- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- hackaday@ibbit.at
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- hackaday@ibbit.at
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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
I was watching a random short with a guy what I’m assuming is one of these. I didn’t hear much of what he said, because I was distracted by the lenses the whole time. It was impossible to ignore as the light catches the lenses as he moves his head around.
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
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.
I’ll give you an upvote. I feel thats fair. Like you guys if you can’t make buck you lose a buck. (Any of you read Uglies?) We really need a reset on the capitalist regime imo and instate a socialist platform that is by the people and for the people. Fuck with this AI nonsense too
It’s really bad yes. I’m no communist but I really think we should have had mixed economies and better tax policies to keep the rich in check. AI and other automation could have led to us working 20hrs a week on average while everything runs smooth, if used for the benefit of all.
Right now they have snowballed so much money and power and tech that I just can’t see how we can out of outside of revolts. Democracy has been corrupted almost everywhere and people are being manipulated into thinking other religions or immigrant are the problem.
There was a time we banned cloning to prevent the rich from making armies to exploit. But religion/ethics made that easy. We never considered doing the same with tech and important means of production.
This comment seems to lack perspective. In countries where medicine is socialised, this technology wasn’t invented. Could it have been? Yes, absolutely. But in the reality we are faced with, it was invented with capitalist values. Now it can be assessed and potentially taken up by public health systems.
I’m not saying that technology and progress is bad nor that we should stop pursuing it.
I’m saying that progress that only benefits 1% or less of the people doesn’t interest me.
If your innovation cannot reasonably exist without economic bubbles and worker exploitation, then it doesn’t deserve to.
Even if we found the cure to cancer tomorrow but it was so expensive and restricted that maybe 1000 billionaires alone could afford it I literally wouldn’t care for it.
The cost for achieving all that is exploitation. It literally worsens the lives of many, so that few can taste the fruits of advancement. I’d rather we discovered that cure 20 years later if it meant that 99% of us had better quality of life.
The rich want the opposite and try convince you and me and everyone else that this is to the benefit of humankind because advancement happen faster with capitalism.
I have no sources on that. But even if they do, I simply don’t care about it. It doesn’t benefit me nor anyone I know.
Yeah I am also not particularly interested by healthcare which only benefits a tiny fraction of society.
However, when glasses were first invented they were only accessible to very few people. Technology tends to get more accessible over time as it is developed from a niche product to something for the mass market. So we can be cautious about the impact of these smart glasses, but still recognise that, for something that costs significantly less than a hearing aid and has hearing-aid like features, making life easier for people with hearing and vision impairments is in fact a key area where tech can help, is helping, and is recognised as such even in the world of big tech.
Yes, I have two family members who are blind and they regularly use this app and the meta glasses. It’s a huge help to them!
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!
The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well known is this: Never go in against a septuagenarian when blindness is on the line!
I never thought I’d hear someone mentioning the Bosnian Ape Society, on Lemmy.
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.
Lauren Boebert. She thinks they make her look smartish.
I sorta do, too, but in a specific way. I don’t strictly need glasses. In my late 20s, distant objects starting getting a little fuzzy, but not enough that driving was a problem. I’m in my early 40s now, and my prescription is basically the same as what I got back then. I’m sure that will start to change in my mid 40s (the muscle that controls your eye lens tends to weaken by then), but I basically spent all my genetic lottery points on my eyes.
Anyway, I wear glasses with a suit to kink events. If it didn’t come off as slightly oppressive, suits wouldn’t be used in BDSM.
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.
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.
Yeah, not looking forwards to being in Meta (or any other massive company)'s database or whatever when a friend or family member wears one of these.
Like VR, meta’s will probably be the best priced and have the best tech on top of it for the price, so end up getting the most market share too.
Yes. I’m all for an open specification, local only version of this.
But I don’t think Meta releasing a set of smart glasses leaves anyone (other than possibly Zuckerberg) better off.
One could argue that without Meta’s investments into the technology, we might never get an open specification at all. With something like Valetudo, it wouldn’t exist without the privacy nightmare that is off-the-shelf robot vacuums.
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.
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.
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.)
The EU has proven very willing to levy increasingly large fines against the tech giants until they behave.
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.
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).
(e.g. domestic violence victim being recognized by their attacker)
Not sure how or why the attacker wouldn’t be able to recognise them normally.
My point is that same technology can and will be used to violate peoples’ privacy
Every technology can be used to do shitty stuff, and in most cases has been. 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.
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 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.
It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that we could use the hardware with 3rd party software. With the Quest line of VR headsets, Meta was pretty open to letting devs mess with the hardware. At least during the time I was using one.
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?
Only acquaintances with your permission would have entered your face into their local database. Beyond that, checking faces against what’s stored in the database does not require recording, hence you should not be in any randos database.
That’s a very good and respectful way of solving the issue, thank you for sharing!
I don’t have face blindness, but I can’t remember names for the fucking life of me.
This reminds me of Peacemaker, a guy claiming to be ‘bird blind’. Hilarious bit
Tim Meadows was a great addition to season 2
I knew it would be fun as soon as I saw him. Love Tim
I learned about this recently in a anime!
The Apothecary Diaries - A main character has this disability.
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I understand the gripes about Meta, but I don’t understand how everyone clowns on this like the core concept is stupid or unwanted.
Easy $1000 sell: cycling / escooter accessory. People already regularly buy expensive sport glasses just for sun and wind protection. With a smart version of them like this, you add open ear headphone, and you add the potential for navigation directions, or even a Bluetooth rear view camera on the back of your helmet to get a virtual mirror.
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?’
Heh…these days I kinda long for devices for for specific purposes again 😅 and I’m a software engineer.
Exactly my first thought.
Hope it doesn’t turn out the same way this time around
You’d rather have a camera cell phone and mp3 player than a smartphone?
No.
Doesn’t make me any less apprehensive about meta putting cameras and microphones on everybody’s face.
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Literally everything you said is just dumb hater bullshit. You added nothing to the discussion.
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We’re at the point now that we “need” 6 gadgets that do the same thing.
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.
To me it seems like a thing that sounds kinda cool on paper, but is not actually that useful in practice. We already have the ability to do real time translations or point the camera at something to get more information via AI with our smartphones, but who actually uses that on the regular? It’s just not useful or accurate enough in its current state and having it always available as a HUD isn’t going to change that imo. Being able to point a camera at something and have AI tell me “that’s a red bicycle” is a cool novelty the first few times, but I already knew that information just by looking at it. And if I’m trying to communicate with someone in a foreign language using my phone to translate for me, I’ll just feel like a dork.
real time translations or point the camera at something to get more information via AI with our smartphones, but who actually uses that on the regular?
Anybody living in a foreign country with a different language.
Being able to read signs and storefronts from a motorbike in real time would be life-changing.
Being able to point a camera at something and have AI tell me “that’s a red bicycle” is a cool novelty the first few times, but I already knew that information just by looking at it.
Visual search is already useful. People go through the effort of posting requests to social media or forums asking “what is this thing” or “help me ID these shoes and where I can buy them” or “what kind of spider is this” all the time. They’re not searching for red bicycles, they’re taking pictures of a specific Bianchi model and asking what year it was manufactured. Automating the process and improving the reliability/accuracy of that search will improve day to day life.
And I have strong reservations about the fundamental issues of inference engines being used to generate things (LLMs and diffusers and things like that), but image recognition, speech to text, and translation are areas where these tools excel today.
they’re taking pictures of a specific Bianchi model and asking what year it was manufactured
And the answer they get will probably be wrong, or at least wrong often enough that you can’t trust it without looking it up yourself. And even if these things do get good enough people will still won’t be using it frequently enough to want to wear a device on their face to do it, when they can already do it better on their phone.
Sell your bike to afford them. Easy. It’s another pointless gimmick, like 3D TV or the Metaverse and virtual shopping. Zuckerberg had one idea and got lucky, it’s been wasting money since.
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.
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.
I think the reason this is a problem with smart glasses but not with spy pens is that smart glasses are more accessible. I mean, you don’t just keep a spy pen on your person, or even buy one, in case it will be useful, right? but the smart glasses are just there, on your head. and why not take a few stealthy photos if I can just click and its one, nobody knowing? or even just that you take a photo of something, but there are others in the field of view who have no idea.
and not just with Meta. I don’t think other companies either can be trusted with tech like this. Certainly not in this age.
Whoever exhibits that mentality you describe hasn’t waiting for meta to be a creep.
Yeah, they do. You never heard of a crime of opportunity?
Why do you lock your doors at night? You know that anyone who wants to get in can just rake the god damn lock, right? Most people don’t want to get into your house, and the ones who do will be able to enter anyway, so what pathology drives you to waste your time like this?
“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.
I don’t disagree. I meant for users it is incidental. Most users probably wouldn’t buy them with spying as the main purpose(they just also don’t really care that it can spy). making them much more widespread than something where spying was the main use-case, making the problem worse.
And as someone else mentioned, once you did get it, the temptation for using it for spying is there for a user. Making it worse than e.g. a spy pen imo, as with that you’d need the intent to spy first, and then buy it, but with this, you buy it for whatever reason and then think “oh, I could just spy now” since you already own the device, which I’d argue leads to more overall spying, so to speak. Maybe you see a video online and go “oh, I can just do that, right now, no effort on my part, since I already own this device”.
And for Meta it’s like tracking cookies on crack
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 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.
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.
throwaway account is an option?
I might try that.
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
There’s new glassholes?
All I need is a nu-metal revival and we’re back in 2008 baby.
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Ah, yet another bit of technology I’ve been looking forward to for years.
Let’s see @technology dump all over it.
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
Oh man I’m wearing ray bans. I should get a new pair else I’d get lynched for it… again…
