this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
295 points (95.1% liked)
Technology
75489 readers
2579 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I understand the gripes about Meta, but I don't understand how everyone clowns on this like the core concept is stupid or unwanted.
Easy $1000 sell: cycling / escooter accessory. People already regularly buy expensive sport glasses just for sun and wind protection. With a smart version of them like this, you add open ear headphone, and you add the potential for navigation directions, or even a Bluetooth rear view camera on the back of your helmet to get a virtual mirror.
The core technology is impressive, and has legitimate use cases.
But that doesn’t outweigh the enormous privacy concerns these devices raise. They aren’t being angled as an accessory for specific activities, but as everyday wearables. If smart glasses like these became common they would be unavoidable, creating leave of intrusion that’s concerning even without Meta being involved.
"Hi, just wearing my glasses in the changing room..."
As a cyclist, this is a terrible sell. I already have tech which does all this, and probably does it better, for less.
I don't need a HUD constantly in my face obscuring the beautiful views. I have sun glasses which fit well with a helmet and wrap around my face to keep the wind out.
I have a cycling computer, which offers GPS turn by turn, and pairs to power meters, heart rate and radar light. It is mounted on the handlebars in an easy to view place.
I have bone conducting headphones for music.
All of this is significantly less than $1000, and if something breaks, I can replace it all individually. I also don't have to wear ridiculous looking sunglasses to listen to my bone conducting headphones.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but this reads a bit like some of the comments on those old Slashdot threads clowning on the first smartphones.
‘these things will fail, I already have a camera, a cellphone, and an mp3 player, why would anyone want them all in one device?’
Heh...these days I kinda long for devices for for specific purposes again 😅 and I'm a software engineer.
Exactly my first thought.
Hope it doesn’t turn out the same way this time around
You'd rather have a camera cell phone and mp3 player than a smartphone?
No.
Doesn’t make me any less apprehensive about meta putting cameras and microphones on everybody’s face.
We're at the point now that we "need" 6 gadgets that do the same thing.
Literally everything you said is just dumb hater bullshit. You added nothing to the discussion.
I agree that head mounted displays can be useful, I'm contemplating getting something like it, but just no cameras, please. not in the frame, not backwards, not anywhere.
If you don’t have cameras you instantly lose a tonne of potential amazing functionality.
If you’re in public you have no expectation of privacy, so someone being able to photograph you or record you with glasses is no different to being able to do it with a camera or phone.
People should still have an expectation of privacy in public spaces to some extent, otherwise the only way is to move to the foresf. One should not have to be concerned about being recorded, especially children (a pdfile can take photos to pick “targets”, so to speak).
Why? You're in a public space. You don't have privacy when you're out in public. There are already laws around taking photos of minors etc, but it being able to be done via glasses is no different to it being able to be done with a phone or a camera.
Unless society gets revolutionized so that people can remain in their homes as much as they want (and even then), that is not an option.
What is not an option?
Being surveilled in your daily life, becoming a sitting duck.
The pdfile will do it anyways. What concerns me is all those data will be streamed to Meta. They will relay it to Palantir. The best mass surveillance you can think of.
The glasses don't record and stream all the time btw. They don't have their own built in wireless connection to meta.
For now, just give it some more time. ;)
To me it seems like a thing that sounds kinda cool on paper, but is not actually that useful in practice. We already have the ability to do real time translations or point the camera at something to get more information via AI with our smartphones, but who actually uses that on the regular? It's just not useful or accurate enough in its current state and having it always available as a HUD isn't going to change that imo. Being able to point a camera at something and have AI tell me "that's a red bicycle" is a cool novelty the first few times, but I already knew that information just by looking at it. And if I'm trying to communicate with someone in a foreign language using my phone to translate for me, I'll just feel like a dork.
Anybody living in a foreign country with a different language.
Being able to read signs and storefronts from a motorbike in real time would be life-changing.
Visual search is already useful. People go through the effort of posting requests to social media or forums asking "what is this thing" or "help me ID these shoes and where I can buy them" or "what kind of spider is this" all the time. They're not searching for red bicycles, they're taking pictures of a specific Bianchi model and asking what year it was manufactured. Automating the process and improving the reliability/accuracy of that search will improve day to day life.
And I have strong reservations about the fundamental issues of inference engines being used to generate things (LLMs and diffusers and things like that), but image recognition, speech to text, and translation are areas where these tools excel today.
And the answer they get will probably be wrong, or at least wrong often enough that you can't trust it without looking it up yourself. And even if these things do get good enough people will still won't be using it frequently enough to want to wear a device on their face to do it, when they can already do it better on their phone.
Sell your bike to afford them. Easy. It's another pointless gimmick, like 3D TV or the Metaverse and virtual shopping. Zuckerberg had one idea and got lucky, it's been wasting money since.