I'm actually somewhat interested to see something like this hit mainstream. Like smartphone-levels of mainstream. Because one of the first apps for it will likely be one that looks at people's faces and immediately digs up everything about them available online. There's already been videos of it working with older tech, so I'm sure it'll work even better now with newer hardware and AI.
Anyway, once it goes mainstream and people see what we've done to ourselves, maybe it will open people's eyes and we'll start fighting for our privacy again.
I'm reminded of the "Gargoyles" in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. These are people with wearable computers that are plugged into the VR/AR internet at all times. The relevant passage...
"Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think they're talking to you, but they're actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is standing there measuring the length of Hiro's cock through his trousers while they pretend to make conversation."
> You think they're talking to you, but they're actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead.
I used to work in the hardware side of AR until recently when I took a step back for my family. I've had hands on experience with many types of hardware, wave guide, birdbath and laser beam scanning to name a few. Technically these are all really amazing, and I miss working in this space.
Unfortunately, while I want to see the technology succeed in the mainstream, it's never going to get there. Period. The AR use-case presented by tech giants to consumers fails to solve any real world problem that a cheaper and more accessible cellphone couldn't. Sure there are niche-use cases and cool demos for consumers, but until the hardware reaches the form factor and durability of traditional prescription glasses consumers will never adopt the technology in a meaningful way.
If we actually want to drive sales of AR devices, we will replicate usecases where AR currently drives value, such as HUDs for aircraft. The same concept can be applied to other high workload environments such as EMS, truck drivers, ATC, law enforcement and handful of military applications. However sales in these domains will be somewhat limited except for military applications which is bad PR for the most of the leaders of AR tech.
So for now its all essentially vaporware to generate hype for the stock market.
Yes, and a standard dashcam/bodycam on every person's head. Right now you can see when a person is recording you, they are holding up their phone. With this, it's just a tap on the glasses (or auto-record and tap to preserve the last X minutes).
It will remember all your activities, help you find your keys and objects, remember what you bought when and if there's still toilet paper in your bathroom, etc. It will make helpful charts and statistics about your life, help to optimize it, notice if there is some product that it wants to advertise to you based on your activities etc. It's all going to be packaged and sold to ad networks. You will see AR ad objects floating everywhere, depending on what you do.
> It will remember all your activities, help you find your keys and objects, remember what you bought when and if there's still toilet paper in your bathroom, etc. It will make helpful charts and statistics about your life, help to optimize it, notice if there is some product that it wants to advertise to you based on your activities etc. It's all going to be packaged and sold to ad networks. You will see AR ad objects floating everywhere, depending on what you do.
Yeah but maybe slowly things will require it. Just like restaurants today that only have a QR code but no physical menu, maybe a bunch of stuff will only be virtually present in augmented reality in the future. If you take off the glasses, signposts will be missing, etc. It's hard to imagine now, but maybe it would be hard to tell someone from 50 years ago that entire stores, subway ticket machines, bakeries etc. will be cashless and people will tap their phones to pay, and if you have no phone or card, you're screwed. Or if you have no Android/iOS app, you can't book appointments with certain govt offices etc.
Things that start as optional and convenience only can slowly become essentially mandatory. And then if you are already wearing it, it will push the ads.
Some big leaps being made in your argument, but I think the sentiment is where the heart of the issue with this tech lies. Privacy focused individuals will never buy a product like this, but it clearly is meant for the masses & not the typical HN user.
A privacy-first version of smart glasses running OSS would make me lean forward in my seat, at minimum.
> Because one of the first apps for it will likely be one that looks at people's faces and immediately digs up everything about them available online.
How am I meant to opt out of this? A device that broadcasts an (inevitably ignored) do not scan signal? CV Dazzle? Am I resigned to just never leaving the house again?
For now I’m hoping that the major factor against people adopting this is that you’ll look like a wanker. I’m not sure what to do once that becomes the norm though.
They will keep getting smaller and more powerful. It won't be long until they look close enough to normal sunglasses.
As for opting out? I think the only chance you have is to have zero online presence, especially with pictures. Of course, many are forced into this by their careers.
What is your threat/concern that you will not leave the house on order not to be photographed in public ?
I get it could be mildly to very annoying depending on what's available on you online - but not leaving the house ? The only things that come to mind are you have a hit on you and you did an identity change to ditch it or some thinfoil hat level theory.
The way I see this is this is all being done for over a decade now we are just making it more widespread. In some ways I find it a good thing - where previously the government could track you through security infra, now the government servants are also surveiled in all public appearances.
If we're inevitably going in this direction, might as well have the same rules for everyone.
Alternatively, the good version of that is AI giving knowledge on anything that exists naturally or artificially that we look at. To flourish we just need a distinction between general knowledge and individualized personal knowledge.
Is that a good thing? Having the answer to everything before you’ve even asked makes life boring. There’s nothing fun about talking to someone who Google’s the thing you’re trying to remember or unsure about. That on steroids sounds like a dull existence.
>Because one of the first apps for it will likely be one that looks at people's faces and immediately digs up everything about them available online. There's already been videos of it working with older tech, so I'm sure it'll work even better now with newer hardware and AI.
The app in question[0]. I would imagine newer hardware and some Palantir APIs would be all you need to do this very reliability.
Similar to the Massive Attack gig that used facial recognition on the crowd - they put the captured faces (with labels against them) up on the big screens. Discussed a day or so ago on here:-
I thought while it did "facial recognition", it was to draw boxes round faces, and not to identify people. And the labels were things like "ENERGISED".
I don't actually see the difference between this and a crowdcam at a sporting event, other than many privacy-oriented publications have reposted pictures of the people at the Massive Attack event, presumably without their permission.
It's never coming back , it's over dude. There is no more privacy.
Self-driving cars, they will know absolutely everything, about everyone, all the time, combine that with delivery drones and glasses, the government, meta, google, they will know exactly where you are all the time. Even if you leave your device at home.
They don't let you record phone calls (at least in my country, call recording is blocked), but they'll let people look up other people etc?
I guess as long as the data is shared with three letter agencies and data mills, then why not.
With phone calls that would be tricky, so at least they disabled it to protect scammers.
When that feature did work, I was able to get money back from insurer as their sales person misrepresented the policy I paid for. I had it recorded and they had to pay up.
With call recording no longer available, I don't do any calls if I don't have a tablet with me to record it.
I remain convinced that AR glasses will never ever be mainstream no matter how good the hardware is. They just don't solve any actual problem. Interacting with UI using voice or gesture is just way too hard.
They could still be useful as a dumb display without voice or gesture. Imagine being in an airplane and wanting to use your laptop. You'll be hunched over with terrible posture. With a pair of AR glasses that support displayport alt mode, you could plug in your glasses and sit with proper posture, your screen displayed in front of you as a virtual 40" display, while you touch type on your laptop sitting on the food tray. Perhaps you're in bed and want to watch a movie. You could pop on the glasses, plug in your phone, and enjoy while while fully reclined, achieving the most comfortable least effort movie viewing experience. Maybe you're traveling and staying in hotels where you want to get some work done. Programming on tiny laptop screens sucks if you're opening more than 2 files at a time, but what if you could just pop on your glasses, plug them into your laptop, and program on a virtual 40" display?
My understanding is the current tech is not sharp enough for serious productivity, is too heavy for extended wear, and has a short life due to overdriving tiny OLEDs, so I'm not ready to purchase one yet. But some day those problems will be solved and I'm absolutely going to jump on that.
The thought of an airport full of people all seated with perfect posture, all looking ahead but not really seeing, tapping away at their oh-so important work, feels both worse than the current status quo but also somehow no different. Maybe it’s the posture thing.
Yeah, that's the brand I've been watching most closely. How would you rate the sharpness of the display for text editing / coding? Like if you opened some large code files on your glasses and desktop monitor, and adjusted both their font sizes to have the same legibility + feel, do you fit more text on the glasses or your desktop monitor and by how much?
This is the one aspect that is hard to find info about online. Everyone talks about the weight and what size the virtual display is, but if I am going to seriously use it for productivity then I need at least 3 files open side by side, fully legible, with 100-character-wide lines at the bare minimum to be considered.
Either way, I'm not going to purchase until they solve the longevity problem, but I am curious if the sharpness is at the point where I can stop worrying about it.
It's literally a 70" HD display around 4m from your face. All HD displays fit exactly the same amount of text in their 1920x1080 pixels, the only thing that changes is the field of vision the display takes up.
I use them to do work, the issue I have is, having owned three pairs (for reasons), the lenses can be hit-or-miss. The pair I own now is more on the miss side, and some part of the lens is blurry. You don't notice it when watching films, but it's noticeable for text. The other two pairs were OK, this one I got less lucky with.
This one also seems to tire out my eyes if I wear the glasses for more than an hour, and I don't know why (it might be the blurriness). It's not the focal distance, they did a good job there, it's about 5m as far as I can tell.
Anyway, overall I like the glasses. They're worth the 200 € I paid used, but I probably wouldn't pay 400 € for them, I only use them on flights. They'd be great if I watched lots of movies or played games on a Steam Deck, though.
I always wished for AR glasses. I described it like playing a MMO with player names overlaid above their heads.
I have an incredibly hard time remembering faces and names. Close to disability level. People I have known for 20 years and interact with monthly can take a bit for me to recall their names and it requires a ton of mental tricks to do so.
I used to go to a decent number of trade shows, and the number of folks who casually knew me and my name but I couldn’t place was embarrassing. And crippling for business purposes.
I always thought if I had someway to overlay a persons name over their head it would level the playing field and allow be to avoid a lot of personal embarrassment.
Now that the future is here I’m not so sure. One of those things I want for me but not for thee.
I can see how this would be beneficial for you. But I also get the feeling that those people would rather you can’t remember their name than have you doing facial recognition on them. It’s one of those solutions to social problems that is so unsocial it just changes the problem. Instead of “that’s the guy that always forgets my name” it becomes “that’s the creep with the AI glasses!” (No offence). One of those is much more preferable.
As someone who's been avidly following and sampling VR/AR since the 90s, in recent years I've changed my opinion. While I'm not as confident as you seem to be, I do now think it probably never goes into widespread all-day consumer use. Although, I do believe certain gaming, entertainment and workplace use cases will become much more common.
I think it's helpful, perhaps even necessary, to differentiate between different kinds of text.
Let's start with text intended to convey information. Good documentation-type text that acts as a one-way communication channel is an example of this. A small number of writers and contributors to something that can be read by thousands or more can be incredibly powerful and can be incredibly information dense and valuable if written well.
Text intended to entertain? Well, that's just art and people will choose to engage in that way when they prefer the medium itself, so that's really just personal preference and enjoyment.
Text as the de-facto replacement for voice/face-to-face feels like something that's been forced into a lot of situations now. It's beneficial (or really required) when it's the only option such as for long-distance communication, and favours slow-changing content. But I think in a lot of cases we've been forced into having to use text over voice for raw human communication (thinking of course about remote working now).
I think text has a lot going for it. It can be incredibly information dense, it's easier for writers to take time to prepare something well, it's persistent, it's searchable, it's easy to make available historically. But I'm not convinced that it's a blanket replacement in every way. As the equivalent of voice it's also just slower.
As for video telephony, well David Foster Wallace had a bit to say about that [1]
Then how come in face-to-face interactions people generally communicate using speech rather than text?
Clearly there's a disadvantage to using text in that situation, and I think it's that it almost always takes longer to express thoughts/intents using text. ISTM a sufficiently advanced computer voice interface would have the same advantage.
Because it allows people to communicate when they're not in close physical proximity. Would you rather go out to dinner with friends and just speak to each other or sit there and type your conversation out in a WhatsApp group chat?
It's a convenience/necessity thing, pure and simple.
I said was talking about face-to-face (or 'in person' as you put it) communication. You're absolutely right that over long-distance people prefer to communicate by text, but in person people prefer to communicate by speech so that's exactly my point: there are at least some contexts in which people prefer speech.
I guess I could also follow suit and return your weird toxic/patronising insult here too since you clearly didn't understand my original comment, but perhaps it would be nicer if we didn't do that?
They will become mainstream because the advertising industrial complex will see the opportunity to have a paid subscription model to reality with ads from the moment you open your eyes to those on the free-tier.
Realtime on-demand satnav in ar, onscreen messaging, news updates etc, the facial recognition is just one aspect, having automatic connections with people looking at you across a room signifying interest.
This is dystopian to me but I don't see how it doesn't eventually become mainstream.
I'm not so sure there is no problem to be solved. Being able to see the world around me annotated visually has massive potential - I for one would love the Google Translate camera feature that lets you translate text seen by the camera in real time and overlay the translated text on the document but built into a pair of normal looking glasses, freeing my hands etc.
While I accept some will take issue with calling it an "AR device", the current Meta RayBans have sold very well with major YoY growth and I only expect them to get more popular as they get more capable and add more "AR"-esque features in future versions. I see them already as a first step on road to real AR products much, much more than I do the Quest line.
It doesn’t seem to stop people being okay with <42 hour smart watch charges, so I’m not so convinced this will be the limiting factor unless you need the prescription version of these (which rules them out for me, I’m happy with my dumb-glasses that I’ve never had to plug in to anything)
no ones playing games, recording videos, taking pictures or doing any kind of immediate activity with smart watches.
Those sensor input-only arn't what would push people to want whole-ass screens & VR overlays. It's weird you think there's a similar power profile to a smart phone and a smart watch. They are not a gradient in use cases.
> no ones playing games, recording videos, taking pictures or doing any kind of immediate activity with smart watches.
This is a good point, but my point was more that if a smart watches are doing less than a smart phone and people still seem to be happy to have to charge them everyday, I'm not so convinced that having to fast-charge a set of AR glasses for time-limited use would put people off if they felt it was useful enough.
For context, I was imagining that most of the AR/VR overlays would be time or context dependent. Perhaps when travelling to aid with directions or on a commute for entertainment.
Are people really going to be walking through life with an always-on HUD? If they are then yes, completely fair point around battery usage. Perhaps once a global network of wireless charging is fully operational this will be a problem of the past...
Right, they're _passive_ devices that don't need active engagement.
That's not a good case to make that active devices that consume orders of magnitude more power are going to make it on the market if they can't last 8-10 hours on a charge doing active things.
Maybe people misunderstand just how much power AR/VR require and think it's similar to wireless ear phones.
There's just a huge band gap in power requirements. EVs have similar issues in the consumer confidence when it comes to matching range requirements.
No matter how much on paper you explain to people what they actually do vs what they want to do, the salesman needs to sell at what they want to do.
SUVs and Trucks are similar, except inverse: people want to do a bunch of things, but what they actually do is very little. They'd still never drive a small vehicle just because it gets them good range.
So, when I say the tech/battery isn't there for the consumer, it's recognizing the consumer is an idiot, and the nerd-requirements are different than average consumer expectations.
I’ve heard otherwise intelligent people talk about how amazing it will be when AR systems are just a contact lens, like it’s something that’s going to happen in the near future.
I wonder is it not possible to transmit power through the body. It seems janky anyway how does the battery pack on your pocket connect to your body. Wireless has loss. Watch battery pack that uses a laser shooting at the glasses ha. Also clothes that harvest power maybe contacts to body.
The human body consumes merely ~2000 calories a day. Really not that much energy, about the same as a 100W light bulb.
Even if you can capture every single bit of extra energy from a tshirt, you'd end up with a tiny fraction of 100W. Certainly not enough to power a mobile device like this.
> Anyway, once it goes mainstream and people see what we've done to ourselves, maybe it will open people's eyes and we'll start fighting for our privacy again.
This is how some even older people feel about smartphones :p
Some of this is the lack of a killer app and some of this will be generational. At some point the 10-30yos will be more used to being permanently plugged in than not. (we're probably already there in some senses, but will go through the same adoption cycle again for AR/VR imo)
> This is how some even older people feel about smartphones :p
I walked around listening to cassette tapes on my walkman and couldn't imagine why anyone would want an "mp3 player" with all the hassles of loading 100 songs at a time onto a computer and then onto the thing etc etc. Minidiscs seemed cool tho?
~5 years later I got an iPod with 10gig of storage and holy shit it was the best thing I'd ever encountered. All my music. Immediately. All the time.
why would i spend 15 minutes copying a CD to the computer and another 15 copying it to the device, the man thought to him self while making a 90minute mix tape.
Its pretty safe to assume all of them up there are exactly the same in this, each of them with their own little unique twist. There may be somehow magically an exception (probably not 2 though), but I am not holding my breath.
This was pretty much known since Day 1 (famous dumb fucks quote about people sharing their personal details), and as we all should know at this point people don't change, not for the better at least.
All these years later another thing from Zuckerberg to enable playing “hot” or “not” targeting the women around the office with his buddies.
Every owner will “Share your contacts” then do the work of labeling their friends and family in every which way for Meta. Even if those friends and family don’t want to be on social media it’ll be stored.
In the future Meta will just plan to attend a senate hearing, apologize for the misuse of that data and pay a fine.
Rather off-topic, but the juxtaposition of words in the headline made me think of a potentially actually cool application for 3D AR glasses — visualizing the radio-frequency fields in the surrounding environment, colors mapped to wavelengths, saturation linked to RF strength/amplitude. You could look around the house and see the hot and dead zones for your wifi, how much the microwave leaks, how the broadcast radio and TF filters through the building...
Fun for curiosity, but it could be actually really useful for techs?
The Meta Ray-Bans have been extremely successful for a completely new consumer device form factor. But they don't have a screen. Meta is releasing new glasses with a screen and this is a look into the display technology they are using. It is "newsworthy" for tech people who are interested in the development of new technology in displays and optics, and new computing devices more generally.
This is the kind of content HN was made for, much more so than the Israel/Gaza or Bertrand Russell stories I see on the front page right now for example.
Periodic reminder to flag submissions that are off-topic, and comments that break the guidelines. HN is mostly moderated by users - dang and tomhow don't do as much moderation as you might think.
> The Meta Ray-Bans have been extremely successful for a completely new consumer device form factor.
Do you have any sources on them being a successful product by any measurable standard? I honestly wasn't aware that they were even being sold, and I'm sure I don't know anyone that owns a pair. I'm not exactly their target market, but I think at least some in my social circle are.
It's not 2007 anymore. You can't judge a product today with the standards of almost 20 years ago. Additionally, Wikipedia says it sold 6.1 million units within 12.5 months.
The iPhone was not a completely new consumer device form factor. There was a huge existing market for cellular phones, even smartphones with touchscreens. There is no equivalent pre-existing market for smart glasses today.
New? “wearable camera with headphones” is not exactly groundbreaking.
Even a new model with a screen would only be semi-new, other AR glasses have existed for over a decade - with Apple releasing a consumer-focused product last year.
My understanding is that this specific type of lens projection technology hasn't been available at the consumer level before, and is a step up from previous AR approaches.
Noteworthy because it's an interesting extra technical insight about a soon to be announced Meta product, if that's your kind of thing
The site’s “about us” page appears to be lorem ipsum, so
I guess it is probably just somebody’s blog. Showing up there doesn’t make it necessarily newsworthy I guess.
Lumus is just a company. So “Lumus waveguide” doesn’t seem to tell us much other than the supplier.
But I found his blog a couple years ago and have been reading it ever since. Karl follows VR/AR display tech obsessively, goes to all the shows/conferences and talks with all the companies - then does highly technical, in-depth write-ups of what's new and notable - which often includes his unvarnished opinions. His blog is read by basically everyone in the industry, so all the companies give him briefings and demos despite the fact he'll call it like he sees it. Which is why he's pretty much my go to source when any new VR/AR display tech gets announced.
Even more valuable to me, he'll mention when companies are lagging or falling short of expectations and he'll even speculate about where things could (or should) go. His blog is basically like having a buddy who's an expert industry insider who'll tell you what he really thinks over a beer - which is pretty invaluable if you're someone who's interested and technical but doesn't follow this space that closely. That doesn't mean Karl's opinion is always correct but it is certainly well-informed and usually supported with technical data - although he did say this post was just a quick note that a video was leaked. He'll probably have a real post after it's announced and a deep dive once he gets his hands on one.
Interesting fact: Karl's career was as a chip architect. He designed key parts of the the Texas Instruments 9918 - the first general purpose video display processor which was used in dozens of 80s computers and game systems including Sega Master System (and coined the term "sprite"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS9918https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_%28computer_graphics%29https://kguttag.com/2025/07/01/tms9918-the-first-sprite-chip... So yeah, he's just "some random retired guy with a blog" but a guy with 150 patents and dozens of published technical papers. But being some random retired guy with a blog, he makes little effort to be accessible to first-time visitors or do design, marketing, etc. You just have to read-in and when you do, you pretty quickly figure out this guy knows his stuff.
Folks have been predicting that the next big shift in computing will be onto glasses that we wear and away from our phones.
The tech just hasn’t been there yet and most of the devices that do this are heavy clunky and hot
Meta is investing billions to get out ahead of this shift and to own the entertainment and data (and thus advertising) layers that sit on top of the real world through these glasses
The rumor mill is abuzz that Facebook finally making a play for it in the next set of smart glasses after a few years of sticking to VR headsets and audio/camera only glasses
They're also called smartwatches, when most of them are pretty useless without a phone. Even if they offload everything to the phone, they're still much "smarter" than normal glasses, which just sit there doing nothing but correcting vision.
If you have wifi calling enabled on your mobile account and your watch has wifi connection, you can receive calls to it. Or you can get a watch that has mobile data connection.
The "old man yelling at the sky" part of me can only hope the side effects of something like this gaining traction might be that physical-world advertisements fade away.
I'm actually somewhat interested to see something like this hit mainstream. Like smartphone-levels of mainstream. Because one of the first apps for it will likely be one that looks at people's faces and immediately digs up everything about them available online. There's already been videos of it working with older tech, so I'm sure it'll work even better now with newer hardware and AI.
Anyway, once it goes mainstream and people see what we've done to ourselves, maybe it will open people's eyes and we'll start fighting for our privacy again.
I'm reminded of the "Gargoyles" in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. These are people with wearable computers that are plugged into the VR/AR internet at all times. The relevant passage...
"Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think they're talking to you, but they're actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is standing there measuring the length of Hiro's cock through his trousers while they pretend to make conversation."
> You think they're talking to you, but they're actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead.
So, the average Zoom call in 2025?
Eh, checking OrgWiki or LinkedIn is hardly as distracting as a salacious credit report
I used to work in the hardware side of AR until recently when I took a step back for my family. I've had hands on experience with many types of hardware, wave guide, birdbath and laser beam scanning to name a few. Technically these are all really amazing, and I miss working in this space.
Unfortunately, while I want to see the technology succeed in the mainstream, it's never going to get there. Period. The AR use-case presented by tech giants to consumers fails to solve any real world problem that a cheaper and more accessible cellphone couldn't. Sure there are niche-use cases and cool demos for consumers, but until the hardware reaches the form factor and durability of traditional prescription glasses consumers will never adopt the technology in a meaningful way.
If we actually want to drive sales of AR devices, we will replicate usecases where AR currently drives value, such as HUDs for aircraft. The same concept can be applied to other high workload environments such as EMS, truck drivers, ATC, law enforcement and handful of military applications. However sales in these domains will be somewhat limited except for military applications which is bad PR for the most of the leaders of AR tech.
So for now its all essentially vaporware to generate hype for the stock market.
> maybe it will open people's eyes
That is very wishful thinking and will backfire. What will actually happen is normalisation and increased erosion of privacy.
Yes, and a standard dashcam/bodycam on every person's head. Right now you can see when a person is recording you, they are holding up their phone. With this, it's just a tap on the glasses (or auto-record and tap to preserve the last X minutes).
It will remember all your activities, help you find your keys and objects, remember what you bought when and if there's still toilet paper in your bathroom, etc. It will make helpful charts and statistics about your life, help to optimize it, notice if there is some product that it wants to advertise to you based on your activities etc. It's all going to be packaged and sold to ad networks. You will see AR ad objects floating everywhere, depending on what you do.
> It will remember all your activities, help you find your keys and objects, remember what you bought when and if there's still toilet paper in your bathroom, etc. It will make helpful charts and statistics about your life, help to optimize it, notice if there is some product that it wants to advertise to you based on your activities etc. It's all going to be packaged and sold to ad networks. You will see AR ad objects floating everywhere, depending on what you do.
Presumably only if you wear it.
Yeah but maybe slowly things will require it. Just like restaurants today that only have a QR code but no physical menu, maybe a bunch of stuff will only be virtually present in augmented reality in the future. If you take off the glasses, signposts will be missing, etc. It's hard to imagine now, but maybe it would be hard to tell someone from 50 years ago that entire stores, subway ticket machines, bakeries etc. will be cashless and people will tap their phones to pay, and if you have no phone or card, you're screwed. Or if you have no Android/iOS app, you can't book appointments with certain govt offices etc.
Things that start as optional and convenience only can slowly become essentially mandatory. And then if you are already wearing it, it will push the ads.
Some big leaps being made in your argument, but I think the sentiment is where the heart of the issue with this tech lies. Privacy focused individuals will never buy a product like this, but it clearly is meant for the masses & not the typical HN user.
A privacy-first version of smart glasses running OSS would make me lean forward in my seat, at minimum.
What will happen is that Meta will capture this information for themselves and sell it to the highest bidder and drip feed some of it back to you.
In a functional society, these always on, corporate controlled devices would be outlawed.
What will happen is that Meta will capture this information for themselves and sell it to the highest bidder and drip feed some of it back to you.
The highest bidder. And then the next-highest bidder, and the next highest bidder, and the next highest bidder…
> Because one of the first apps for it will likely be one that looks at people's faces and immediately digs up everything about them available online.
How am I meant to opt out of this? A device that broadcasts an (inevitably ignored) do not scan signal? CV Dazzle? Am I resigned to just never leaving the house again?
For now I’m hoping that the major factor against people adopting this is that you’ll look like a wanker. I’m not sure what to do once that becomes the norm though.
They will keep getting smaller and more powerful. It won't be long until they look close enough to normal sunglasses.
As for opting out? I think the only chance you have is to have zero online presence, especially with pictures. Of course, many are forced into this by their careers.
High-powered infrared LEDs, surrounding you with a halo, blinding the sensors.
Optionally pulse-modulated in specific ways, to make the software behind those crash by inducing cyber-epilepsy.
IOACM (infrared optically active countermeasures)
Move to the EU.
Denmark's Justice Minister calls encrypted messaging a false civil liberty
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45248802
A Scanner Darkly
What is your threat/concern that you will not leave the house on order not to be photographed in public ?
I get it could be mildly to very annoying depending on what's available on you online - but not leaving the house ? The only things that come to mind are you have a hit on you and you did an identity change to ditch it or some thinfoil hat level theory.
The way I see this is this is all being done for over a decade now we are just making it more widespread. In some ways I find it a good thing - where previously the government could track you through security infra, now the government servants are also surveiled in all public appearances.
If we're inevitably going in this direction, might as well have the same rules for everyone.
Have you _seen_ the insanely stupid things that people get harassed over?
> Because one of the first apps for it will likely be one that looks at people's faces and immediately digs up everything about them available online.
Reminds me of my single girlfriends who put every single person they talk to on online dating into facecheck.id.
Alternatively, the good version of that is AI giving knowledge on anything that exists naturally or artificially that we look at. To flourish we just need a distinction between general knowledge and individualized personal knowledge.
Is that a good thing? Having the answer to everything before you’ve even asked makes life boring. There’s nothing fun about talking to someone who Google’s the thing you’re trying to remember or unsure about. That on steroids sounds like a dull existence.
I gave your comment to chat GPT and it said that...
Just kidding.
>Because one of the first apps for it will likely be one that looks at people's faces and immediately digs up everything about them available online. There's already been videos of it working with older tech, so I'm sure it'll work even better now with newer hardware and AI.
The app in question[0]. I would imagine newer hardware and some Palantir APIs would be all you need to do this very reliability.
[0]https://gizmodo.com/this-facial-recognition-experiment-with-...
Similar to the Massive Attack gig that used facial recognition on the crowd - they put the captured faces (with labels against them) up on the big screens. Discussed a day or so ago on here:-
https://www.gadgetreview.com/massive-attack-turns-concert-in...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45255400
I thought while it did "facial recognition", it was to draw boxes round faces, and not to identify people. And the labels were things like "ENERGISED".
I don't actually see the difference between this and a crowdcam at a sporting event, other than many privacy-oriented publications have reposted pictures of the people at the Massive Attack event, presumably without their permission.
If this was possible at a reasonable price point the cops would already be wearing them.
This is reversed. If cops were wearing them, for a reasonable price, it would mean everyone else was already wearing them, for a reasonable price.
volume is what makes things like this reasonably priced.
I wonder if any US states will ban the practice? Many states have laws in place that govern license plate reader use by individuals.
Yes, but people are not cars.
Facebook got nailed for tagging people in the background of photos. That's illegal in some states.
I know because I was in the background of someone's snapshot and got a ~$500 check out of the settlement. Thanks, Facebook!
It's never coming back , it's over dude. There is no more privacy.
Self-driving cars, they will know absolutely everything, about everyone, all the time, combine that with delivery drones and glasses, the government, meta, google, they will know exactly where you are all the time. Even if you leave your device at home.
They don't let you record phone calls (at least in my country, call recording is blocked), but they'll let people look up other people etc?
I guess as long as the data is shared with three letter agencies and data mills, then why not.
With phone calls that would be tricky, so at least they disabled it to protect scammers.
When that feature did work, I was able to get money back from insurer as their sales person misrepresented the policy I paid for. I had it recorded and they had to pay up.
With call recording no longer available, I don't do any calls if I don't have a tablet with me to record it.
I remain convinced that AR glasses will never ever be mainstream no matter how good the hardware is. They just don't solve any actual problem. Interacting with UI using voice or gesture is just way too hard.
They could still be useful as a dumb display without voice or gesture. Imagine being in an airplane and wanting to use your laptop. You'll be hunched over with terrible posture. With a pair of AR glasses that support displayport alt mode, you could plug in your glasses and sit with proper posture, your screen displayed in front of you as a virtual 40" display, while you touch type on your laptop sitting on the food tray. Perhaps you're in bed and want to watch a movie. You could pop on the glasses, plug in your phone, and enjoy while while fully reclined, achieving the most comfortable least effort movie viewing experience. Maybe you're traveling and staying in hotels where you want to get some work done. Programming on tiny laptop screens sucks if you're opening more than 2 files at a time, but what if you could just pop on your glasses, plug them into your laptop, and program on a virtual 40" display?
My understanding is the current tech is not sharp enough for serious productivity, is too heavy for extended wear, and has a short life due to overdriving tiny OLEDs, so I'm not ready to purchase one yet. But some day those problems will be solved and I'm absolutely going to jump on that.
The thought of an airport full of people all seated with perfect posture, all looking ahead but not really seeing, tapping away at their oh-so important work, feels both worse than the current status quo but also somehow no different. Maybe it’s the posture thing.
You can already do this, and I did it last week on my flight with my Xreal Air.
Yeah, that's the brand I've been watching most closely. How would you rate the sharpness of the display for text editing / coding? Like if you opened some large code files on your glasses and desktop monitor, and adjusted both their font sizes to have the same legibility + feel, do you fit more text on the glasses or your desktop monitor and by how much?
This is the one aspect that is hard to find info about online. Everyone talks about the weight and what size the virtual display is, but if I am going to seriously use it for productivity then I need at least 3 files open side by side, fully legible, with 100-character-wide lines at the bare minimum to be considered.
Either way, I'm not going to purchase until they solve the longevity problem, but I am curious if the sharpness is at the point where I can stop worrying about it.
It's literally a 70" HD display around 4m from your face. All HD displays fit exactly the same amount of text in their 1920x1080 pixels, the only thing that changes is the field of vision the display takes up.
I use them to do work, the issue I have is, having owned three pairs (for reasons), the lenses can be hit-or-miss. The pair I own now is more on the miss side, and some part of the lens is blurry. You don't notice it when watching films, but it's noticeable for text. The other two pairs were OK, this one I got less lucky with.
This one also seems to tire out my eyes if I wear the glasses for more than an hour, and I don't know why (it might be the blurriness). It's not the focal distance, they did a good job there, it's about 5m as far as I can tell.
Anyway, overall I like the glasses. They're worth the 200 € I paid used, but I probably wouldn't pay 400 € for them, I only use them on flights. They'd be great if I watched lots of movies or played games on a Steam Deck, though.
I always wished for AR glasses. I described it like playing a MMO with player names overlaid above their heads.
I have an incredibly hard time remembering faces and names. Close to disability level. People I have known for 20 years and interact with monthly can take a bit for me to recall their names and it requires a ton of mental tricks to do so.
I used to go to a decent number of trade shows, and the number of folks who casually knew me and my name but I couldn’t place was embarrassing. And crippling for business purposes.
I always thought if I had someway to overlay a persons name over their head it would level the playing field and allow be to avoid a lot of personal embarrassment.
Now that the future is here I’m not so sure. One of those things I want for me but not for thee.
I can see how this would be beneficial for you. But I also get the feeling that those people would rather you can’t remember their name than have you doing facial recognition on them. It’s one of those solutions to social problems that is so unsocial it just changes the problem. Instead of “that’s the guy that always forgets my name” it becomes “that’s the creep with the AI glasses!” (No offence). One of those is much more preferable.
As someone who's been avidly following and sampling VR/AR since the 90s, in recent years I've changed my opinion. While I'm not as confident as you seem to be, I do now think it probably never goes into widespread all-day consumer use. Although, I do believe certain gaming, entertainment and workplace use cases will become much more common.
Yes it is highly economically inefficient.
People seem to underestimate how wonderful it to be able to touch and tap an interface and how minimal effort is exerted.
I want an HUD mini-map that displays directions for navigation. That solves an actual problem for me (having no sense of direction).
oh i think we will see voice becoming a much more popular interface in the very near future, now that it’s actually getting very good
Highly doubt it. As a species we have gotten accustomed to talking through text as opposed to voice/audio over time.
People prefer it. Pure and simple.
I think it's helpful, perhaps even necessary, to differentiate between different kinds of text.
Let's start with text intended to convey information. Good documentation-type text that acts as a one-way communication channel is an example of this. A small number of writers and contributors to something that can be read by thousands or more can be incredibly powerful and can be incredibly information dense and valuable if written well.
Text intended to entertain? Well, that's just art and people will choose to engage in that way when they prefer the medium itself, so that's really just personal preference and enjoyment.
Text as the de-facto replacement for voice/face-to-face feels like something that's been forced into a lot of situations now. It's beneficial (or really required) when it's the only option such as for long-distance communication, and favours slow-changing content. But I think in a lot of cases we've been forced into having to use text over voice for raw human communication (thinking of course about remote working now).
I think text has a lot going for it. It can be incredibly information dense, it's easier for writers to take time to prepare something well, it's persistent, it's searchable, it's easy to make available historically. But I'm not convinced that it's a blanket replacement in every way. As the equivalent of voice it's also just slower.
As for video telephony, well David Foster Wallace had a bit to say about that [1]
[1] https://ochuk.wordpress.com/2015/08/20/my-favorite-pieces-of...
Then how come in face-to-face interactions people generally communicate using speech rather than text?
Clearly there's a disadvantage to using text in that situation, and I think it's that it almost always takes longer to express thoughts/intents using text. ISTM a sufficiently advanced computer voice interface would have the same advantage.
People communicate with their friends more over text than in person.
Am I really having to explain basic stuff like this? Lmao.
Because it allows people to communicate when they're not in close physical proximity. Would you rather go out to dinner with friends and just speak to each other or sit there and type your conversation out in a WhatsApp group chat?
It's a convenience/necessity thing, pure and simple.
Theres benefits to be had when interacting with REAL people in person.
Zero benefit interacting with voice with an AI. Pure and simple.
Nobody cares about an agent when they are the principal - this is not remotely the same as interfacing with a human that is valued much higher.
I said was talking about face-to-face (or 'in person' as you put it) communication. You're absolutely right that over long-distance people prefer to communicate by text, but in person people prefer to communicate by speech so that's exactly my point: there are at least some contexts in which people prefer speech.
I guess I could also follow suit and return your weird toxic/patronising insult here too since you clearly didn't understand my original comment, but perhaps it would be nicer if we didn't do that?
They will become mainstream because the advertising industrial complex will see the opportunity to have a paid subscription model to reality with ads from the moment you open your eyes to those on the free-tier.
Realtime on-demand satnav in ar, onscreen messaging, news updates etc, the facial recognition is just one aspect, having automatic connections with people looking at you across a room signifying interest.
This is dystopian to me but I don't see how it doesn't eventually become mainstream.
I'm not so sure there is no problem to be solved. Being able to see the world around me annotated visually has massive potential - I for one would love the Google Translate camera feature that lets you translate text seen by the camera in real time and overlay the translated text on the document but built into a pair of normal looking glasses, freeing my hands etc.
While I accept some will take issue with calling it an "AR device", the current Meta RayBans have sold very well with major YoY growth and I only expect them to get more popular as they get more capable and add more "AR"-esque features in future versions. I see them already as a first step on road to real AR products much, much more than I do the Quest line.
battery usage will continue to limit the commercial->public usage.
It doesn’t seem to stop people being okay with <42 hour smart watch charges, so I’m not so convinced this will be the limiting factor unless you need the prescription version of these (which rules them out for me, I’m happy with my dumb-glasses that I’ve never had to plug in to anything)
no ones playing games, recording videos, taking pictures or doing any kind of immediate activity with smart watches.
Those sensor input-only arn't what would push people to want whole-ass screens & VR overlays. It's weird you think there's a similar power profile to a smart phone and a smart watch. They are not a gradient in use cases.
> no ones playing games, recording videos, taking pictures or doing any kind of immediate activity with smart watches.
This is a good point, but my point was more that if a smart watches are doing less than a smart phone and people still seem to be happy to have to charge them everyday, I'm not so convinced that having to fast-charge a set of AR glasses for time-limited use would put people off if they felt it was useful enough.
For context, I was imagining that most of the AR/VR overlays would be time or context dependent. Perhaps when travelling to aid with directions or on a commute for entertainment.
Are people really going to be walking through life with an always-on HUD? If they are then yes, completely fair point around battery usage. Perhaps once a global network of wireless charging is fully operational this will be a problem of the past...
Right, they're _passive_ devices that don't need active engagement.
That's not a good case to make that active devices that consume orders of magnitude more power are going to make it on the market if they can't last 8-10 hours on a charge doing active things.
Maybe people misunderstand just how much power AR/VR require and think it's similar to wireless ear phones.
There's just a huge band gap in power requirements. EVs have similar issues in the consumer confidence when it comes to matching range requirements.
No matter how much on paper you explain to people what they actually do vs what they want to do, the salesman needs to sell at what they want to do.
SUVs and Trucks are similar, except inverse: people want to do a bunch of things, but what they actually do is very little. They'd still never drive a small vehicle just because it gets them good range.
So, when I say the tech/battery isn't there for the consumer, it's recognizing the consumer is an idiot, and the nerd-requirements are different than average consumer expectations.
I’ve heard otherwise intelligent people talk about how amazing it will be when AR systems are just a contact lens, like it’s something that’s going to happen in the near future.
> no ones playing games,
I do. Many take advantage of the wheel. There are even full 3d games (it has a decent GPU, considering how small it is).
There's also uBrowser web browser, to help reduce your charge.
I wonder is it not possible to transmit power through the body. It seems janky anyway how does the battery pack on your pocket connect to your body. Wireless has loss. Watch battery pack that uses a laser shooting at the glasses ha. Also clothes that harvest power maybe contacts to body.
The human body consumes merely ~2000 calories a day. Really not that much energy, about the same as a 100W light bulb.
Even if you can capture every single bit of extra energy from a tshirt, you'd end up with a tiny fraction of 100W. Certainly not enough to power a mobile device like this.
> Anyway, once it goes mainstream and people see what we've done to ourselves, maybe it will open people's eyes and we'll start fighting for our privacy again.
lol
Perhaps this is an aside, but for my anniversary my partner bought me a pair of JBL glasses that also act as headphones.
Absolutely love them. They're not absolutely essential, but they're a nice-to-have and they're a lot more convenient than putting in ear buds.
The problem though is that I would never have thought to ever buy them myself. I feel this way about these AR glasses.
This is how some even older people feel about smartphones :p
Some of this is the lack of a killer app and some of this will be generational. At some point the 10-30yos will be more used to being permanently plugged in than not. (we're probably already there in some senses, but will go through the same adoption cycle again for AR/VR imo)
> This is how some even older people feel about smartphones :p
I walked around listening to cassette tapes on my walkman and couldn't imagine why anyone would want an "mp3 player" with all the hassles of loading 100 songs at a time onto a computer and then onto the thing etc etc. Minidiscs seemed cool tho?
~5 years later I got an iPod with 10gig of storage and holy shit it was the best thing I'd ever encountered. All my music. Immediately. All the time.
why would i spend 15 minutes copying a CD to the computer and another 15 copying it to the device, the man thought to him self while making a 90minute mix tape.
Seems like a rehash of Adrian Travis's Wedge display idea https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
Nice hardware. What a shame that any product that runs a Meta platform is completely dead to me.
Seeing Mark caught sycophanting on the live mic sealed it for me.
Would you mind linking the incident you're referring to?
I want to say they were referencing this video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EqwcxH1h2Eo
(Warning it is a youtube short)
Its pretty safe to assume all of them up there are exactly the same in this, each of them with their own little unique twist. There may be somehow magically an exception (probably not 2 though), but I am not holding my breath.
This was pretty much known since Day 1 (famous dumb fucks quote about people sharing their personal details), and as we all should know at this point people don't change, not for the better at least.
My thoughts exactly, looks nice, waiting for a non-Meta company to move into this space so I can try it out.
Thirded
Fourthed. Or should that be Forth’ed, as this is HN after all.
All these years later another thing from Zuckerberg to enable playing “hot” or “not” targeting the women around the office with his buddies.
Every owner will “Share your contacts” then do the work of labeling their friends and family in every which way for Meta. Even if those friends and family don’t want to be on social media it’ll be stored.
In the future Meta will just plan to attend a senate hearing, apologize for the misuse of that data and pay a fine.
Where could one find the leaked video? :eyes:
Rather off-topic, but the juxtaposition of words in the headline made me think of a potentially actually cool application for 3D AR glasses — visualizing the radio-frequency fields in the surrounding environment, colors mapped to wavelengths, saturation linked to RF strength/amplitude. You could look around the house and see the hot and dead zones for your wifi, how much the microwave leaks, how the broadcast radio and TF filters through the building...
Fun for curiosity, but it could be actually really useful for techs?
Since the article didn't seem to mention... can someone explain why this is newsworthy? My smoothbrained self just doesn't get it.
The Meta Ray-Bans have been extremely successful for a completely new consumer device form factor. But they don't have a screen. Meta is releasing new glasses with a screen and this is a look into the display technology they are using. It is "newsworthy" for tech people who are interested in the development of new technology in displays and optics, and new computing devices more generally.
This is the kind of content HN was made for, much more so than the Israel/Gaza or Bertrand Russell stories I see on the front page right now for example.
Periodic reminder to flag submissions that are off-topic, and comments that break the guidelines. HN is mostly moderated by users - dang and tomhow don't do as much moderation as you might think.
> The Meta Ray-Bans have been extremely successful for a completely new consumer device form factor.
Do you have any sources on them being a successful product by any measurable standard? I honestly wasn't aware that they were even being sold, and I'm sure I don't know anyone that owns a pair. I'm not exactly their target market, but I think at least some in my social circle are.
over 2mil sold since oct 2023.
.... thats nothing. Id hardly call that a success when you consider Meta's resources for marketing.
Google is also finding that blasting YT with ads of Google Pixel does not work very well.
2 million hardware devices sold is not nothing, that is a pretty significant amount of hardware to ship.
When you have a 1+ billion of users to market to, practically for free, it is actually a tiny number.
To be honest the best adverstisement for the Google Pixel series is GrapheneOS :-).
My friend in England has a pair. They’re selling extremely well
My mate Paul says they're not.
Thanks for posting, your comment was informative and didn't contain hate and boring tropes.
2 million sold in three years is hardly ‘extremely successful’.
Compare it to devices with similar form factors or use cases sold by competitors:
- Snapchat - has been trying for a decade and has sold ~220K Spectacles.
- Amazon Echo Frames - Reuters estimated less than 10,000 units sold.
- Humane AI Pin - the less said about it the better.
- Google Glass - neat but way ahead of its time, and barely made it to consumers before being quickly discontinued.
- Hololens/Magic Leap - both duds.
- Lengthy list of startups with smart glasses and other wearables that have gained no traction.
Meta glasses are noteworthy because there's finally a company making an AR wearable catch on among a mainstream audience.
Or they are all failures, including Meta’s…?
Well let's just agree to call it "the most successful smart glasses ever by a long way".
The original iPhone sold 1.3 million units in its first year. I suppose you consider that a massive failure as well?
It's not 2007 anymore. You can't judge a product today with the standards of almost 20 years ago. Additionally, Wikipedia says it sold 6.1 million units within 12.5 months.
The iPhone was not a completely new consumer device form factor. There was a huge existing market for cellular phones, even smartphones with touchscreens. There is no equivalent pre-existing market for smart glasses today.
It is "for a completely new consumer device form factor"
New? “wearable camera with headphones” is not exactly groundbreaking.
Even a new model with a screen would only be semi-new, other AR glasses have existed for over a decade - with Apple releasing a consumer-focused product last year.
Vision Pro is the same form factor as Meta's glasses in the same sense that a semi truck is the same form factor as a moped.
That's why I gave other examples :)
[dead]
My understanding is that this specific type of lens projection technology hasn't been available at the consumer level before, and is a step up from previous AR approaches.
Noteworthy because it's an interesting extra technical insight about a soon to be announced Meta product, if that's your kind of thing
The site’s “about us” page appears to be lorem ipsum, so I guess it is probably just somebody’s blog. Showing up there doesn’t make it necessarily newsworthy I guess.
Lumus is just a company. So “Lumus waveguide” doesn’t seem to tell us much other than the supplier.
Karl Guttag has published far more information than you ever wanted to know about Lumus in the past, e.g. https://kguttag.com/2021/05/24/exclusive-lumus-maximus-2k-x-...
The "About" link on the upper left of the site's homepage goes here: https://kguttag.com/about-karl-guttag/
But I found his blog a couple years ago and have been reading it ever since. Karl follows VR/AR display tech obsessively, goes to all the shows/conferences and talks with all the companies - then does highly technical, in-depth write-ups of what's new and notable - which often includes his unvarnished opinions. His blog is read by basically everyone in the industry, so all the companies give him briefings and demos despite the fact he'll call it like he sees it. Which is why he's pretty much my go to source when any new VR/AR display tech gets announced.
Even more valuable to me, he'll mention when companies are lagging or falling short of expectations and he'll even speculate about where things could (or should) go. His blog is basically like having a buddy who's an expert industry insider who'll tell you what he really thinks over a beer - which is pretty invaluable if you're someone who's interested and technical but doesn't follow this space that closely. That doesn't mean Karl's opinion is always correct but it is certainly well-informed and usually supported with technical data - although he did say this post was just a quick note that a video was leaked. He'll probably have a real post after it's announced and a deep dive once he gets his hands on one.
Interesting fact: Karl's career was as a chip architect. He designed key parts of the the Texas Instruments 9918 - the first general purpose video display processor which was used in dozens of 80s computers and game systems including Sega Master System (and coined the term "sprite"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS9918 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_%28computer_graphics%29 https://kguttag.com/2025/07/01/tms9918-the-first-sprite-chip... So yeah, he's just "some random retired guy with a blog" but a guy with 150 patents and dozens of published technical papers. But being some random retired guy with a blog, he makes little effort to be accessible to first-time visitors or do design, marketing, etc. You just have to read-in and when you do, you pretty quickly figure out this guy knows his stuff.
Folks have been predicting that the next big shift in computing will be onto glasses that we wear and away from our phones.
The tech just hasn’t been there yet and most of the devices that do this are heavy clunky and hot
Meta is investing billions to get out ahead of this shift and to own the entertainment and data (and thus advertising) layers that sit on top of the real world through these glasses
The rumor mill is abuzz that Facebook finally making a play for it in the next set of smart glasses after a few years of sticking to VR headsets and audio/camera only glasses
Why do they call the smart glasses when they just send everything to the smart phone? Nothing is done on device.
They're also called smartwatches, when most of them are pretty useless without a phone. Even if they offload everything to the phone, they're still much "smarter" than normal glasses, which just sit there doing nothing but correcting vision.
You know, I never thought of this until I took my phone into a repair shop. I was just like “give me a call, I have my watch.”
Two seconds after I walked out … I was like, “oh, that’s not going to work…” so I just sat around for an hour.
If you have wifi calling enabled on your mobile account and your watch has wifi connection, you can receive calls to it. Or you can get a watch that has mobile data connection.
You still need the original phone to forward the call. If it is out of commission, nothing will happen.
It's a marketing term not a technical term
Facebook is trying so very hard to be Innovative Online Industries.
"I get that reference."
And that's the whole book
No deep insights there, but it was a beautiful romp while it lasted :)
The "old man yelling at the sky" part of me can only hope the side effects of something like this gaining traction might be that physical-world advertisements fade away.
I'd love ad-blokcer in my glasses. Replace every billboard I see with fine art.
They’ve actually had this cool feature at art galleries and museums for quite a while now ;)
Or dad jokes.