Tacky men with ridiculous glasses want you to wear them too (opens in new tab)

I don't love the idea of smart glasses and I'm definitely very concerned about the implications of their widespread adoption. And yes, most of what we've seen hasn't looked very good.

But when I see a headline like "tacky men with ridiculous glasses" I get a sense that the intent is more to persuade via bullying than anything else, which...I dunno. Doesn't feel great!

This feels like I'm reading a comment written by anti-video game moms in the early 90s talking about the stupid unfashionable nerds and how they were ushering in a frightening new age of fewer values and greater social isolation.

I dunno, I'd love to have elf-like abilities to see systems of energy in the world around me that the human eye can't see, like wind patterns, and be able to zoom in on plants and animals in the garden and woods where I hike. I can't wait to see the skins people create for themselves, just walking around the world on holidays with fun appearances. And I'm excited for all the identity crises coming. Philosophy as physical reality.

But I guess this is as diverse of a human experience as y'all are willing to tolerate. :/

I'm actually looking forward to AR glasses getting more mainstream. My dream is glasses with displays that show live captions for people speaking. My auditory processing kinda sucks, and live captions would be a huge help in conversations. I'd also see the appeal of a HUD with some basic information like compass direction, clock, and weather, but really just captions would be awesome.

But all of the mainstream glasses are basically just bad earbuds and cameras. The idea of permanent cameras on my face feels creepy as hell, and there are a million better options for earbuds. It also feels ridiculous to get a device with a permanent connection to one single company's AI. It's like a dedicated Hulu button on a smart TV's remote, but several cranked several notches dumber.

The accessibility features for blind and low-sight individuals is life-changing. These are available already for Meta glasses, and I am very hopeful that the Google Audio glasses will be as good.

The problem is not the glasses.

Industrial use cases will be huge once software+AI are firing on all cylinders.

I’m a skeptic on the consumer side of this being a runaway hit like smartphones.

Enterprise and industrial and the trades use cases in physical space is big.

I keep getting this ad for... Meta? glasses that shows a guy at a concert I guess filming it with his glasses. It zooms out and everyone around him has their phone in the air but not him because he's super cool.

It's like one of those puzzle images where you're supposed to find 20 things wrong with this picture.

Why did this site prompt me for permission to send notifications? Did my browser just do something weird? Seems strange

These people have no taste.

But I must admit, similar things regarding style were said about the AirPods and here we are.

I would encourage anyone who has a chance to book a Vision Pro demo at an Apple Store. It changed my mind in the following way:

Previously, I thought AVPs were expensive, ridiculous and useless. Now I think they are expensive and still mostly ridiculous and useless.

I saw the immersive movies and the immersive sports experiences. If they had AVP support for MLB/NBA games in my market I would absolutely buy a subscription. I think they have Lakers now but I don’t care about that.

From what I understand, there’s still a chicken and egg problem for Meta and Apple with regards to content and devices. It sucks because both companies are flush and could fix it if they wanted to.

The device itself still costs too much though.

The new Google ones don't look too bad.

links to pages which ask if they can send you notifications should be insta-flagged + banned on hn

Since when was looking ridiculous a hindrance to being fashionable?

> Sorry for exposing you to this image

The photo captions are hilarious: "Style icons"; "Ahead of his time"

Zuckerberg looks like Woody Allen in that photo. :)

I'm rooting for this general class of technology as a platform for sensory augmentation for the blind. I don't know exactly what sonic encoding of spatial information is exactly ideal — I suspect it's something echo-like, only slowed-down — but it's going to be a hell of a lot easier to develop it and support it on commodity hardware. Please no Meta login, though.

My wife wore Meta glasses (we borrowed a pair from a friend) on a visit to the Vancouver aquarium and they were frankly amazing. You could just hit a button and say something like “what’s that orange fish in the back?” and it just tells you and then you can read stuff off the plate or get more information if you need.

I get that this kind of dunk polemic is popular among a certain crowd but it’s more incantatory than persuasive. For the rest of us who don’t particularly dress stylishly or whatever I guess it’s fine. I can be tacky. Not the greatest sin.

As someone who wears glasses, I hate glasses. Yet these wears are never designed for those with glasses so you have to buy add ons to ensure you can see out these glasses.

To have eyesight without glasses would be bliss, minus laser surgery.

Yesterday's story about airpods causing wearers to isolate themselves and become unhappier comes to mind. Headphones in your ears, display in your glasses... about the only way to connect with anyone will be to smell really bad I guess.

I agree that VR goggles hit a ceiling due to simple inconvenience. Whether smart glasses will suffer the same fate is a very interesting question. But the article would be much more effective without the cheap “tech bro” ridicule. Ultimately, after calling every product ugly, the analysis put forward by this author comes down to “short battery life and privacy concerns”.

I read in another thread on another site that the Snapchat SPECs were targeted at developers. If not are they going to market with what Evan is attempting to wear at over $2K ?? Insights appreciated, NSC.

I think passthrough has no future. VR games are fun, immersive applications are real, AR adds a dimension to that but without the immersive applications tech bros will keep failing at this one.

This is so much like something of the amazing series Silicon Valley. Fucking billionaires.

> sold a few million camera glasses for pervs

I stopped reading.

If you want to convince people, try to meet them where they're at.

I hope theft deters people from wearing these perv glasses. They're easier to nick than phones since owner isn't gripping them at all. I'd tolerate a fair amount of crime and public disorder as part of this tradeoff, like how we keep predators around to control pests.