Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses: a turning point | Hacker News Reader

Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses: a turning point

theverge.com

49 pointsisaacfrond50 comments

Turning point in what? It's a camera and a pair of speakers in ugly glasses (yes, personal opinion) with shit battery life and tied to an unethical company. That's the entire thing. They're not remotely "smart" in any way. Certainly no smarter than a pair of bluetooth earbuds.

Way uglier than a classic pair of Ray-Bans which is what I expected to see when I saw their brand attached to it. Thing looks like a shitty old Thunderbird.

I'm generally inclined to dislike these, but I do respect this decision:

"The capture LED light lets people know when you’re using the camera to capture content or going live. If the LED is covered, you will not be able to start recording, and you'll be notified to clear it."

I don't understand it myself. "I don't mind if people see X, but I'm bothered if they can prove it" is such a bizarre attitude to me.

I've known people who e.g. had justified worries about their children being kidnapped by a noncustodial parent. Someone in that situation doesn't necessarily mind if their neighbor sees their kid playing, but would mind quite a bit if said neighbor posted video of same to social media.

I don't mind acting silly doing kareoke at a bar in front of some random stragers, because it will only go as far as their memory, but I do mind if a video of it is uploaded to the internet.

There's a rather enormous difference between people seeing a thing and people recording a thing and, even more impactfully, distributing that recording or using it to populate databases.

Have you truly never had a conversation or real world interaction with someone that you didn't want recorded and then posted to the internet?

In public? Sure, but only because I was being an asshole, lying, or both.

"There is no warning system to detect hams being thrown at you in response to the LED lighting up, so be mindful."

It's better than nothing, but it's very, very far from adequate.

Is it worth buying one of these now, keeping it in a box for a year, then busting it out once we've found a way to hack the early firmware?

Otherwise I wouldn't dream of dropping the money on something so locked into social media.

I'd say so. The community always find a way and $300 is pretty reasonable given raybans are typically like $200 themselves.

Does that $300 still include the $195 rayban markup in the original price? /s

$150 of that $200 is markup over a comparable pair of sunglasses without the word "Ray-Bans" on the side.

Sure, but people pay for the name

I was surprised to see no SDK/API. Does Meta expect to seed and grow the ecosystem of apps themselves? Do they even have the bench to do this any longer?

If anyone from Meta is reading this, know there are companies out there eager to develop on the Wayfarer platform, is there a perhaps less publicized means for outsiders building on the platform?

  LED privacy indicator still too subtle

  I took pictures and filmed many times in public, and no one ever noticed.

Wow, these sound incredibly dystopian. Secret spy glasses everywhere you go. No thanks.

I felt like this when Google Glass was announced - but these days smartphone cameras are so ubiquitous and people constantly photograph/video others, I'm not sure this actually makes much of a difference. If someone wants to video you surreptitiously, they'll do it with their high quality phone camera and you won't notice.

Yeah there are so many ways to carry a camera these days, I'm not going to get fussed about one more -- even if I have no personal interest in this thing whatsoever. It's more about how people behave with their pictures and videos than it is about what tech they use to take them. Actually, these would be great on everyone else's head at concerts, I won't have to try to see past the phones they're holding up the entire time.

The dystopia these sound like is already here. If the "good guys" decline to wear them, that doesn't really really do anything to mitigate the dystopia. You can't put the cat back into the bag.

The turning point is that people think the metaverse wasn't going to happen but then they saw the last podcast with Lex and Zuck and then they knew.

Companies are working on things you cannot see yet, so if you want to catch up you need to work on things that they cannot even see yet.

Same goes if you dislike the surveillance era and think this will turn into a dystopian world. Then you must find a solution that no one else sees yet, before they go to market.

No one can argue against better solutions. They just work. You need to beat frictionless design.

Is there already a use case for that metaverse or is it 2nd life 2.0?

Zuck's plan is to make it a personal computing device for the next generation.

Woz/Jobs --> Personal Computer

Gates --> Business Computer

Jobs --> Pocket Computer

Zuck --> Visible Computer

People have been working on basically this "Visible Computer" concept for a few decades now, with pretty marginal results. What makes you think a) the time is right now from a a hardware point of view and b) Meta is the one to make it happen.

Neither of those things are obviously true, right?

Right. Meta, Apple, any existing company might not even be the one to make that happen.

It’s just Zuck’s goal, but I don’t know who will do it.

However, if it is technologically possible, someone will build it, and it will probably be the future platform of computing.

If you don’t want Meta or Apple to lock down that future ecosystem then I am saying you should build an alternative future before they get there.

Why would I want to wear a computer on my face? Seems really awkward.

Apple seems to think otherwise.

Perhaps a cool product, but I wont touch it with a 10 meter pole. Same reason I will never buy a Quest, Metas grubby fingerprints are all over it. Why would I buy a camera that can only post to instagram?

Most cameras can't post to anything at all though, you need to download the images from your camera, which is possible with this too.

This reads like an ad for Luxottica, the eyeglass frame monopoly. Luxottica bought Ray-Ban some years back, took the product off the market for a year, then brought it out again at 4x the price.

This is flop #2 for Meta and Ray-Ban in "smart glasses".[1] Version 1 was two years ago.

There's not even a display. They can't even do Pokemon Go yet.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/even-people-who-boug...

So yeah, you will pass, but what about majority of people? Most people do not know what the privacy is. Most people do not understand "inflation".

Most people want features. Most people are lazy. If Zuck provides a couch solution that does not put so much strain on the head this will be a goldmine.

... with voice assistant, with productivity features.

Most people complaining about privacy "you do own a smart phone?".

hot take: don't like that it's called smart glasses, it's a camera(s) attached to glasses, sure wireless but yeah

I don't know if it's twitter's arrogance or is it Mark/Meta's maturity but my perseption of Meta is generally a little positive these days unline before when I would take anything from facebook with a grain of salt. Just to clear myself, I still don't trust Meta completely yet to use any of their products.

Potential Option 3: your perspective is more influenced by the prevailing tone / narrative that you're reading online than you realize. When Twitter was in positive light and Meta wasnt, you may have been more positive / neutral on Twitter and negative on Meta. Now the prevailing tone is negative on Elon / Twitter / X and you may be going with the flow while being more positive on Meta now that the prevailing narrative has shifted to more neutral or positive.

I've seen this with dozens of our employees and people in tech. Without anything materially new to come out of Zuckerberg, everyone magically started liking him again simultaneously. It's amazing to watch.

This is one of the products that Apple could make but didn't because they know better.

They look aright tbh. There seems to be no escaping getting caught on camera anyway, people are taking pictures and filming constantly when I go into town. This takes it a step further convenience wise so I do see them catching on.

I have no hope for a society that pays a hefty price for the privilege to be a walking surveillance camera and look absolutely stupid doing it.

What about this plus spatial audio? What do we get? Environmental computing?

What does that mean?

Are you familiar with Apple's latest move into AR/VR? They are pushing "spatial computing" as a foundational concept for AR/VR+Audio:

https://developer.apple.com/wwdc23/topics/spatial-computing/

https://www.apple.com/apple-vision-pro/

These glasses don't even have a screen.

I wish the video quality was better. If they can get iPhone quality camera in there, I would def get these!

It was dystopian, invasive tech back when the Glass-holes were doing it in 2013 and it's still dystopian and invasive now [0]. The two major differences are:

1. The product execution is better this time

2. We've become more complacent about this sort of thing

Wonder if we will tolerate it this time around?

---

[0] Reference: Black Mirror S01E03 (The Entire History of You)

It's a shame that I have to face the externalities of people paying for the privilege to do the dirty work of the surveillance state. If I was gonna wear this stupid shit, I had better be getting paid to so.

But this time you look cool while being tethered to Zuck's poison.

This was the first episode I watched, and it hit hard enough that I just couldn't do any more of it.

Nope. hard pass. Meta can try all it wants to make these happen -- but they arent going to land. Why would I want camera glasses locked into facebook? Fuck that. If they made non-camera ones with just the speakers -- those would have a bigger market what with cameras added. I am sure they next revision of the facebook phone will takeoff /s

(Sigh) Assume everything from the Verge is a thinly veiled advertisement for the powers that be.

And oh, look, the company that coordinated with Cambridge-Analytica to compromise the 2016 Election and give it to Trump wants me to buy their headset again.

lol what? I'm not a fan of Facebook, but saying they coordinate with Cambridge Analytica is quite a reach. Global Science Research Coordinate with Cambridge Analytica… Facebook had a shitty API.

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