Pricing is interesting. $299 for the Wayfarer model when the base Wayfarer goes for $171 on the Rayban website. If (and this is a big if) you assume Luxottica takes the same cut on both models, then Meta is selling a camera, headphones, etc, conveniently packaged into a very small form-factor for $128. If I were in the market for a new pair of sunglasses, it isn't hard to seem me splurging another $128 for something that could potentially replace my airpods for taking calls while I'm away from home.
Personally, not a fan of sticking a camera everywhere I look though. I get why companies want to push that feature (more data!) but I just don't see a reason why consumers need a camera pointing at everything they're doing.
The base, regular Wayfarers were cannibalized and cheapened out by Luxottica a long time ago. I'm fortunate enough to have a vintage pair from the mid-1980's that still look brand new. They have higher quality zyl frames, polarized glass Bausch & Lomb lenses, and, crucially, five barrel bolted hinges. They're built like a tank.
The new ones are so cheap I won't even wear them. Cheap plastic, plastic lenses, spring hinges that break quickly, and obnoxious branding on both the temples and the lenses. Terrible.
I work in the optical industry. I do R&D/quality control for a lens manufacturer and agree Luxottica is an awful company, but your comment is way off base. It's actually quite wrong.
Your "zyl" acetate frames aren't higher quality. Modern acetate is stronger, lighter, less brittle, less subject to warping from temperature change, and more resistant to UV damage which impacts brittleness and color. 40 years of material science progress. No one in the industry would say older acetate is better. It's worse in every way especially because yours are old. They're breaking down.
People don't wear glass lenses anymore for a reason. They are heavy and the only advantage over plastic is less chromatic aberration which is a non issue unless you are comparing to an extreme prescription using high-index plastic. They are also fairly dangerous compared to plastic due to the way they shatter. They fog up more easily. Again, 40 years of material science.
Additionally, there are no low optical-quality plastic lens blanks. This is a solved problem. The only defects you'll get in lens blanks are bubbles and these won't make it through production. What happens after a manufacturer grinds the lens out is a different story but I can also tell you that their lens surfacing is not low quality by any means.
Your hinges aren't any better and get loose over time. You can't actually use these for 40 years, they will wear out too and are harder to replace. Spring loaded hinges are lighter and reduce strain on both the frames and the wearer. I know what they use, they aren't cheap, and are high quality.
I do agree with your point on the branding.
The optimization for optics is all about weight. Your old frames and lenses aren't better because they're heavier, they're worse. As well as being more brittle and shatterable. It's like pining for the old heavy golf clubs made of wood and iron or all steel cars with V8 engines. Yeah, they're heavier! But they're worse in every way.
I will also say that you should buy frames because you like the frames. If you want great lenses, you just get them made. You shouldn't expect high-quality prescription lenses from a frame manufacturer, that's what your optometrist is for. I buy cheap frames all the time and pop in whatever I want.
You may have a bit of a point if you are talking moderate to high prescription ordered from Ray-Ban, but if you are talking about their non-prescriptive sunglasses, you're just yelling about all the wrong things.
Edit: typo and swapped in "surfacing" rather than "production" for clarity.
I once had a pair I found under a house from I’d guess the 60s, the builder must have misplaced them. They felt like something from another universe compared to today’s garbage.
Yeah, I go hiking several times a week and I'd wear these all the time. I like listening to podcasts or music, but want to be able to hear any rattlesnakes or interesting birds, so the speakers seem like a plus. And being able to snap a photo without pulling my phone out would also be great. I probably wouldn't use them in a lot of situations, but hiking seems like a good one. If these end up being decent I'd consider them over a normal pair of sunglasses next time I need a pair.
Bone conducting headphones are great, I use them all of the time on walks, and you can hear everything as long as you don't play anything too loud. If they get loud enough then you don't hear certain things but that goes for any kind of headphones.
Bose had sunglasses with bone conduction audio for a while - but I think they got discontinued. I like the idea but these are, to me, worse. I get why some people would like having a camera, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable with it.
Yes, it's to gather even more data. Ad agencies have figured out how to glorify this. Dell in the UK is running an ad telling the viewer that the tourists photographing and filming coral reefs are helping the scientists help preserve nature.
Yeah, I would take no cameras, less creepy, and longer battery life, if I had the option.
Edit: I do love that they have a transition lens version, though. I haven't seen that elsewhere.
Bose had some Bluetooth glasses, but their website currently says "We'll be back soon". I also can't find them on Amazon, so I'm wondering if they were discontinued.
Luxottica is probably doing very nicely on this partnership, and may well be offering Apple a substantial price cut to compensate. I had never heard of 'Rayban' before this Apple announcement! (Not that I am the target market for sunglasses anyway, in dark and wet Great Britain)
Omnipresent video input is going to be essential for Artificial Self-Instantiation AGIs early next year. Your personal assistant can’t help you if you need to tell it what you’re doing all the time!
We need to invent something that does the opposite now where individuals could wear something that prevents them from showing up in someone else’s content without explicit digital consent (some sort of personal scrambler). I don’t think the LED feature listed on this product page will often be honored by most people who will use these shades
We're nearly at the "Foundation" levels of surveillance tech, but with no countermeasures in sight to oppose that. Even resisting web browser fingerprinting is difficult.
There are no "hard" countermeasures possible, not technological ones - you're fighting against the laws of physics here, which mandate that everything constantly radiates information about what it's doing, in every direction, at the speed of light. Advancement of surveillance is advancement in being able to discern that information. You can try and introduce noise, but you're still fighting uphill, against the whole fields of signal processing and information theory.
The only "countermeasures" we can have are "soft" ones - social, political and legal. Convince people to treat privacy as core value, and surveillance as repugnant. Make forms of surveillance illegal. Mandate by law to have surveillance capabilities in devices handicapped by design. But this, at best, only solves the problem for regular people and some of the time, while governments stay stable and sane - the possibility of deeper surveillance is still there, just the choice to perform it seems unattractive at a given moment.
A Halloween costume that changes the shape of the body and face should suffice. Let's all dress up as "V" from V for Vendetta. Some would say a persons gait can give them away so we can all walk or sashay like a runway model. The costume needs an RF blocking pocket for fondle slabs. I can picture this happening. Low tech, affordable, concept can be applied to any costume. Optional platform boots to balance peoples height.
I think we still have an option of a privacy regulation that requires explicit expiring consent on any kind PII handling and a private right of action to enforce it (e.g. small claims court).
In the sci-fi novel "The Mountain in the Sea" (highly recommended btw) there is a piece of tech called "abglanz" which is an identity shield mask that flickers in iridescent blurry patterns to protect a person's privacy from camera surveillance.
Check out Adam Harvey's "CV Dazzle" and other related design efforts. CV Dazzle is from 2010 but still very cool, the concept is generally to design cyberpunk clothing and headware that is adversarial to face detection algorithms. Algorithms are always changing, but I'm sure there will always be attacks of this nature. We could see them pop up in military applications in addition to personal privacy.
This sounds like legislation. Mandate (with stiff penalties for violations) that any recording in the presence of a certain BLE advertised value (that's anonymized) means that all people should be removed from the scene with current image generation AI tooling? Not sure what to do about in frame vs out of frame, but perhaps this sparks something.
Yeah. The creepy is back. When Google released its glasses, people jumped on it right away always gave me weird vibes. Why would someone want to do it? What is an everyday function that would be greatly improved by this, aside from some professional application?
These could be pretty incredible if the platform was more open. You get highly available image and voice input, and good voice output.
Imagine if you could take a picture of anything, add a little note, have it filed away. Not necessarily an awesome Instagram picture, but just a picture of some mail you got, a tool you are putting away, any thing you want to record and save. Heck, why not a picture of your computer screen? Pair that with quickly available audio transcriptions and you can also dictate anything, thoughts, small notes, information associated with the images.
That all could be great... if the library of things you made was useful. It's pretty clear how it could be useful now; do some OCR and other detection on images, use a vector store for both that and transcripts, and hook it all up to an LLM assistant. It's a bit complicated, and a bit expensive to run, but at least for a prototype you could make something pretty incredible.
Meta might make something like that... but they aren't doing that yet, and they might never do that. If the platform was open people could explore these things right now. And it doesn't even need to be radically open, you don't need to be able to hack the firmware; but it has to be more open than the preview Ray-Ban glasses, and I'm assuming more open than this revision.
> Imagine if you could take a picture of anything, add a little note, have it filed away. Not necessarily an awesome Instagram picture, but just a picture of some mail you got, a tool you are putting away, any thing you want to record and save. Heck, why not a picture of your computer screen? Pair that with quickly available audio transcriptions and you can also dictate anything, thoughts, small notes, information associated with the images.
I know HN already has too much cynicism for my own liking, so it pains me to say: you can already do this with the phone you have in your pocket. Have a shortcut that enables audio dictation/photo mode/etc., and you're good to go.
The workflow for glasses (either these or some other hypothetical ones) would involve hitting a button and then having to either speak the command out loud or hit some other button to capture video/audio/etc., which seems more cumbersome than the phone approach that exists today.
I am currently in the middle of rebuilding a pair of 6.2L small block Chevrolet engines. By a factor of six these are the largest engines I've ever worked on, and the rebuild is far more extensive than anything I've attempted before too.
During the teardown, part of my process (let's not dignify it with "workflow") has been photographing the incredible amount of crap that's been bolted to the engines as I remove pieces to help me with later reassembly. Sometimes I say a couple of words because the Live Photo captures some context.
I have come to loathe my phone as a camera. Yes it works with gloves on, but every day it ends up covered in oil and grease. Holding it is awkward, you have to do a bunch of swipey things to make the camera work, the 3D Touch (or whatever it's called now) is somewhat random with gloves, and I've lost count of the number of times it's got itself stuck in portrait or panorama mode. Those of you with daughters will understand this ultimate critique - it was worth it to me to bribe my grumpy pre-teen to operate the camera rather than fighting it myself.
All of this is to say, I could _really_ use a pair of camera glasses. That little bit of friction taken out of the process would make a massive difference to me. And if I could record video, I'd be able to add another middle aged man's amateur mechanics channel to YouTube - something that I am certain the world is desperate for.
I have the near opposite experience especially having attempted to build the mobile based product you mentioned [https://placenote.com/]
The seamlessness of glasses is really what makes this even possible, especially now that voice is becoming a seamless interface.
I largely like my phone to remain in my pocket (especially when I’m with my impressionable kids) and bringing it out and unlocking, getting my brain to ignore all the notifications, going through whatever button routine is required, then doing the camera localization dance, just doesn’t compare to one click + voice narration once it’s built right.
People already regularly use their phones for this kind of image capture (taking a picture as documentation, not for nostalgic memories or sharing). This seems like a positive signal. Voice doesn't get used this way, but the voice interactions are cumbersome on the phone mostly because the platform is not open enough, not because of form factor issues.
In regards to voice: there's no way to have access to the easy start mechanisms of wake words or quick button access and also control what happens before intent resolution and endpointing (i.e., deciding when the voice interaction is done). You can have your own app with its own "record" button: hard to open but you have control of what happens. Or you use the assistant infrastructure and have to compete with every other Apple/Google product goal and parsing approach, and at best you have a chance to do further recording only after the initial intent has fully resolved, the mic has closed, and you can reopen it.
So yes a phone can do all that, and it ALSO would be awesome, but just like with these glasses you can't ACTUALLY implement this.
>> The workflow for glasses (either these or some other hypothetical ones) would involve hitting a button and then having to either speak the command out loud or hit some other button to capture video/audio/etc
I was hoping to just say "Hey Meta, start recording". Totally hands free, even while driving or carrying stuff. I thought the whole point is to not have to mess with a phone.
Handling a phone is cumbersome - I'm playing a guitar and want to record to check what I'm doing wrong, I'm building something in the garage, taking something apart, etc. Sure I can setup some mobile stand but I usually won't bother, this would change that.
But these are sunglasses and I doubt resolution/focus will be good enough for those use cases.
> hitting a button and then having to either speak the command out loud or hit some other button to capture video/audio/etc., which seems more cumbersome than the phone approach
For the mass market, perhaps the right place to put the camera is on headphones. (I’m already talking to my AirPods.) This product doesn’t appear to be positioned for the mass market, however, but instead influencers.
I mean, the light makes it VERY apparent when it's recording or taking a picture.
Would you be just as uncomfortable eating lunch with someone who had their phone in their hand? It'd be much easier to surreptitiously record/photograph someone with a phone because they have no status indicator when they're recording and people inadvertently point phone lenses at each other all the time.
People used to feel all kinds of ways about what is now normal smartphone use. There are probably a lot of remnants of those attitudes in ‘00s media that can still be found.
Everyone either got over it or shut up about it because they (ahem, we) had clearly lost.
I expect actually-useful smart glasses will eventually overcome the same stigma. Actually-useful being the key part of that.
Maybe I haven't gotten far enough in the thread, but it seems like most people have forgotten that when Google came out with these, the people who were wearing them were called "glassholes".
As long as the activation is overt I don't think it's a big issue. Overt as in taking a picture or recording requires the user to do something that is noticeable to the people around them. The wake word is quite obvious; the button on the stem is a bit less, but together with the light I think it's fairly clear something is happening.
It would be a rare thing that someone would actually be streaming or recording on them, unless you agreed to make a video. Technically someone could record your every conversation with their phone in their pocket or on the table, but no one worries about that, because it goes against the social contract. If one of your friends did that regularly, everyone understands it would likely be the end of that friendship, and others they shared that with would shun them. I think it's the same with these glasses.
Another similar example is reading your SOs text messages. In the past this would be impossible because normal people didn't have a "paper trail", but now most everyone does. But it's not a huge concern for most people, because we know it's socially unacceptable to look at someone's messages without a very good reason.
> Imagine if you could take a picture of anything, add a little note, have it filed away.
This is more or less what Vanevar Bush imagined in his 1945 article “As We May Think”, which many consider the origin of hypertext [1].
“On a pair of ordinary glasses is a square of fine lines near the top of one lens, where it is out of the way of ordinary vision. When an object appears in that square, it is lined up for its picture. As the scientist of the future moves about the laboratory or the field, every time he looks at something worthy of the record, he trips the shutter and in it goes, without even an audible click.
…
And there is provision for direct entry. On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. On this are placed longhand notes, photographs, memoranda, all sorts of things. When one is in place, the depression of a lever causes it to be photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film…”
> Imagine if you could take a picture of anything, add a little note, have it filed away.
that's the plan, but for facebook's benefit instead of yours. We're not allowed to have cool new tech that doesn't exploit us in some way for the benefit of some one else.
Facebook loves to spy on other people and businesses without their consent and target its opponents like that, I've worked in a firm in which that happened. After a while the whole Cambridge Analytica fuck up came out and it was an A Ha moment for everyone involved.
Have you heard of rewind.ai? It does exactly that but for your computer screen. I find it incredibly useful. Combined with this, the future looks very promising!
This seems seriously cool. I wonder if its constant recording is going to fill up my HDD.
edit: found the storage option. It defaults to keeping all data, but I've changed that to one month retention -- they say they use around 14GB a month.
It reminds me of having to use screen recording software for a previous remote job. I wished I could use that recording to do something exactly like this. Now, if only one could flip the script, and make the employer request that recording, instead of forcing one to share it.
That... takes like a double-click on a modern cell phone to pull up the camera, with an all-day battery life and no silly designer glasses needed. Also doesn't need to upload all your crap to Meta.
> The Capture LED lets others know when you’re capturing content or going live. If the LED is covered, you’ll be notified to clear it.
Wonder how that works. Maybe the capture LED has a light sensor next to it that detects reflections? It solves an interesting problem, although the prevalence of cheap spy camera glasses on amazon make it an uphill battle.
LEDs can effectively be used as light sensors when wired in reverse - About a decade ago there was a post where someone turned an 8x8 LED matrix into a touch sensor.
It’s probably duty cycled on and off and compared to a photodiode output on the reflection.
Either way the moment that light comes on you’re getting punched if you point it at the wrong person. I’d rather have my phone hit out of my hand. Google Glass was not welcome and I suspect the same will be true of this.
I wonder if one could just replace the LED with a UV one, depending on the tolerances this kind of detection may still work while being visibly "off". :/
That wouldn't work with all materials that could be used to cover the camera. The proximity sensors that you describe are designed specifically to measure the change in capacitance due to proximity to a human; they can't detect something like a blob of glue that causes no change in capacitance.
For some reason this really doesn't work for me. I have also enabled the extra feature of locking the touch screen when in dark places, too. I still regularly get my pocket navigating my browser and my ear starting songs on Spotify mid-call.
Lack of HUD is why I wouldn't get these. I suppose if I was taking more pictures / video I might be more interested, like at the beach or something, but I don't find myself doing these things as much. Maybe this would make it easier for me to capture my life around me (my SO thinks i don't take enough pictures or video of our life), could alleviate having to remember to pull out the phone and such.
Add a HUD like google glass had and you may have a more compelling use case.
Honestly my biggest beef with this isn't the quality but the field of vision.
It's so incredibly narrow and not at all how we imagine a "first person perspective" looks like for a human. (I know we lie to ourselves, and think that our peripheral vision is better than it is, but it doesn't matter)
Oh yes the field of vision is very bad! I liked to take snapshots out when with my wife, and I'd turn my head and she wouldn't even be in the field of view.
You have to turn your head 180 degrees like an owl and have them dead centre in front of the camera side to get them on film.
I bought a pair last year and have taken it on a few trips. It's been great for certain activities where I want to take pictures/videos but don't want to have a phone in my hand (like on a boat or parasailing).
Another thing I noticed is that it allows me to record videos while staying in the moment. I took some videos with my wife and captured some cute interactions and conversations that I wouldn't have been able to record with my phone.
Most of the photos and videos don't turn out great because of the camera/mic quality and because you can't see what's in frame but I got some fun videos from them.
In my industry, mining, I can see this sort of integration into a miner's helmet working its way into sites as a sort of situation analysis tool pretty easily. It would make a lot of things so much easier for folks on the surface to be able to quickly see 3-D scans (lidar would be amazin) of broken rock, or new tunnel, or cracks, etc.
I am with others for the desire for more opennness. I would never hop on this loaded with proprietary restrictions. 100% data control for personal use would be a must.
It will absolutely get integrated sooner rather than later. The Microsoft Hololens is still bulky compared to these, but is getting tested out right now by the US military to view the insides of aircrafts [1]. After a few more size and cost decreasing iterations, it will get quickly adopted.
Granted, I'm a tech luddite by modern standards, so as a retail consumer I still fear ads all over my FOV. But for businesses there's absolutely a need, use case, everything for it.
Makes me think of the power dynamic between smart glass wearers and bystanders as a social problem and not a technical one: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ar-glasses
It's better than nothing, but it does put other people in the uncomfortable position of having to ask the glasses wearer to not record. And can you see the indication before you're actually on camera?
The counter is to put on your own pair of glasses that have mirrored lenses, a laser beam scanning back and forth and a prominent shotgun microphone pointed at the other person.
I had the original version of these, which didn't know if the LED was covered, but it didn't matter because no one even noticed when the LED was on, or if they did, they didn't seem to realize that it was a camera. I tried it at a party to get some candid shots with my friends. But in the end, the quality wasn't good enough for the candid shots to actually be worth keeping.
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Personally, not a fan of sticking a camera everywhere I look though. I get why companies want to push that feature (more data!) but I just don't see a reason why consumers need a camera pointing at everything they're doing.
Kinda cool nonetheless.
The new ones are so cheap I won't even wear them. Cheap plastic, plastic lenses, spring hinges that break quickly, and obnoxious branding on both the temples and the lenses. Terrible.
Your "zyl" acetate frames aren't higher quality. Modern acetate is stronger, lighter, less brittle, less subject to warping from temperature change, and more resistant to UV damage which impacts brittleness and color. 40 years of material science progress. No one in the industry would say older acetate is better. It's worse in every way especially because yours are old. They're breaking down.
People don't wear glass lenses anymore for a reason. They are heavy and the only advantage over plastic is less chromatic aberration which is a non issue unless you are comparing to an extreme prescription using high-index plastic. They are also fairly dangerous compared to plastic due to the way they shatter. They fog up more easily. Again, 40 years of material science.
Additionally, there are no low optical-quality plastic lens blanks. This is a solved problem. The only defects you'll get in lens blanks are bubbles and these won't make it through production. What happens after a manufacturer grinds the lens out is a different story but I can also tell you that their lens surfacing is not low quality by any means.
Your hinges aren't any better and get loose over time. You can't actually use these for 40 years, they will wear out too and are harder to replace. Spring loaded hinges are lighter and reduce strain on both the frames and the wearer. I know what they use, they aren't cheap, and are high quality.
I do agree with your point on the branding.
The optimization for optics is all about weight. Your old frames and lenses aren't better because they're heavier, they're worse. As well as being more brittle and shatterable. It's like pining for the old heavy golf clubs made of wood and iron or all steel cars with V8 engines. Yeah, they're heavier! But they're worse in every way.
I will also say that you should buy frames because you like the frames. If you want great lenses, you just get them made. You shouldn't expect high-quality prescription lenses from a frame manufacturer, that's what your optometrist is for. I buy cheap frames all the time and pop in whatever I want.
You may have a bit of a point if you are talking moderate to high prescription ordered from Ray-Ban, but if you are talking about their non-prescriptive sunglasses, you're just yelling about all the wrong things.
Edit: typo and swapped in "surfacing" rather than "production" for clarity.
I once had a pair I found under a house from I’d guess the 60s, the builder must have misplaced them. They felt like something from another universe compared to today’s garbage.
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The camera is only 720p. There are probably a couple more iterations before this becomes good enough to not pull your phone out.
With the amount of data collected, it should be provided free of charge, heck, you are getting paid too!
The real value to be made here is to get facebook’s data vacuum into a new aspect of our lives.
Edit: I do love that they have a transition lens version, though. I haven't seen that elsewhere.
Bose had some Bluetooth glasses, but their website currently says "We'll be back soon". I also can't find them on Amazon, so I'm wondering if they were discontinued.
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Apple? Or do you mean Meta? It would be understandable if you had never heard of them, given the recent rebrand!
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I assume "help" in this case will mean shoving endless ads your face and feeding manipulative lies to you on behalf of anyone willing to pay for it.
Agents barely work as of now. OpenAI’s plugins that ~do~ things like browse are still quite slow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aS4xhTaIPc
We're nearly at the "Foundation" levels of surveillance tech, but with no countermeasures in sight to oppose that. Even resisting web browser fingerprinting is difficult.
The only "countermeasures" we can have are "soft" ones - social, political and legal. Convince people to treat privacy as core value, and surveillance as repugnant. Make forms of surveillance illegal. Mandate by law to have surveillance capabilities in devices handicapped by design. But this, at best, only solves the problem for regular people and some of the time, while governments stay stable and sane - the possibility of deeper surveillance is still there, just the choice to perform it seems unattractive at a given moment.
The days of open communication about privacy (lol) are long gone!
https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle
https://yr.media/tech/guide-to-anti-surveillance-fashion/
This sounds like legislation. Mandate (with stiff penalties for violations) that any recording in the presence of a certain BLE advertised value (that's anonymized) means that all people should be removed from the scene with current image generation AI tooling? Not sure what to do about in frame vs out of frame, but perhaps this sparks something.
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Imagine if you could take a picture of anything, add a little note, have it filed away. Not necessarily an awesome Instagram picture, but just a picture of some mail you got, a tool you are putting away, any thing you want to record and save. Heck, why not a picture of your computer screen? Pair that with quickly available audio transcriptions and you can also dictate anything, thoughts, small notes, information associated with the images.
That all could be great... if the library of things you made was useful. It's pretty clear how it could be useful now; do some OCR and other detection on images, use a vector store for both that and transcripts, and hook it all up to an LLM assistant. It's a bit complicated, and a bit expensive to run, but at least for a prototype you could make something pretty incredible.
Meta might make something like that... but they aren't doing that yet, and they might never do that. If the platform was open people could explore these things right now. And it doesn't even need to be radically open, you don't need to be able to hack the firmware; but it has to be more open than the preview Ray-Ban glasses, and I'm assuming more open than this revision.
I know HN already has too much cynicism for my own liking, so it pains me to say: you can already do this with the phone you have in your pocket. Have a shortcut that enables audio dictation/photo mode/etc., and you're good to go.
The workflow for glasses (either these or some other hypothetical ones) would involve hitting a button and then having to either speak the command out loud or hit some other button to capture video/audio/etc., which seems more cumbersome than the phone approach that exists today.
During the teardown, part of my process (let's not dignify it with "workflow") has been photographing the incredible amount of crap that's been bolted to the engines as I remove pieces to help me with later reassembly. Sometimes I say a couple of words because the Live Photo captures some context.
I have come to loathe my phone as a camera. Yes it works with gloves on, but every day it ends up covered in oil and grease. Holding it is awkward, you have to do a bunch of swipey things to make the camera work, the 3D Touch (or whatever it's called now) is somewhat random with gloves, and I've lost count of the number of times it's got itself stuck in portrait or panorama mode. Those of you with daughters will understand this ultimate critique - it was worth it to me to bribe my grumpy pre-teen to operate the camera rather than fighting it myself.
All of this is to say, I could _really_ use a pair of camera glasses. That little bit of friction taken out of the process would make a massive difference to me. And if I could record video, I'd be able to add another middle aged man's amateur mechanics channel to YouTube - something that I am certain the world is desperate for.
The seamlessness of glasses is really what makes this even possible, especially now that voice is becoming a seamless interface.
I largely like my phone to remain in my pocket (especially when I’m with my impressionable kids) and bringing it out and unlocking, getting my brain to ignore all the notifications, going through whatever button routine is required, then doing the camera localization dance, just doesn’t compare to one click + voice narration once it’s built right.
In regards to voice: there's no way to have access to the easy start mechanisms of wake words or quick button access and also control what happens before intent resolution and endpointing (i.e., deciding when the voice interaction is done). You can have your own app with its own "record" button: hard to open but you have control of what happens. Or you use the assistant infrastructure and have to compete with every other Apple/Google product goal and parsing approach, and at best you have a chance to do further recording only after the initial intent has fully resolved, the mic has closed, and you can reopen it.
So yes a phone can do all that, and it ALSO would be awesome, but just like with these glasses you can't ACTUALLY implement this.
I was hoping to just say "Hey Meta, start recording". Totally hands free, even while driving or carrying stuff. I thought the whole point is to not have to mess with a phone.
But these are sunglasses and I doubt resolution/focus will be good enough for those use cases.
For the mass market, perhaps the right place to put the camera is on headphones. (I’m already talking to my AirPods.) This product doesn’t appear to be positioned for the mass market, however, but instead influencers.
Would you be just as uncomfortable eating lunch with someone who had their phone in their hand? It'd be much easier to surreptitiously record/photograph someone with a phone because they have no status indicator when they're recording and people inadvertently point phone lenses at each other all the time.
Everyone either got over it or shut up about it because they (ahem, we) had clearly lost.
I expect actually-useful smart glasses will eventually overcome the same stigma. Actually-useful being the key part of that.
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Another similar example is reading your SOs text messages. In the past this would be impossible because normal people didn't have a "paper trail", but now most everyone does. But it's not a huge concern for most people, because we know it's socially unacceptable to look at someone's messages without a very good reason.
This is more or less what Vanevar Bush imagined in his 1945 article “As We May Think”, which many consider the origin of hypertext [1].
“On a pair of ordinary glasses is a square of fine lines near the top of one lens, where it is out of the way of ordinary vision. When an object appears in that square, it is lined up for its picture. As the scientist of the future moves about the laboratory or the field, every time he looks at something worthy of the record, he trips the shutter and in it goes, without even an audible click. …
And there is provision for direct entry. On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. On this are placed longhand notes, photographs, memoranda, all sorts of things. When one is in place, the depression of a lever causes it to be photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film…”
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
“At 8:32, you were in the basement and left it on your work bench, it was very close to the edge of the table and possibly fell”
Ah the easy life…
that's the plan, but for facebook's benefit instead of yours. We're not allowed to have cool new tech that doesn't exploit us in some way for the benefit of some one else.
[1] https://www.rewind.ai/
edit: found the storage option. It defaults to keeping all data, but I've changed that to one month retention -- they say they use around 14GB a month.
It reminds me of having to use screen recording software for a previous remote job. I wished I could use that recording to do something exactly like this. Now, if only one could flip the script, and make the employer request that recording, instead of forcing one to share it.
The big question is what kind of development platform will it provide.
But it's obvious they don't want that community.
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Wonder how that works. Maybe the capture LED has a light sensor next to it that detects reflections? It solves an interesting problem, although the prevalence of cheap spy camera glasses on amazon make it an uphill battle.
Edit: Found the link, here it is: https://mrl.cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ledtouch/index.html
Analog Devices has an excellent article about using LEDs as sensors in this way: https://wiki.analog.com/university/courses/electronics/elect...
Either way the moment that light comes on you’re getting punched if you point it at the wrong person. I’d rather have my phone hit out of my hand. Google Glass was not welcome and I suspect the same will be true of this.
Seems not worth worrying about.
Add a HUD like google glass had and you may have a more compelling use case.
If someone could take the epson moverio and make it cordless, that’s more like what I want from smart glasses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF3iysOyelg&t=280s
If this has a better picture quality, like up to the ~2023 smartphone camera standards then I'll buy one. I really like the idea.
It's so incredibly narrow and not at all how we imagine a "first person perspective" looks like for a human. (I know we lie to ourselves, and think that our peripheral vision is better than it is, but it doesn't matter)
You have to turn your head 180 degrees like an owl and have them dead centre in front of the camera side to get them on film.
Another thing I noticed is that it allows me to record videos while staying in the moment. I took some videos with my wife and captured some cute interactions and conversations that I wouldn't have been able to record with my phone.
Most of the photos and videos don't turn out great because of the camera/mic quality and because you can't see what's in frame but I got some fun videos from them.
Few things are more enjoyable for me than looking at photo albums from trips I took years ago with loved ones.
I am with others for the desire for more opennness. I would never hop on this loaded with proprietary restrictions. 100% data control for personal use would be a must.
Granted, I'm a tech luddite by modern standards, so as a retail consumer I still fear ads all over my FOV. But for businesses there's absolutely a need, use case, everything for it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV4EQ1Ltujs
"The Capture LED lets others know when you're capturing content or going live. If the LED is covered, you'll be notified to clear it."
So that's nice.