting more and more sweet data from its users. How anyone can not see past this being a surveillance tool for a vast amount of data is unbelievable to me.
maybe this is not something that you understand, especially if you're in the US, as there it's common to move farther than the distance between Madrid to Budapest, as an example, but for a lot of people I know, like me, who live more than a 1000km from their childhood friends and 3/4 of the family, any innovation that helps us meet more often and do more things together is welcome.
forget the glasses. it's a step in a direction. there will be many more steps. if you have not already, I urge you to watch Mark's interview at the Acquired event, he talks about his vision there.
do they need money to make all of this happen? of course. you can be part of this as well just by buying META stock.
in the EU I do not need to log in with my facebook account anyway.
It can therefore translate it to a handwritten stroke and then do classical handwriting to text conversion.
You've got to type with your shoulders if you want to avoid RSI!
I doubt it has enough accuracy for a virtual keyboards (since keyboards require precise absolute input and it measures relative), besides, most people aren't experienced with single-hand typing.
A bespoke gesture based shorthand would be optimal, but then users would need to spend months learning this new shorthand.
But (almost) everyone already has experience with handwriting, which is a single hand relative input method. It's the easiest option for people to quickly pick up and enjoy.
Though, it's far from perfect, you can see he is struggling to trick his muscle memory into writing without a pen, and he needs to do it on a solid surface (I'm not sure if that's a technology limitation, or a muscle memory limitation).
Typing can also work, but handwriting is simply faster and easier to decode.
sEMG signals correlate with *muscle* activation. When your fingers move, the actuators are the muscles in your forearm, and the tendons relay the force on the joint. Placing the band higher up on the forearm would actually give you better signals, but a wrist placement is much more socially acceptable.
Skip to around 53:00
I have been reading the book called Apple in China and hardware is so hard. 30 hours of battery with wireless communication (I wonder if this is BLE 6.0 alone) between the EMG + Wave guide tech is not easy.
This is the second long term bet by meta that is panning out, the first being investing in long horizon AI projects(pytorch and a bunch of AI models), though that org has had rough times it did yield something good.
with up to six hours of mixed-use battery life and up to 30 hours of battery life total thanks to the portable (and collapsible!) charging case
1. A world wide localization map that can let the glasses SLAM system do useful things.
2. I believe the Puck runs on a custom OS. The glasses are probably on somekind of a real time Microcontroller driven thing(would be surprised if its much more than firmware, code wise) that needs to efficiently package sensor data and send it over BLE to the puck/wristband. I am not sure they have open sourced those two components.
I hope they open source both of those for public good.
1) “Meta AI with camera use is always enabled on your glasses unless you turn off ‘Hey Meta", which basically makes glasses defunct.
2) “voice transcripts and stored audio recordings are otherwise stored for up to one year to help improve Meta’s products.”
[1] https://www.theverge.com/news/658602/meta-ray-ban-privacy-po...
How much can they do before some people think twice? Or are they all employees?
Why this wasn't written as: "Meta debuted the next.."? You know what?! I have always felt that Meta is owned, managed, and totally controlled by Zuck alone! No board members and no investors.
I have been following Zuck in his Metaverse journey and more specifically, in his interviews like the one with The Verge and he is always speaking with this tone: "This is how I see it", "My vision is..", "I plan to make it this way..", like he is the only employee in his company.
If it was Apple that released this product, we would read something like: "Cupertino: Apple debuted the next exciting.." which reflects the vision, strategy, and innovation made by the company as whole and not a single person. I don't recall that Steve Jobs had behaved like this even in his prime time.
Jensen Huang owns 3.8% of Nvidia and 3.8% of the voting power
Tim Cook owns 0.021% of Apple and 0.021% of the voting power
Previously, Steve Jobs owned 0.6% of Apple and 0.6% of the voting power
So yeah, there's a structural difference here and Meta is much closer to being owned, managed, and controlled by Zuck alone
Insanely cool, and awesome to see a viable wave guide device.
It's so cool that it might outweigh my reluctance to strap facebook to my face.
> In an interesting twist, CTRL-Labs purchased a series of patents earlier this year around the Myo armband, a gesture and motion control device developed by North, formerly known as Thalmic Labs. The Myo armband measured electromyography, or EEG, to translate muscle activity into gesture-related software inputs, but North moved on from the product and now makes a stylish pair of AR glasses known as Focals. It now appears the technology North developed may in some way make its way into a Focals competitor by way of CTRL-Labs.
Should be EMG, but is it normal EMG or sEMG?
[1] sEMG data:
https://fb-ctrl-oss.s3.amazonaws.com/generic-neuromotor-inte...
[2] Code for exploring surface electromyography (sEMG) data and training models associated with Reality Labs' paper:
https://github.com/facebookresearch/generic-neuromotor-inter...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09255-w
yes the Myo was a similar, earlier, and less capable technology also based on EMG sensing.
Although surface electromyography is quite a bit older than that.
These glasses are just "annotated reality" rather than full AR, with just 1 small display; think Google Glass but 100x more discreet. So discreet input and output on a device with a camera.
So, it's quite a stretch to say "counterproductive", I'm for one very glad that happened. Sure, I love the tech and what really mind-blowing we could do with it (I was part of devs working with Gglasses) but I don't want these ruthless corps being the ones owning the output.
I'll wait until it is open, with self-hosted infra, and until then, I'll politely ask to remove the glasses if someone is talking to me.
Why do I need to pay $800 for this? I already paid a grand to have a phone disrupt my every waking moment!
That's funny because the ones sold on my street are $10 and they definitely have the rayban logo
So unless you have a rare medical condition AND you're buying plastic lens glasses, I think you're worrying for nothing.
They account for 30% of the global market. They own key brands, license key premium names, and control key distributors like sunglass hut and LensCrafters.
Their cost to manufacture vs sale price shows a clear ability to price like a monopoly. As does their ability to box out competitors.
The $10 look alikes are not identical. They generally are cheaper materials, not polarized or coated, etc.
Again, you are getting confused by branding vs monopoly. They sell luxury goods and can mark them at wild premiums, same as Hermès and Ferrari. None of them are monopolies. Very far from it.
No, it doesn't. It shows there exists demand for their products at that price point.
>As does their ability to box out competitors.
They have none. Anyone can go to various websites and order cheaper sunglasses that work just as well, or go to Costco and buy them for $25.
also: looking for a good discussion forum where people are interested in technological advancement
Now I won't hesitate, although the in-lens display is fantastically intriguing, I'm wondering about safety concerns like: walking down the sidewalk or crossing a street, at the wheel of a car(!), work related issues, etc. Gee, I guess I am hesitating! It will be interesting to see a study on how these glasses change our brains as it deals with this new paradigm.
put glasses on, do what i want to do, then take them off. more like a laptop or tablet (or my ps4 jfc) where there is just enough friction to keep it from being overly compulsive
i wonder if any major ar product will embrace that people want to only wear glasses for tasks and want to take them off, or if theyre all going to push toward something one always wears like meta seems to. most successful tech products arent for constant use
Unfortunately, Meta, and Zuckerberg, have been involved in far too much malfeasance. I just can't ethically justify buying a product from them again. I'm hoping that viable competitors become available, but it's going to be hard to compete with Meta's investment, especially on the HCI front.
I struggled with this question too. Unfortunately our current system doesn’t make it easy for startups to build this stuff at scale without being gobbled up (the FTC under Lina Khan seemed to want to change that but oh well) so Im resigned to using Big Tech products if they’re the only option.
And yet, Meta is squeezing every cent they can out of our attention spans, and knowingly tearing apart the fabric of our society in the process. Do I discourage the kids from doing amazing stuff with Meta's gadgets? I don't think so. They're not my kids. It's not really my place to be having those conversations with them.
That was the promise when I originally bought the Quest 2, but a year later they forcibly tied those accounts to Meta accounts and through that, facebook accounts. Now I can't use my Quest 2 because it is locked into an account verification screen, demanding that I upload a photograph of my drivers license to access the games I already purchased from the quest store.
Meta cannot be trusted.
If you created the account early in the Quest2's life, or hit the wrong button in the UI, your Meta account will end up linked to your Facebook account.
You might be able to unlink the Facebook account from your Meta account at https://accountscenter.meta.com/accounts, though I don't know if you can still reach the page.
Can you imagine trying to talk to someone face to face, but they are giving you a blank stare as random notifications and tiktok videos are being beamed inbetween their eyeballs and you.
Meta seems like one of the few large tech companies where if the whole company vanished, the world would be purely a better place.
I have a HUD in my car that shows me directions, speed etc and when I'm looking at that the rest of the view out the windscreen is hardly even there to my visual perception even though I'm looking right at it. This seems to be getting largely overlooked but I feel like over time statistics are going to emerge that HUD type displays are increasing accidents rather than preventing them.
Your car might have settings to adjust it somehow, have you tried those?
I recently hired a car where I had to duck under the steering wheel to check my speed!
wahhhh? is this real life.
Here in the future we use our thoughts.
Airplane HUDs occupy center of the vision, literally showing where you're going. Car HUDs don't, and instead stay out of sight, as it's illegal to do in cars what they do in planes. That makes car HUDs just heads down display that happens to be transparent.
In fighter jets, they project onto the visor. Obviously not the most convenient method for an automobile. There have been attemtps to figure out depth of field but it's tough. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00304...
But it’s uncomfortable for me because it requires my eyes to refocus from distant to close and back when I glance at it, which isn’t needed with an actual mirror. So I don’t use the feature.
I found myself actually using the incidental reflection on the surface of the screen instead of the actual pixels. I can't believe this arrangement is legal.
There are ways to do stuff like this.
Though I don't feel comfortable having more Meta in my life.
And, yes, surely, one needs to periodically switch attention to mirrors and instruments, and I must imagine that shorter gaze movement distance shouldn't hurt. It's the same as checking the speedometer - you don't see the road, only have a rough idea from the peripheral vision.
Although I can imagine that a HUD can be actively distracting, constantly intercepting attention, e.g., flickering.
It doesn't display notifications or other distractions, nor is it possible to configure it to do so.
It's not flickering when viewed in person, but when filmed with a phone camera they do flicker due to how the display works.
It's a pretty good system, and allows one to keep their eyes on the road without having to look at other screens, and keeping ones eyes focused on far objects.
With a normal car dashboard, you're much more aware you're not seeing the road while checking your speed, and you don't actually see the speedometer moving while you're looking at the road, so it can't accidentally catch your attention.
Of course, none of this will matter in the vast majority of cases. But driving safety is all about the tail end, when you're slightly tired or when someone in front of you does something unexpected and maybe illegal, or someone jumps on the road - these are the times where accidents are avoided, and a HUD might well hurt rather than help for these cases.
Extreme example: showing random ads every ten minutes, even if the glasses c/should suspect you’re driving a car. I have my doubts as to whether Meta will make the right choices here.
Don't, and I mean DON'T decide things for the user.
It's pretty interesting how today's cars come with features like remote braking and monitoring cameras, all designed to make driving less demanding for us. So as these researchers work to make vehicles less distracting, these cool features somehow end up making us even more distracted. It's an ironic cycle that leaves you more distracted, and maybe more unsafe.
Your attention reacts differently
As in, are you just concentrating on the speedometer instead of the road, or do your eyeballs have to adjust because the optics aren't set correctly? I believe a HUD is supposed to focus at infinity, same as a road that's many times farther away than the size of your eyeballs.
They wouldn't do this if the conversation is important to them. Not as much as one would glance on a smartwatch when they get a chirp, which, I believe is perfectly socially acceptable in most business/casual situations.
And if they do it's nothing new - it's a literal equivalent of talking to a person deep into their phone. Exact same audiovisual media consumption - just a different form factor and display technology. Or, in a pre-phone era, a newspaper.
I don't think this technology introduces anything new to this issue.
This belief shows up time and time and again and is nearly always false. We had the written word before the internet, and before the printing press, so blogs are just like a hand-written letter. Gossip has always existed, so twitter does nothing new. There have always been things which eat at our impulse control, such as sports gambling and casinos, so smart phones are nothing new. etc.
What this view really fails to understand is that the constant here is human nature. Human nature is built more or less the same way as it has been for thousands of years. What changes is how technology allows human nature to play out, whether or not any given technology interacts poorly with human nature. New problems can exist purely based on scope, scale, reach, ease-of-use, lack of friction, etc.
The faster it happens, the more addictive it is. It's the difference between oral administration of drugs and IVing them directly into one's veins.
They see themselves in a race to produce the most radical, most efficient machine that produces the most effective addictive response. Content has been interchangeable for decades, everything is about the naked control over people's attention, because that is having power over people.
There is a very modernist logic in the whole effort. Everything must be taken to its extremes, nothing is ever enough, and nothing good sits in the middle of anything, and having values is only a detriment in this race.
And tacking on some personal experience, I've also noticed when I'm meeting over Zoom (i.e. with the rest of the internet within arm's reach), I get distracted way more easily than when meeting in real life. Sure, maybe not all those meetings are super important to me, but I'm not sure if the world would be a worse place if that wasn't possible.
When I see such person who simply can't resist looking at their displays during conversations, I know I am seeing a hard addict with host of other attention disorders. And the fool is feeding those, actively making them worse for some ultra short dopamine kicks that keep getting shorter till they make new baseline.
Not a stellar person in any meaningful way, rather an addict or an asshole. So much for perfectly acceptable.
> It’s technology that keeps you tuned in to the world around you, not distracted from it.
Using this to sell a technology that will keep the wearer even longer in virtual spaces...
Marc evidently hasn't let go of his Metaverse dream and small details, like most of the population finding those ideas completely horrible, aren't gonna stop him...
Plus, i dunno, i hate glasses that's why i did LASIK and it was the best decision ever.
It’s takes special kind of dbag that thinks it’s ok to wear a Facebook recording device on their face.
100%
Every internal innovation after that has been a disaster. Hence the continuous acquisitions they have done.
You spelled ads wrong.
What you describe sounds like it could be a real problem, but one I’d blame on rudeness rather than Meta. We already live in a world where people order coffee while reading E! news on their phones.
> In my culture it’s considered extremely casual — and therefore quite rude
There are other, valid use cases for this. I'm looking forward to it. More specifically, I'm looking forward to the secondhand market that will surely spring up moments after release as people realize that it's not a product for them in particular.
It would be just like in the Dungeon Crawler Carl books (and probably other scifi/fantasy books)
In the 'developed' world I'd extend that concept to many other other organizations. Around 90% of the work they do is useless or harmful: banks, govt, fast food chains etc.
The glasses shine bright when you’re alone, on a walk.
Also while you’re at it, kill the Facebook and Instagram feeds to save humanity. Too much to ask?
Out of curiosity, is there a specific reason to expect different? To me this is designed for attention primacy, for exactly that purpose.
Among Meta's many technical contributions: React PyTorch osquery GraphQL Presto/Trino RocksDB Jest OCP Llama
Any large company can write a web UI framework, but only a truly special one can directly contribute to genocide, know about it, have employees bring it up and suggest intervening, and decide that nah, they'd rather let people die and make more money.
This is what I disagree with. Specifically, I don't disagree that Meta has caused serious harm. I just don't think we live in such a black and white world "where if the whole company vanished, the world would be purely a better place".
HN reader: the world would be a better place if they didn't exist
Peak Hacker News hubris.
+1 ...and I think about it everyday
The whole product category seems to be everything wrong with tech turned up to 11.
That's a present day situation but I never seen anyone shaking their fist at tvs screens in cafes.
... and I personally find that horrible.
Normal method:
* Search for a recipe
* Leave my phone on a stand and glance at it if I forget a step
Meta glasses:
* Put glasses on (there's a reason I got lasek, it's because wearing glasses sucks)
* Talk into the void, trying to figure out how to describe my problem as well as the format that I want the LLM to structure the response
* Correct it when it misreads one of my ingredients
* Hope that the rng gods give me a decent recipe
Or basically any of the things shown off for Apple's headset. Strap on a giant headset just so I can... browse photos? or take a video call where the other person can't even see my face?
Imagine it’s 1992:
Cookbook: Open book, follow steps.
PC: Turn on tower, wait for DOS, fiddle with floppies, pray the printer works, hope the shareware recipe isn’t weird.
Not saying you're wrong but its easy to miss the big picture
I still feel that way. I have cookbooks because I find the UX better than searching for recipes.
And frankly, even the online recipe experience leaves much to be desired. Skip past the blog post. Skip past the list of ingredients. Skip past another blog post. Find the single statblock on the bottom that lists ingredients & amounts, & instructions - hoping that it exists.
Like other commenters, I've also started going back to paper cookbooks.
Internet and recipe websites solve a real problem: accessing recipes was expensive and not easy
AR headsets don't solve any problems. If anything, they make up a nonexistent problem, attempts but fails to solve the problem, during which the experience becomes even worse.
i got the art of italian cooking recently and it's genuinely far easier to get a recipe than trying to scroll through a 50 page monologue about the intracicies of someones childhood before even listing the ingredients
The internet over time has been riddled with junk, especially since the cost of production of information is just your opportunity cost of time. Even that is going away with the use of LLMs....
In the same way that google search used to be amazing before it was taken over by optimization, I think we're seeing a mass influx of content production to attempt to integrate itself into training corpus.
I have always believed there is a cost borne to get the best of something. This means a sacrifice is entailed. Theres something very important about this re. the culture - a culture in which everything is free is how you get crap stuff produced. And people settle for crap stuff just because its free.
People who can see the bigger picture when you have this, can see the dangers of it.
I agree random recipes are hell on the internet, but it's also not something we're forced into if we care any bit about recipes in the first replace.
Hands-free while cooking (not having to touch my phone with messy hands) is not a bad thing either.
But yeah, it doesn't give me good answeres any more, usually trys to start an unrelated YouTube video or email me something about Youtube plus or w/e
You're missing the part where I'm reminded that my phone autolocks so I have to go into the settings in the middle of cooking to make it never autolock (or be lazy and unlock it every time I need it). And then I have to find a clean knuckle to scroll the ingredient list and the recipe steps every time I'm trying to remember what step I'm at.
You could do some killer recipe UX with a HUD on some glasses.
With glasses, you have to aim your head at whatever you want the AI to see. With a phone, you just point the camera while your hands stay free. Even in Meta’s demo, the presenter had to look back down at the counter because the AI couldn’t see the ingredients.
It feels like the same dead end we saw with Rabbit and the Humane pin—clever hardware that solves nothing the phone doesn’t already do. Maybe there’s a niche if you already wear glasses every day, but beyond that it’s hard to see the case.
To me the phone is a pretty good form factor. Convenient enough(especially with voice control), unobtrusive, socially acceptable, and I need to own one anyway because it's a phone. I'm a geek so I think this tech is cool, but I see zero chance I would use one, even if it were a few steps better than it is.
Beat Saber as a social party experience with friends in the same room, sure, that's fun... but for day to day gaming the amount of people who want to play VR games on the regular is nearly zero.
If they really want to lean into the VR use case that people want, its porn, but I suspect they won't put that front and center.
But since I moved I didn't want to screw the base stations in to the walls again and haven't played in a long time. I feel like I probably still would like VR gaming but haven't been tempted enough to buy any of the newer systems since it seems like Meta has fully captured the market and it all seems pretty distasteful now.
Of course, you could make all sorts of traditional top-down or isometric games work well without motion sickness - but no one is going to pay for VR to play Civilization or Star Craft or Baldur's Gate 3, since these would be fundamentally the exact same experience as playing on PC or console, but with a display strapped to your head.
This is an overated problem. You play VR for a small amount of time then you adapt to it. You get your "VR Legs" as they say.
I've been involved with two VR projects that were ultimately cancelled because, while we developed a sexy tech demo that showed the potential, building things out into something sustainable required too many resources and took too much time to maintain.
I agree they are reaching (and not finding) for an application.
An idea that I've had before is like 'augmented curated experiences' for all kinds of things--for example imagine playing a Magic the Gathering (or similar) card game, and watching your cards come to life on the board in hologram-esque 3D. Or while watching a sports match, being able to pull up the stats or numbers of any players, or flip through channels of POV camera from helmets. Car navigation that shows you what turns to make by augmenting lanes or signs with highlighting. Brick and mortar stores having a live wayfinding route to products in their store based on your grocery list, recognizing and highlighting items you like.
This is the kind of thing that buries VR ideas. It's very cute in a demo, but as an actual product, the cost of coming up with 3D models and animations for all MTG cards currently being played is many orders of magnitude more than the total number of people who would pay for this. Ultimately this is completely unnecessary fluff for the game, like chess games where the pieces actually fight: irrelevant, and it actually detracts from the game because it interrupts the flow of what you're actually doing.
I played some VR sword-fighting games and they were bad in a way that AAA budgets would not fix. Stuff like an attack animation being pre-scripted feels incredibly goofy in VR.
I think this is a general problem. VR worlds need to be more dynamic than typical games. AAA games tend to have higher quality assets, but arranged in a more restrictive and scripted configuration. More innovative indie work is needed to work out what the language of VR should be (it is a bit weird compared to the past because stuff like Quake was innovative, AAA-equivalent for the era, but also small and independent enough to be innovative).
It just isn't taking off. In my experience even though VR is unique and amazing, it's not that much better than playing those games flat screen. I tend to spend most of my time in Beat Saber.
Also i'm not sure what these single player relatively short playtime/runtime games accomplish as you buy it play it in less than a week and are done. What I would like to see is the large scale infinitely playable MMO type game done on VR with at least at 250M budget.
And without free movement, you can't build any of the mainstream game genres. You can't build and get people excited in a Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed or Fortnite or Elden Ring or Zelda where movement works like Riven, the sequel to Myst. Valve actually tried with the first Half-Life game in a decade, and even that didn't work.
Add to this massive gameplay limitation the second massive issue that you can't get a mass audience to pay hundreds of dollars extra for a peripheral without which they can't play your 70-80 dollar game.
Half Life Alyx is still considered to be one of the best VR games ever made and one that is still consistently recommended to new users even years after release. IMO people buy hardware because of the exclusive content. If a standard game console came out and it only had one AAA game on it, I probably wouldn't bother buying it. But if there were 3-4 games that looked really interesting it starts to look more worth the investment. Playing VR games takes a lot of committment (time / physical space / $$$) so the payoff has to be worth it or you'll lose people. With the huge amount of money spent on R&D for new hardware I think it's a valid argument to say that maybe funding content would have been a better investment in terms of ensuring platform growth.
Also, side note but not every game requires free motion. Plenty of hits had no movement or teleport etc. A lot of these were completely new (sub-)genres that didn't exist or hit the same as they would in a traditional pancake game. Plus lots of kids seem unaffected by free movement (maybe as high as 50% of users by my rough estimate).
[1]:
Most played VR games
Rank Name Curr 24h pk All-time
1. VRChat 33,032 46,652 66,824
2. War Thunder 26,388 65,589 121,318
3. PAYDAY 2 23,513 31,619 247,709
4. No Man's Sky 22,509 46,010 212,613
5. OBS Studio 11,434 22,388 27,334
6. Phasmophobia 7,716 22,789 112,717
7. Forza Hz 5 4,940 13,617 81,096
8. Assetto Corsa 3,885 13,598 19,796
9. OVR Adv. Sett. 3,030 4,299 6,418
10. Tabletop Sim. 2,902 7,755 37,198
I had really expected a different "only one"
THere is no need for these stupid glasses. Some refuse to accept it - especially Zuckerberg who relies on folks like Apple to make his money. Thats really whats driving this project if you tear away all the BS.
Maybe the tech wasn't quite fool proof and they tried to fake it and then the fake version messed up.
I fully expect the AI to suck initially and then over many months of updates evolve to mostly annoying and only occasionally mildly useful.
However, the live stage demo failing isn't necessarily supporting evidence. Live stage demos involving Wifi are just hard because in addition to the normal device functionality they're demoing, they need to simultaneously compress and transmit a screen share of the final output back over wifi so the audience can see it. And they have to do all that in a highly challenging RF environment that's basically impossible to simulate in advance. Frankly, I'd be okay with them using a special headset that has a hard-wired data link for the stage demo.
(I didn't have control over temperature settings.)
That's...interesting. You'd think they'd dial the temperature to 0 for you before the demo at least. Regardless, if the tech is good, I'd hope all the answers are at least decent and you could roll with it. If not....then maybe it needs to stay in R&D.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19567011
And a quora link (sorry):
https://www.quora.com/If-floating-point-addition-isnt-associ...
I think there’s some respect to give cause they’re doing it live and non-scripted.
I bet the device hardware is small/cheap and susceptible to interference
Mad props to the presenter for holding it together though.
Edit0: ie without internet access the ai is unable to produce an answer other than some prerecorded ones I guess
In the live showcase the presenter even mentions that the wifi must have been bad for the ai to repeat the answer
In the glasses is just a client to the ai. Like there is no ai in your phone when you talk to chatgpt, you are querying it and it will not keep talking to you if you cut off the wifi
The prerecorded responses I speculated about would have been things like "i'm having some connectivity problems, I'm unable to chat at this time, I'll let you know when I'm back." - the same kind of prerecorded things your earbuds tell you when they're low on power.
Unless you think they've added some inference logic on the device to slightly re-state the last answer they got from the cloud, it's clear that the glasses were connected and receiving the same useless answer from the cloud.
* side note, but it can also sound like "pear" to me this second time
I own a pair of Meta glasses, and the response when they don't have connectivity is "this function is not available at this time".
Edit0: and what are you even doing? Where do you think this is going?
But hey, at least it's not all faked
Pitches can be spun, data is cherry picked. But the proof is always in the pudding.
This is embarrassing for sure, but from the ashes of this failure we find the resolve to make the next version better.
For an internal team sure absolutely, but for public-facing work, prerecorded is the way to go
Not doing it live would've been an embarrassment. I don't think the thought ever crossed anyone's mind, of course we'd do it live. Sure the machines were super customized, bare bones Windows installs stripped back to the minimum amount of software needed for just one demo, but at the end of the day it sure as hell was real software running up there on stage.
Their actual result was pretty bad, but, ya know, work in progress I guess.
live demonstrations are tough - i wish apple would go back to them.
Zuckerberg handling it reasonably well was nice.
(Though the tone at the end of "we'll go check out what he made later" sounded dismissive. The blame-free post-mortem will include each of the personnel involved in the failure, in a series of one-on-one MMA sparring rounds. "I'm up there, launching a milestone in a trillion-dollar strategic push, and you left me @#$*&^ my @#*$&^@#( like a #@&#^@! I'll show you post-mortem!")
With traditional cameras, feature phones, and smartphones, if someone wanted to be creepy with the camera, they'd have to point the device at someone, which tended to look exactly like they are using the camera.
(IIUC, some countries even required a shutter sound, for anti-creepy reasons, when the pointing of the phone wasn't enough warning.)
Now, the wearer of the glasses spy camera just has to look in the general direction that creepiness should be sprayed.
The creepiness isn't even that of the wearer; it could also be that of the tech company.
Is this going to end up another Google "Glassholes" situation, with the wearers shunned?
https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/metas-ray-ban-smart-g...
I've only noticed some influencers wearing them in Web videos, where they look prominent, like I should also be able to recognize them in-person.
Maybe people are only wearing them at home or in the office? Maybe it's mostly a California techbro regional thing?
Maybe I'm not paying enough attention. I will start consciously looking for them.
The point is, if you want to secretly record, it's already trivial to do it.
A reminder, users cannot opt out of current Meta Ray Bans data recording/storage/training if you actually want to use them as smart glasses.
The tech is impressive, but people are already getting concerned about excessive screen time via zombie doomscrolling. Moving it from the pocket to literally in people's face will only worsen it.
And by Meta of all companies, with concerning privacy practices and of course motivated to hold your attention to serve you more ads.
I will never buy a Meta product again, the brand reputation is lower than dirt to me. Even ignoring all the other awful things Meta does, they have no reason to require a verified account to play two local-only games that I already paid for. No matter how cool glasses like these may look, I have no trust that the brand will not suddenly demand more money or information from me to continue using a product I have already purchased.
Then there were a bunch of walls in the transition period where Oculus accounts can do X,Y but Meta accounts are needed for Z.
Can really tell Zuck told the teams "All in on VR/AR" and the accounts/FB team began "well if its core it's account should be the core account we use".
Would have been much smarter to keep it like Instagram where it's an entirely separate feeling account but under the hood deeply connected in a way that allows the data syphoning they want but the end user it rarely feels like a Facebook account.
I’m almost at a tipping point of leaving windows because of the weird account integrations.
Even my Mac nags me to log in. Why do I have to log in online to use a computer? This bothers gen x at least.
And I use google products way less than I would because of all the login requirements.
Linux doesn't do any of that or bug you about logging in. It's been a breath of fresh air. I have a windows VM in case I absolutely have to have Office365, but so far LibreOffice has been great.
No doubt that Facebook is losing people over it, but they're gaining what they care about most -- your data.
I was gifted a Meta Quest 3S, and I was forced to make a Meta account, but I didn’t have to make a Facebook account.
They have since reversed that decision.
Literally all the data they could possibly need to build 3D models of your face for even better facial recognition, along with plenty of data to train models on. When that data eventually leaks, it will be interesting.
It's insane that anyone puts up with it.
Hetzner (outsourcing to Idenfy) dared to demand this of me, three years ago. I'm still mad about it.
> "When that data eventually leaks,"
Indeed, my understanding is these sensitive biometrics are generically (i) uploaded in full to a remote server, where they're (ii) retained for a nontrivial amount of time, because they need to be (iii) manually QA'd by humans. It's nothing like an iPhone's local-only biometrics enclave. My understanding's based on the specific case of Idenfy, and an ex-Idenfy HN'er explaining its workflow[0].
likewise, most USA government backed benefits require people to submit all sorts of biometric to a private company who used to monetize coupons for military deployed personel, called gov.id or something.
It's been a few years since I last used Airbnb and I regret that moment of weakness.
If you're in the US you're on your own I guess.
Always remember that you are under their will, be your data, be the devices you purchase from them or any other thing that is related to them.
If you want to play something minecraft-like, Luanti (VoxeLibre) is really excellent. I play it with my child, and it's indistinguishable from 'real Minecraft'.
I believe this would be the first time in my life that I would try to generate a fake driver's license.[0] It's completely ridiculous.
[0] Not to mention that I'd only use a fake FB account first anyway, there's no way I'd give them my real data. I know Zuck apologized by "dumb fucks", but while the wording was offensive he was actually right.
It’s still Facebook and will always be Facebook.
I haven't checked, but the Facebook decoupling was made kicking and screaming so I assume there will be rought edges
I use them for taking videos when I'm out and for listening to music without putting on headphones or earphones. While it is not the best at anything, it is definitely capable of doing a lot of things well enough and that is what matters a lot of times.
Only step beyond this is neural implants putting purchasing decisions directly into your grey matter.
Then everyone whose shirt is used to display ads can get revenue-share.
> released on May 1, 2018 to generally positive reviews. By July 2019, the Go was estimated to have sold over two million units. On June 23, 2020, Facebook Technologies announced it would be ending the sales of the Oculus Go later that year
At least they released an update in 2021 that allows people to "root" the device so it won't rely on the cloud services anymore -- a pretty rare occurrence for abandoned products!
I had an Oculus CV1 in 2019 but sold it when it became mandatory to migrate to a Meta account.
Imagine seeing everyone with glasses with suspicion because you don’t know if they’re filming you, reading notifications or actually conversing with you.
And also, I hereby ban them in our office. Thou shalt not wear spyware while looking at the screens that contain our company IP.
If an employee wants to steal your IP, they will.
And yes, if someone made a habit of pointing their cellphone camera at the screen all day, I would ask them to please knock it off.
I don't trust Facebook installing cameras in our workspace, or trust that they couldn't be compromised by another party who might want to watch what we're doing.
Edit: Lmao, fake downvotes while another comment which is essentially the same gets upvoted. The veil has been lifted :D.
"I ABSOLUTELY love your mission, and I envision everyone wearing these! It's cool if I use them during the interview, I feel this will help me understand the end user experience."
Just because your iPhone has a video function doesn't mean it has to be on all the time.
Of course I would ask for permission, and I'm 99% sure they would say no, but what if I'm actually interviewing for the AR team ?
What better way to embrace the product than to use it ?
You won't blend in wearing the Oakleys, but they look like what they are, which is an insane mirrorshades cyberpunk HUD, and if the wearer can own that they could actually look kind of sick.
Of course, I'm technically underwhelmed and unimpressed by what I've seen of the actual technology, but that's hardly the most important thing.
I’m happy to let them prove out the tech, and if/when a company enters the market with a compelling product that I can trust, I will consider that competing product.
I suspect it's impossible as long as Zuckerberg is involved in the company.
If you ask any of those 4 billion people if they know WhatsApp is related in anyway to Meta, your answers will be split between "no" and "what's a Meta?"
Most non tech folks believes that Meta listens to their conversation for ads in Instagram, but that's a different issue, and even with that belief they are fine with that. I have seen this discussion so many times with so many different groups.
Everyone is only on WhatsApp because everyone is on WhatsApp. That is why they tolerate the Meta ickiness of it.
Also, that "everyone else" would have to include all business accounts, which I think would require Signal to build out an API
Most users do not care. If you told them other users agreed to switch platforms, they’d be annoyed about having to learn a new app when they already had one that was set up and they knew how to use.
HN is part of a small bubble that doesn’t understand product management for common people. Average users do not care. They just want a product that works.
I use Whatsapp daily (as does everyone I know) and there's no way I'm buying anything from Meta.
But I'm making sure WhatsApp will not be used for anything outside this context. That way I can nuke it when we're back home.
My comment was in the context of "Meta has a brand issue" which is absolutely true.
The number of overly confident yet entirely incorrect comments about how other people use WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook from people who obviously aren’t familiar with this platforms is interesting.
Instagram. Critical to life. Naah.
These people probably have zero awareness about cookies, tracking, online disinformation campaigns and online security in general...yet the one "tech" thing they know is that Facebook spies on you.
Everyone is aware of how Meta kills privacy in their products. The products are still useful, especially at price point "free". And they are still riding on an installed base and network effect from a time before we cared that much about the privacy infringement.
But, actually paying for the privilege of being the product...that seems like an extremely hard sell from Facebook for me.
I remember doing Bug Bounty for Meta a while ago and telling some friends and family about it, and I had to repeatedly explain they _are_ Facebook and WhatsApp and Instagram and many other things because they would look at me like I was talking about aliens.
Less those bastards get of anything I control (data, finances, time) the better.
I was very angry though when they suddenly took away my USB debugging and had to go through another round of "verification".
The (literally) billions of people around the world using Facebook and Instagram don't care.
Also, you're right about the niche. A lot of 'normal' people probably don't even have a clue that Meta and Facebook are the same thing.
The rest of the brands are either luxury or fairly unknown brands. Picking a smaller brand would automatically flop the product and going with e.g. Burberry could limit sales or the risk to the brand would be to high.
As a site that ranked how hot girls were?
Hard to imagine nearly two decades later, but for a brief moment in time, it was cool to be on Facebook.
They are all <checks notes>
"dumb fucks." -- Mark Zuckerberg, 2004 personal correspondence documented in https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/
Smart glasses are great for ppl who wear some type of glasses and use their phone to take pics. Also, when I was in Europe asking about my surroundings enhanced my trip per my learning of about many sights I explored in Berlin and Amsterdam.
I do love and miss them but I’m not buying another pair til they are rock solid durable! Also the Ray Ban stores need to act just like Apple stores in terms of tech support but they do not ..and thus both Meta and Ray Ban are just selling a toy that easily breaks / doesn’t last. Even a Ray ban customer service rep said these things break I get so many calls.
The vast majority of the world doesn’t care. Half don’t know that Meta and Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp are the same thing.
And even if they know it’s no more concerning than that conspiracy video they just watched and 100% believed about Bill Gates, as they log into Windows or power on their Xbox.
I don’t use my iPad much…or didn’t, until I had a toddler and long car rides. I either used my phone or my PC, or a projector for movies. The iPad didn’t really fit in there.
I use my Quest 3 often. I can see why someone would have his opinion.
It's a fun toy, but gets boring pretty quickly.
YMMV :-)
There is just shockingly so little going on in VR.
There is also the issue that it is like a drug that the first few times are so mind blowing but your tolerance builds so fast. Then there is nothing stronger to up the dosage.
Far as fun toys go, the Quest sits head-and-shoulders over my Nintendo Switch.
Even if you try to stick with it you grow to dread all interaction with their app or OS. They have some superb technology but the product management is atrocious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People
Meta delenda est.
I myself don't really have problems with them, and neither with Meta. I don't think they have a brand problem other than in bubbles like HN.
The other is the Chinese brands.
But the wrist/hand control is the thing that impressed me the most in today's release. I'd hope for this to go far beyond just the glasses.
You actually know that? how? Just the leaked road map or something more concrete?
spy state actor's wet dream comes even more true with this, even more than with already overly de-privaciced public spaces.
The whole 17 nerds who will buy this toy will have to do that yes
My god, how fucking grim our future looks. I miss when tech was fun.
Source: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/05/21/apple-smart-glasses-eve... or some other Mark Gurman leak
Personal computers? Apple wasn’t first. Smartphones with screens? Apple wasn’t first. Tablets? Not first by a mile. True Wireless Earbuds? Nope, not at all first. Smartwatches? Hell no, not first.
And yet, Apple’s a category leader in every single one of these areas.
I don’t think it matters if Meta releases something first; Apple wins by doing it way better. Arguably, Vision Pro was way too early, even though it’s an incredible experience.
You can't just jump in, the lead up to getting this stuff going is a 5 year+ horizon, and Google, Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic are still moving exceptionally fast. Apple has shown they are nowhere near. They missed the boat on buying Anthropic, OpenAI was never going to sell with Musk behind it. There's no path forward for them, let alone catching up.
I think Apple is being smart by sitting out this "light barrels of money on fire" phase, because we have no idea where it ends or whether it'll be worth a damn. Apple has a big enough warchest that once real solutions do start to coalesce out of the fog, they can just acquire what they need to build actual products.
But the reality of it is that it's probably still to early to say if these devices will have mainstream appeal. I see a lot of people saying "well, i no longer need to take the phone out my pocket", but that has been the case for a couple of years with smartwatches, for example, and it has not meaningfully changed our dependency from the smartphone or the smartphone market dynamics that much.
Top-shelf wireless earbuds aren't from Apple. Same for smart watches.
Not for everyone obviously. But there are many, many, many, options at this level of quality.
I want to make this clear: I am not claiming these Sennheisers are the best. The parent claimed the Airpods are the best. Which is not true. That is all I am saying, nothing more.
Apple was first to the personal computer. First to the smartphone. First to the tablet. First to wireless earbuds. The vast majority of the company's revenue comes from segments where they had a multi-year head start over their competitors.
In fact products where they play catch up are more prone to failing (Vision Pro, Airpods Max, Homepod, Maps, MobileMe, Ping, Music Connect, AirPower, Airport).
Edit: even for touch LG Prada was first.
Aside from maybe the personal computer, they were not the first to any of those. BlackBerry/Palm/Windows Mobile devices all existed prior to the iPhone; the LG Prada was announced prior to the iPhone and had a similar form factor. Many tablet PCs existed before the iPad. Many Bluetooth earbuds existed prior to the AirPods.
They did a much better job of integrating each of these into a cohesive experience, but they absolutely had predecessors in each category.
I wonder how the etiquette will evolve for people with legitimate needs to use them in polite company.
I’d use it for so many things. Cooking, repairs, maybe even motivating me to do yard work? A full time AI assistant is just such a crazy sci fi idea.
I love the product but hate all the privacy issues and just not being in control of such an intimate device.
The Apple Vision Pro is AR glasses at the Apple Newton evolutionary stage, an early smart PDA (Yes I'm the sucker that bought both at their respective launch, 3 decades apart).
The Meta Ray-Ban Display is AR glasses at the Windows Mobile/Blackberry stage.
Apple will likely swoop in and launch the final refined version of the AR glasses (thin, 8 hour battery, eye gaze control, retina based authentication, tethered to the iPhone, Apple AI, etc), when the tech is available at a decent price point for mainstream launch.
And yes, being the unrepentant Apple FanBoi, will be buying the Apple iGlass at the launch.
One of my biggest annoyances is the OS on the Ray Ban Metas. If they just served as dumb I/O they'd be an incredible product and everything else about them, e.g. battery life, weight etc, would be so much better.
Apparently eye tracking must distinguish meaningful gaze from the natural jitters. I was thinking at that time, as an AAPL investor, that Apple seems to be wasting money on worthless R&D endeavors.
It only became apparent to me, much later with the launch of the Apple Vision Pro, how his seminal research on saccades contributed to the design and realization of the AVP.
People nowadays want to disconnect from technology more, not to have it even closer.
The rise of smart accessories (especially watches) should tell you that a lot of people don't want to disconnect
For all my numerous complaints about Google
The fact that it’s FB that can see through your eyes doesn’t make this any better.
Right… so having notifications in your face ALL DAY is going to _help_ you stay connected to the real world.
- are prescription glasses available for display ? I guess not ? - these glasses need to be online, I guess they do so with a phone and bluetooth connection nearby ? So that's the glasses, the band and the phone, oh and the glasses case, seems a lot to carry. - pedestrian navigation seems to be rolled out per city, so it's not like having gmaps available right out of the box.
They had to clarify it was “consenting” since it’s the opposite of their normal default.
(You also have to wonder how consensual it really was.)
Well that and it being a meta product.
The default has become to get consumers locked in as much as possible, be for your data or money exploitation or both (check the Slack thread for a non the non-profit HackClub).
If you pay 800 dollars for this device and a year after they ask you for your driver's license (as for the top comment). Are you willing to waste those 800 dollars you payed for it or will you upload any sensitive docs demanded from them? Or if they decide to phase it out early because there is no real adoption, will you get your money back? Will they make the device open so it can still be used by their "owners"?
So the way I see it: you give big money to already super rich companies. You also give them your data. You are forced to comply their rules and in even in any of those cases when they decide you shouldn't use it anymore they deprecate it and keep the device close. No, thanks.
The bottom line is this: do extensive research before making a single penny leave your wallet to try to minimize getting fucked up as much as you can.
We should educate as many people surrounding us as possible so they can make good or informed purchase decisions as well.
This should also be taught to children so from an early age they can understand very well that privacy and data has proven to be extremely profitable to virtually any company out there.
Why they shouldn't be allowed ---
1.The glasses have cameras and microphones capable of recording people nearby often without their knowledge (e.g. the recording indicator can be subtle or blocked, “GhostDot” stickers are being sold to block the LED indicator light so others won’t see when recording is happening)
2. As I remember Meta has changed its privacy policy so that voice recordings are stored in the cloud (up to one year) and “Hey Meta” voice-activation with camera may be enabled by default, meaning more frequent analysis of what the camera sees to train AI models.
3.The possibility that anytime someone might be recording you wearing glasses that look like ordinary sunglasses can create a chilling effect: people may feel uneasy, censor themselves, avoid public spaces, etc.
if they are like the previous ones they have hardware level detection and decativation of the camera if the indicator light is blocked
Heck, go to a tourist location, like a famous area of london or tokyo or new york, and there'll be dozens of wannabe influencers holding up gopros on selfie sticks.
It's too late. It's already happening. If it has a chilling effect, we're already chilled.
I think there's a huge difference in how one perceives these as a privacy/self-censoring risk. Yes, a bunch of tourists with their gopros might catch me in the background, but I think it's reasonable to assume that their intended target is themselves, and catching me in the background is incidental. If someone is recording with their glasses, basically by definition their target is not themselves (though perhaps a companion?), and it's more likely that I am their target.
As you point out, most influencer-types aren't aimed at you.
That generalizes pretty well, with or without glasses, no one cares about recording you, other than incidentally as part of the background
If someone does want to target recording you, i.e. you're a semi-famous idol or such, they'll just pretend to watch tiktoks on their phone and record without an indicator, right? At least the glasses have an indicator, unlike phones.
(A) Are we going to consume food prepared by a human so incompetent that he needs Live AI to tell him what ingredient to put and how much ... and that too an AI so unreliable that it can't tell whether the bowl is empty, let alone what ingredients are in it.[1]
In what world is this a sane marketing proposition?
(B) Distracted driving due to smartphones is at least detectable -- how do we escape distracted driving because of smart glasses?
When people eventually crash cars or walk into traffic or fall into pits -- no tech company will so much as acknowledge that the tech they are pushing so hard might have something to do with it.
Who should take the lead on saying: wait a minute we need some common sense boundaries around this ... some ground rules around responsible use of technology.
[1] Failed demo of Live AI - https://x.com/ns123abc/status/1968469616545452055
Yes, I have cookbooks full of recipes I follow.
> When people eventually crash cars or walk into traffic or fall into pits -- no tech company will so much as acknowledge that the tech they are pushing so hard might have something to do with it.
Adults have agency and I expect them to be held accountable for their actions; not use technology as a scapegoat. If someone drives drunk it's not the alcohol at fault.
regina dugan's f8 keynote 8 years ago
where they announced they were working on a 'haptic vocabulary' for a skin interface as well as noninvasive brain scanning technologyu\
2: Users get to look like the nerd emoji
3: The rest seems like creepy-spying-on-friends-or-strangers kinds of things. Any constructive suggestions? I'm willing to be enlightened...
5. Being able to converse with friends in loud places (e.g. restaurants have become louder and louder over the years due to bad acoustic design)
Not only that... I started to think about ways I could use this!! I pictured myself using them... I visualized it all, and then remembered when I felt this way when the Ipod was released, and then again, when the first Pebble watch was launched or maybe even, the first kindle.
Although there's going to be some strong competition in the next 1-2 years with Apple, as we all know, the "thin phone" is nothing about the phone, and all about their pathway towards wearables...
I must have this. This is a game changer. WOW!
I strongly recommend making owners of these things feel incredibly unsafe and uncomfortable in social situations. I wouldn’t hesitate to break a pair when I get the opportunity personally.
If these things are now to the point of realistic adoption, I'd be interested in getting a pair, specifically to record and get on demand info/maps/AI integration maybe on runs, hikes, and other adventure/exploration-type settings... and recording my cats... But now a whole can of questions is opened:
- What products are developed enough this area that are worth choosing between?
- Don't trust meta due to privacy and data exploitation concerns. Are any other products on the same level in terms of hardware + software quality, or is it just going to have to be a compromise (or waiting until something else is good enough?)
- Responsiveness/UX/photo/video quality etc...
Part of me kind of wishes I was still ignorant to the advancements of these so I could keep ignoring them as a gimmick and not be tempted to dive into researching the product category...
(Sorry about the google search link. Apple and Google go out of their way to hide the url when doing searches on Google from mobile Safari.)
https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=046dc2c9c0fa6748&udm=2...
This is what no one else can seem to understand. The iPad was created in Apple's labs before the iPhone. But Jobs and other staff made the decision to wait several years to launch the phone until the tech caught up to the ambition. They had a certain ascetic they wanted in addition to the hardware and it required time.
In this case, it looks like opposite. The tech is finally getting there, but the design team has no sense of making a daily wear product that people should reasonably want to wear. If I imagine a large population of people wearing these daily, it's going to look like middle and high school students from the 70s and 80s in yearbook photos.
What's awful is that I'm one of the most fashion ignorant people I know. I wear the same type of shirts and shoes because they're comfortable not stylish. And my glasses are as minimal frame as possible because I don't want a large mass of matter sitting on my face. Even that being said, this product just reminds me of my buddy's army photo of him wearing the Army issued glasses. Not good.
What? It's only 2 clicks away. You can click the copy button after hitting the share button. /s
The live captioning with directional audio seems like it could be a huge win for people who are hard of hearing, especially given the display is invisible so is much more natural to use in real life than say a smart phone or a VR headset with passthrough.
Another thing that's cool is the neural band. It looks like it's a more robust and flexible implementation of what Apple is doing with hand tracking.
But generally the idea that you can interact with the glasses silently with your hands to your side while wearing what effectively looks like a normal pair of glasses is incredible. I think this this is the first time we've seen an implementation of AR in which a large group of people could see value in it.
Also the fact Meta was first to market with a solid implementation of AR and not Apple or Google is also notable. I think I would have doubted their ability to pull something like this off a few years ago.
There's a few other companies/startups working on this too, but a lot of the glasses they're producing are very ugly. There's a couple that didn't look bad, but from what I'm seeing Meta's are a combination of the best-looking ones and best display so far, and I'll be very curious to see the reviews.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/3/23818462/meta-ray-ban-stor...
OTOH, for me the Quest killer app is Ace. I can practice pistol shooting any time I want, which keeps me using the headset every day. For the glasses, the killer app might be translation. Now, I couldn't say if that will 'translate' into widespread user retention, or — like Ace — only really keep a smaller community engaged (I don't think most users need translation services on a regular basis).
I'm not negative on the Meta glasses, I think a device like this is the future, even still this hurts Ray-Bans reputation in my eyes.
It's like if Rolex made a smart watch, the tech just doesn't mesh well with a "luxury" brand.
I can understand why apps like Instagram - when used in the browser - wouldn't be compatible. But this product release page? What's going on here? Why?
Err what? How do glasses that let you procrastinate when physically connecting to people help that?!
Also the video demo has no sound and one of the examples genuinely looked like the wearer was having a text a convo with someone whilst sat across from people at dinner…
So that means this is just adding 2 more gadgets, both of which I now need to wear?
Nah. Not happening.
Neat gestures though.
Yeah, I see where this is going. (And here I am wanting less gadgets.)
Huge respect to Zuck and co; I much rather authentic demos where stuff goes pear than some glossy marketing spiel by a non-technical exec.
Also, I didn't know this demo was taking place until afterwards, meta really should do more to publicise their demos, especially given they're actually making cool new stuff, unlike a lot of other big tech companies who are more about rent-seeking, advertising and enshitifying than inventing.
Just never in a million years.
Just imagine the dollars in front of those glasses… if it only darned worked.
I really hope they don’t though because it’s beyond dystopian to own such a billboard company with a sick twist.
But I realized this is a pretty clever move. Only allowing a fixed, inset screen really hides any issues with display field of view.
No? Then no thank you.
As a practical matter, this feels too Orwellian. I don't want necessarily want to emit that much information (he said, looking at his Galaxy smart phone and watch) all the time.
Possibly I'm trending Luddite in my dotage.
Lastly, I don't put it past humanity to actually be interested in seeing ad overlays throughout the world because it's just ... cool, at least at first.
Killer feature for me:
I'd like to see that 3D marker in the world that I need to walk towards like a video game.
It’s a very different experience to passthrough, no matter how small you make the glasses, so I’m not sure there’s a clear path to convergence
Magic Leap.
The HoloLens devices might be another set of candidates.
reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhZdWvnF3do
That's just like, your opinion, man.
The glasses seem pointless to me for now. I’m surprised he didn’t add a booty zoom in view. We thought of that idea way back in middle school. Seems like something he’d vibe with.
Too often HN threads devolve into the same tired comparisons about laserdisks and Palm Pilots. The only precedent we have for a product like this failing is Vision Pro, and this is nothing like that. Your comment was jumping to a conclusion that I think many would disagree with.
WHAT IN THE HOLY FUCK DID I JUST READ
Didnt that stupid AI pin have the same tagline?
i have over 4000 emails, sns...
"what? how'd you manage that one?"
people just submitted it, i don't know why. they "trust me". dumb fucks
Meta RayBan AR glasses shows Lumus waveguide structures in leaked video - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45266215 - Sept 2025 (124 comments)
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45284046 and marked it off topic.
Do you think someone's comment history link is an obscure secret no one can access?
> Clearly this is not the case (..)
Oh really? Please explain in your own words why you believe this is not the case.
It wasn’t 2023: Last post 11 months ago, last comment 8 months ago, which is a typical level of lurking
Zuck really has cracked this one.
To Downvoters:
Give credit where credit is due.
I think you are going to realize in a few years why tens of billions was poured into Reality Labs and Oculus.
Version 2 or 3 of these glasses is going to set Meta ahead of the rest (except at least Apple).
(admittedly with the recent Android news perhaps non-exploitative mobile computing is about to be dead and buried but shit, I'd lug around a backpack module everywhere running linux if it came to that)
Microsoft Hololens 2 also used Microvision-derived laser retinal projection technology. I don't have one, so I can't say how well it really works, but Microsoft seems to have given up on it as well.
If you relax your requirements and allow for a green holographic waveguide display, there are a few other options, but still nothing open source that I'm aware of.
It's quite difficult to do that safely, as it turns out! I would love a virtual retinal display, but I assume there's a good reason that nobody has managed to ship one in the last two decades.
Estimates for that are around $1500.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/apple-vision-pros-co...
The earlier Meta prototype was quoted on media articles as costing over $10k or something and used transparent SiC for lenses, and they said work is ongoing to find a cheaper material. I don't think they meant the lens cost $9.75k and the rest $0.25k by that.
As a Meta Ray Ban owner my biggest takeaway is that these glasses shouldn't have a CPU. They should be a dumb camera, mic, and speakers for my phone.
Interacting with Gemini on my phone would be the ideal product here, but of course that means Meta doesn't reap any of the data rewards.
So of course, since they don't make the phone in your pocket, they're strapping a device to your head and everyone pays the price of a big battery, CPU, and RAM in a sunglass form factor.
They're a remarkable product, but again, "dumb" glasses that just serve the I/O directly to your phone would be an incredible product. I wish Google or someone else would make them.
The changes to their privacy policies plainly show the bait-and-switch.