Can’t wait to have 3D “personalized” ad billboards follow me everywhere and “pause” my walking directions until I watch a 30-second unskippable commercial. The VR glasses future is exciting no doubt: too bad however that it is being ushered in by two surveillance, I mean, advertising companies (Google and Facebook).
1. Ok, the subtitles are in the lady's bust area, does that mean that glassholes 2.0 will look down there when they talk with someone?
2. The popup on the bottom right corner "Gemini start translate" is black on top of light background, does that mean that these new glasses can display dark on top of light background? I thought this was impossible with current technology. Or was it faked like magic leap faked the jumping whale demo?
How they usually address the fact that 50% of their target market is already wearing glasses? Would they just ignore that 50% in their first iteration and then sell customised smart glasses ?
I always wonder this. I was in the target market for Magic Leap / Apple Vision Pro but I never considered buying either because of (among other reasons) the extra hassle of prescription inserts (both for me and for guests who would want to try them).
I presume someone has done the maths - but it's always killed my interest in these form factors.
Sounds like the plan is an attempt to position Gemini as a more useful Siri-like assistant by giving it better input and output capabilities in the form of AR glasses
They're not as noticeable as Google's. Huge difference. Their basically hidden cameras. Google glass has this huge weird glowy glass brick sticking out and the camera hole is also way bigger (I have the enterprise version myself here). I rarely wear it around others though and if I do I put red tape over the camera so they can see it's inoperative.
Though I mainly bought them as a curiosity (second hand for very little). I find an xreal much more useful.
Boss has started wearing the ray bans around the office and everyone unanimously agrees he's an asshole for it. Also because he talks about them constantly
Will it take off as a general consumer product this time? Probably, for some (unfortunately).
It will create a whole new class of distracted people in traffic, that's for sure. Someone lost in a smartphone screen is at least visually recognisable (“Better look out for that smombie about to cross…”), but someone dutifully following Google Maps directions on one of these could actually look like they are aware of their surroundings, whilst their full attention is fixed on the little map widget.
I think the problem here is traffic and cars. Seems crazy to think that it’s normalised to be in alert mode 100% of the time when out of your home because of cars. Every corner, every cross, I need to stop and double check for cars otherwise my life could end.
I'm really not looking forward to (pure) humans assaulting cyborgs again.
> No shirt. No shoes. No augmented reality glasses. No service. Earlier this month, human cyborg and University of Toronto Professor Steve Mann, claims he was brutalized and kicked out of a Paris McDonald’s after employees objected to his headset and its ability to record photos and videos of his experiences.
> [snip]
> To draw attention to his plight, on July 16th Mann posted an account of the alleged assault on blogspot, causing an international uproar. The incident has so far been covered by more than three dozen major news outlets, including Tech Crunch, Forbes, Mashable and The Verge. A group on Reddit had more than 2,000 comments as of this writing. Sci-fi blog io9 even described the alleged attack as "the world’s first cybernetic hate crime."
I'm kind of anxious about checking the map when I'm riding a motorcycle in traffic. You can get away with much lower situational awareness in a car simply because you're far more predictable and not invisible.
Speaking of which... I'm still waiting for a bike helmet with a back-facing camera/HUD that is neither vaporware nor "smart" (read vendor-dependent and barely working), and doesn't suffer from basic usability mistakes. That would be infinitely more useful and probably easier to make than this.
Is that much different from people lost in their thoughts or focusing on their podcast ?
As you point out, distracted people already exist, and new classes of them will appear every day. The problem exists and I don't want to minimize it, but from a driver's perspective the difference sounds minimal, and doesn't affect how you'll handle the situation (someone looking aware might not actually be)
This is not comparable to your two examples which are passive, the new device requires active partisipation will be additionaly distracting in that there will be all of the "gotchas" of modern UI design demanding "engagement".
Face it, this is an attempt to have everything a person sees and hears projected by a corporate entity....."real time threat awareness" and instant sales opotunintues, just look at anything and find out "how much™", .....offer price determined by pulse, pupil dialation, previous comments,buying power and purchases.
good times
You're right, it's not much different at all. People have been walking around with headphones for decades, and the same prejudice existed early on when Bluetooth headsets were all the rage. XR glasses simply expand this to another sense.
Can it arguably be more dangerous? Sure. But we'll come up with more technology and regulation to minimize the dangers. And the prejudice will eventually go away as well.
As much as I think that everyone walking around with these things is unsettling in a dystopian way, transhumanism is inevitable, and this is just another step in that direction.
And it will haunt the Apple efforts to get these worn advertising screens into the market as well.
Good.
Why would one pay for the privilege to have everything they see overlayed with advertisements and every micro-expression analyzed for even better ad targeting?
I wouldn’t use a smartphone (or a browser on my computer for that matter) if it weren’t routed through my private DNS blocking advertising and tracking.
Whenever I see how the internet looks like for normal people, I shudder in horror.
Glass had a backlash when privacy still existed. Now we have the Rabbit or the AI Pin, and everyone tells their deepest secrets (even commercial ones like source code) to ChatGPT without thinking about what could go wrong.
Even on HN we can see users saying that AI is better than a psychiatrist.
If it is cheaper than a Meta VR thing, it could be as popular as the latest iPhone.
On top of that they got released more than 10 years ago. We have a new generation of users - I think (might be wrong thought) for gen Gen Z privacy is less of an issue and they are heavy users or tiktok and snapchat (comparing to millenials).
Original glasses looked also more futuristic - new one like raybans looks more like sunglasses so other people less aware about being recorded.
I believe this is the most important argument in favor of local LLMs. There are industries where you can just send some info to OpenAI or Anthropic and just hope it will be safe there.
Your examples are the reason I asked. Whatever Meta was thinking the result was a flop in spite of billions spent on research and production. Apple halted the production of Vision Pro.
So I'm very curious - what caused Google's CXOs to think they absolutely have to revive the dead horse everybody tries to resuscitate but nobody succeeds?
because other companies have done it without it instantly triggering everyone that saw them. Snapchat has Spectacles and Facebook/RayBans have ReyBan-Meta and neither are having customers called glassholes and getting beaten for wearing head mounted cameras everywhere. honestly i think the reason is for whatever reason popular media demonized google glass as evil privacy invading spying device thus killing it in its infancy and ignored snapchat and facebook when they did the same thing.
The public backlash was from apple fanboys and apple PR department. Some of internal apple data got leaked a while back and they talked about their PR plans which included seeding social media with "glasshole".
I tried Glass and it basically didn't work at all. I don't have a strong accent (standard British) and it could only understand half of what I was saying. Given that the only interface was voice... kind of a deal-breaker.
That said, I wouldn't expect this to be a success either. People don't really like talking to devices in public. It's fundamentally embarrassing.
Google Glass development never really stopped. The enterprise editions where on sale for years. They were shelved around the time work on these translation glasses was announced.
I see that as a dystopian future. Google wants to model entire cities in real time, just like London with all the cameras everywhere, but for the profit of a private company and three letter agencies.
It used to be that in a small village everyone knew what everyone else was doing. Now with cloud connected cameras it will be impossible to have privacy on cities. A google camera will see and follow you anywhere you go. They will recognise you, they will track your movement when you go out of reach of one camera into another.
That is too much power and we should not give it to anyone, public or private.
This sounds to me like the most straightforward trying to solve social problems with (blocking) technological solutions.
You'll only stop that future by securing a democratic government and have it protect citizens with solid privacy protection. Fighting technology is an already lost battle (we already have the means at scale)
Two decades past, here in Australia, I worked on a proposal for a another party to develop uniform ubiquitous CCTV software infrastructure for the UK as part of a tender process.
The people I worked for literally tagged it in house as Panopticon.
Big brother social objections aside the one feature I like was ironing out the wrinkles on buses exchanging their most recent footage whenever they parked up at a stop or at lights within wireless range.
The driving intent, at theat time. as I was told, was to be sure to have useful footage survive in the event of another wave of:
I parted ways not long after that initial period as I expected things to drift in the direction of "Well, now that we have this, how can we use it to increasingly track people other than actual terrorists?"
Readit News
2. The popup on the bottom right corner "Gemini start translate" is black on top of light background, does that mean that these new glasses can display dark on top of light background? I thought this was impossible with current technology. Or was it faked like magic leap faked the jumping whale demo?
I presume someone has done the maths - but it's always killed my interest in these form factors.
Though I mainly bought them as a curiosity (second hand for very little). I find an xreal much more useful.
Will it take off as a general consumer product this time? Probably, for some (unfortunately).
It will create a whole new class of distracted people in traffic, that's for sure. Someone lost in a smartphone screen is at least visually recognisable (“Better look out for that smombie about to cross…”), but someone dutifully following Google Maps directions on one of these could actually look like they are aware of their surroundings, whilst their full attention is fixed on the little map widget.
> No shirt. No shoes. No augmented reality glasses. No service. Earlier this month, human cyborg and University of Toronto Professor Steve Mann, claims he was brutalized and kicked out of a Paris McDonald’s after employees objected to his headset and its ability to record photos and videos of his experiences.
> [snip]
> To draw attention to his plight, on July 16th Mann posted an account of the alleged assault on blogspot, causing an international uproar. The incident has so far been covered by more than three dozen major news outlets, including Tech Crunch, Forbes, Mashable and The Verge. A group on Reddit had more than 2,000 comments as of this writing. Sci-fi blog io9 even described the alleged attack as "the world’s first cybernetic hate crime."
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/cyborg-steve-mann-det...
Dead Comment
Speaking of which... I'm still waiting for a bike helmet with a back-facing camera/HUD that is neither vaporware nor "smart" (read vendor-dependent and barely working), and doesn't suffer from basic usability mistakes. That would be infinitely more useful and probably easier to make than this.
Not anxiety by the way, just a healthy amount of distrust.
As you point out, distracted people already exist, and new classes of them will appear every day. The problem exists and I don't want to minimize it, but from a driver's perspective the difference sounds minimal, and doesn't affect how you'll handle the situation (someone looking aware might not actually be)
Can it arguably be more dangerous? Sure. But we'll come up with more technology and regulation to minimize the dangers. And the prejudice will eventually go away as well.
As much as I think that everyone walking around with these things is unsettling in a dystopian way, transhumanism is inevitable, and this is just another step in that direction.
Yes. Transparent glasses are much worse than looking down on your phone.
Deleted Comment
Good.
Why would one pay for the privilege to have everything they see overlayed with advertisements and every micro-expression analyzed for even better ad targeting?
I wouldn’t use a smartphone (or a browser on my computer for that matter) if it weren’t routed through my private DNS blocking advertising and tracking.
Whenever I see how the internet looks like for normal people, I shudder in horror.
Meta is fine with HN crowd it seems?
Dead Comment
Even on HN we can see users saying that AI is better than a psychiatrist.
If it is cheaper than a Meta VR thing, it could be as popular as the latest iPhone.
Original glasses looked also more futuristic - new one like raybans looks more like sunglasses so other people less aware about being recorded.
I believe this is the most important argument in favor of local LLMs. There are industries where you can just send some info to OpenAI or Anthropic and just hope it will be safe there.
Deleted Comment
No one wants to talk about how those headsets are used or how are usage breakdowns by regions, though.
So I'm very curious - what caused Google's CXOs to think they absolutely have to revive the dead horse everybody tries to resuscitate but nobody succeeds?
That said, I wouldn't expect this to be a success either. People don't really like talking to devices in public. It's fundamentally embarrassing.
It used to be that in a small village everyone knew what everyone else was doing. Now with cloud connected cameras it will be impossible to have privacy on cities. A google camera will see and follow you anywhere you go. They will recognise you, they will track your movement when you go out of reach of one camera into another.
That is too much power and we should not give it to anyone, public or private.
You'll only stop that future by securing a democratic government and have it protect citizens with solid privacy protection. Fighting technology is an already lost battle (we already have the means at scale)
CCTV is everywhere in UK.
The people I worked for literally tagged it in house as Panopticon.
Big brother social objections aside the one feature I like was ironing out the wrinkles on buses exchanging their most recent footage whenever they parked up at a stop or at lights within wireless range.
The driving intent, at theat time. as I was told, was to be sure to have useful footage survive in the event of another wave of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings
I parted ways not long after that initial period as I expected things to drift in the direction of "Well, now that we have this, how can we use it to increasingly track people other than actual terrorists?"
It is amazing to see just how quickly they are found because of the all the CCTV cameras.