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Comment by Schlagbohrer | Hacker News Reader

Counterpoint: I am looking forward to the opportunity to get fully open source, open hardware AR glasses. I anticipate that it will happen as first Meta and Google and big Chinese firms spend the R&D to create the hardware to make it possible, then Chinese knock-offs and discount brands appear, and then someone will start selling a pair through CrowdSupply which are truly open source.

At that point I will be able to have the fun of AR (gaming with paper toys or other papercrafts, displaying characters on a table for my tabletop RPG group, getting directions in a foreign city, identifying plants and insects just by looking at them, seeing where my cats are located through walls via their airtag collars) without any ads, without any data harvesting nor privacy concerns, and even being able to write my own custom apps or firmware mods. It will still be a toy rather than a necessary part of life like a smartphone has become but a fun toy nonetheless.

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The software is there already, apparently https://github.com/Mentra-Community/MentraOS

The big hurdle for widely available AR/VR is microdisplay availability. They require displays that are massively denser than regular glass-based LCDs and OLEDs but the ones made like silicon chips. Further, they require specialized drivers for generating correct voltages and waveforms, and they have to be coupled to exotic optics, either the "pancake" concentric reflexive lenses or stacks of Fresnel lenses for VR, or with off-axis optical surfaces or even sliced stacks of PVD coated surfaces or worse yet literal nanoscale or holographic metasurfaces for AR/smart glasses. Those can't be turned on a lathe, barely potentially 3D printable with transparent resin.

That makes smart glasses as a business to only make sense as a massive project with tons of stakeholders involving technical consultants and actual manufacturing companies that can still make those things. That can't be for cheap knockoffs, and that's the problem that needs to be solved for cheap smartglasses.

Counterpoint, people will install content overlays and all of the same problems will exist with open source because "content isn't free".

Why wait?

Meta Ray-Ban - already hacked by p0pcycle

Rokid Glasses - rooted firmware https://github.com/jaskier-os/client-glasses

Google Glass Explorer Edition - officially supported root access

Unless you can build the OS from source, you don't really control it.

Even then, look at Android. Graphene and similar are pretty good base operating systems, but almost the entire app ecosystem is corporate spyware.

> but almost the entire app ecosystem is corporate spyware

this is very true, but it also has a huge FOSS app ecosystem and highly polished FOSS apps.

I've recently been having Codex patch closed source apps making them work offline and greatly reducing their permissions and it works really well.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.getatoms.a...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hybridcali...

I agree the FOSS parts are fine. The problem is that there are reasons you have to carry a cell phone, and there are not FOSS alternatives for those things.

Patching binaries of such mandatory garbage is a nice idea though!

This could solve the main problem I had with graphene in the past, which is that some applications I had to use (like for parking or charging a car or whatever) crashed on startup with a Null Pointer Exception, and the set of broken apps changed from week to week.

I imagine binary patching could be used to bypass hardware attestation checks too (you'd need to extract the key from the enclave, but that's usually pretty trivial, depending on the phone model). None of the apps I used required that.

The phones themselves are part of the surveillance state, u/privacyishuman

GrapheneOS and iPhones are generally more secure and therefore private than desktop OSes. The idea that phones are inherently worse for privacy is wrong. You can use them in airplane mode to avoid sharing your location with carriers.

The apps you use, sure, those are also optional, but using those same apps on a desktop would give them even more information about you and more power over your system.

>> The idea that phones are inherently worse for privacy is wrong.

Phones will always be worse for privacy. They are festooned with microphones, cameras and a variety of radios. The PC I am using to type this doesn't have any of those things.

My desktop computer does not follow me around everywhere. I can be assured I am not being tracked by it by not being in the same location. If I have to leave my phone behind in order to ensure I am not being surveilled, then it begs the question: why do i need a phone in the first place?

> You can use them in airplane mode to avoid sharing your location with carriers.

You can't. "Airplane mode" doesn't actually shut down everything. Carriers can still track your phone. https://undercodetesting.com/how-your-phone-tracks-you-even-...

Your phone also still collects a record of your GPS data, and that history gets transmitted back the moment you have a connection. Your phone can also still be tracked via bluetooth while in airplane mode. That's also how "find my device" works when your phone in airplane mode. WiFi data can also be collected while in airplane mode.

Airplane mode is basically a lie. It's prevents the transmission of certain specific signals from your device, but that's about it.

Even Realities G2 can now run custom firmware too

Interesting

So how many people run jailbroken smartphones? Society adapts to technology if it gets popular enough, and using it becomes basically mandatory.

>Rokid Glasses - rooted firmware https://github.com/jaskier-os/client-glasses

Which model?

It's there any infra for it? As in downloading face data from Facebook and the like.

Countercounterpoint: by participating in this ecosystem which is ad-subsidized, you legitimize it via network effects, contributing to a shittier world for all, even if you yourself block the ads. I don't want the be the target of someone else's AR glasses, and I shouldn't have to give up being in public to accomplish that.

The open source, open hardware glasses the OP wants wouldn't be ad-subsidized.

And the surveillance state part?

Yes, that too. Open source / open hardware can be an effective counter-measure against the surveillance state.

No, because it will eventually have people-identifying apps.

Sousveillance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance

The research and industrial pipeline would be ad-subsidized, in Schlagbohrer's account, because it starts with Meta/Alphabet/etc proving the market and establishing demand for microdisplays (and other components). This gives the knock-off market a target to optimize until the components are cheap enough that some small business sets up an open hardware glasses kit on crowdsupply for Schlagbohrer to buy.

For myself, my smart glasses use case involves darkening headlights of oncoming traffic as I drive at night. The road curves a bit in parts of the city I live in, and the headlights shine in my eyes. It's not worth 5,000$ but car insurance also feels expensive until I need it.

> without any ads

Why stop there? Stream the camera to a CNN and black out all the ads in real time you'd other wise be forced to see walking down the street or in the subway.

Letting a piece of technology mess with my perception 24/7 is the last thing I'm going to do, thank you.

I feel like that's something Steve Mann[0] talked about doing in his AR work. I don't have time to go look for it but it's probably out there.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann_(inventor)

> nor privacy concerns

Except for those of everyone else around you

Every Founder: Freedom for me; externalities for thee!

If you don't watch the ads on your AR glasses after all the free subsidies provided by the big tech companies you are part of the problem.

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