_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Meta Ray-Ban Display
bilsbie wrote 30 min ago:
Any chance someone could root this and run open source software
connected to user controlled AI?
I love the product but hate all the privacy issues and just not being
in control of such an intimate device.
bilsbie wrote 34 min ago:
I just decided Iâm buying this just for the live AI. Assuming they
fix the issues.
Iâd use it for so many things. Cooking, repairs, maybe even
motivating me to do yard work? A full time AI assistant is just such a
crazy sci fi idea.
robofanatic wrote 54 min ago:
These glasses look exactly like my grandpa used to wear back in 1980s
tokai wrote 1 hour 8 min ago:
Wouldn't these be illegal to wear while driving/riding in most of the
world?
probablypower wrote 1 hour 36 min ago:
The penultimate final frontier, adverts directly in front of your
eyeballs 24/7, and tracking not just your position but your attention.
Only step beyond this is neural implants putting purchasing decisions
directly into your grey matter.
rkomorn wrote 1 hour 31 min ago:
Maybe the next step of the business plan is to sell blue (or green)
screen shirts to individuals on which AR glasses can display targeted
advertising that only you see (eg: everyone you see in those shirts
is wearing Nike gear, but everyone I see is wearing Ralph Lauren
because I am fancy).
Then everyone whose shirt is used to display ads can get
revenue-share.
tsoukase wrote 1 hour 37 min ago:
Suggestion: do not use this device in a neurological clinic or they
think you suffer from epileptic absence seizure (loss of contact, gaze
fixation for a few secs)
user1999919 wrote 1 hour 43 min ago:
Gen Z stare intensifies
user1999919 wrote 1 hour 45 min ago:
The 'demo' for ar is always over promising. I know The fidelity does
not actually look like that. Apart of me believes the artistic license
gets carried away with itself, because to begin with, you cannot really
show what it 'looks like' The iphone for instance was easy. Steve held
up a hand held screen. Ar is different, you can't really show what the
lens 'sees' until its right up in your face. so you just make it up. In
doing so you REALLY really really make it up.
sundar_p wrote 2 hours 1 min ago:
I can't wait to read the privacy policy.
A reminder, users cannot opt out of current Meta Ray Bans data
recording/storage/training if you actually want to use them as smart
glasses.
88j88 wrote 2 hours 11 min ago:
Smart glasses featuring cameras, a control bracelet, and in-lens
displays represent significant technological progress with particularly
valuable applications for people with disabilities. The non screen
version could be transformative for blind users, while the display
equipped model offers great potential for the deaf community. However,
there's a notable double standard in social acceptance: while these
devices are welcomed when serving accessibility needs, they face
resistance when used recreationally, reflecting society's discomfort
with wearable recording technology in casual social settings.
olibhel wrote 2 hours 0 min ago:
Why does this read like AI slop?
pnt12 wrote 2 hours 15 min ago:
Cool tech, wrong company.
The tech is impressive, but people are already getting concerned about
excessive screen time via zombie doomscrolling. Moving it from the
pocket to literally in people's face will only worsen it.
And by Meta of all companies, with concerning privacy practices and of
course motivated to hold your attention to serve you more ads.
xutopia wrote 2 hours 33 min ago:
Meta for a company meant to connect people is doing its darnest to reel
us into a virtual world rather than the real one.
Imagine seeing everyone with glasses with suspicion because you donât
know if theyâre filming you, reading notifications or actually
conversing with you.
liendolucas wrote 2 hours 57 min ago:
Maybe we should really think twice when purchasing new amazing gadgets.
It can be this, a drone, a phone or anything that comes to your mind.
The default has become to get consumers locked in as much as possible,
be for your data or money exploitation or both (check the Slack thread
for a non the non-profit HackClub).
If you pay 800 dollars for this device and a year after they ask you
for your driver's license (as for the top comment). Are you willing to
waste those 800 dollars you payed for it or will you upload any
sensitive docs demanded from them? Or if they decide to phase it out
early because there is no real adoption, will you get your money back?
Will they make the device open so it can still be used by their
"owners"?
So the way I see it: you give big money to already super rich
companies. You also give them your data. You are forced to comply their
rules and in even in any of those cases when they decide you shouldn't
use it anymore they deprecate it and keep the device close. No, thanks.
The bottom line is this: do extensive research before making a single
penny leave your wallet to try to minimize getting fucked up as much as
you can.
We should educate as many people surrounding us as possible so they can
make good or informed purchase decisions as well.
This should also be taught to children so from an early age they can
understand very well that privacy and data has proven to be extremely
profitable to virtually any company out there.
nakedrobot2 wrote 3 hours 10 min ago:
"Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses are designed to help you look up and stay
present. With a quick glance at the in-lens display, you can accomplish
everyday tasksâlike checking messages, previewing photos, and
collaborating with visual Meta AI prompts â all without needing to
pull out your phone. Itâs technology that keeps you tuned in to the
world around you, not distracted from it."
WHAT IN THE HOLY FUCK DID I JUST READ
rhetocj23 wrote 2 hours 23 min ago:
"Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses are designed to help you look up and
stay present."
Didnt that stupid AI pin have the same tagline?
kypro wrote 3 hours 15 min ago:
Some very negative comments here... Regardless of personal thoughts
about Meta and AR tech, it's undeniable that these are interesting and
have some cool tech.
The live captioning with directional audio seems like it could be a
huge win for people who are hard of hearing, especially given the
display is invisible so is much more natural to use in real life than
say a smart phone or a VR headset with passthrough.
Another thing that's cool is the neural band. It looks like it's a more
robust and flexible implementation of what Apple is doing with hand
tracking.
But generally the idea that you can interact with the glasses silently
with your hands to your side while wearing what effectively looks like
a normal pair of glasses is incredible. I think this this is the first
time we've seen an implementation of AR in which a large group of
people could see value in it.
Also the fact Meta was first to market with a solid implementation of
AR and not Apple or Google is also notable. I think I would have
doubted their ability to pull something like this off a few years ago.
shade wrote 2 hours 3 min ago:
Yeah, I've been deaf for over 40 years now and captioning glasses are
something that I've wanted ever since I was a kid. I'm not a
particularly big fan of Meta and I have some serious reservations
around privacy that need to be satisfied, but at the same time it's
really exciting to see this going from "pie in the sky thing I
dreamed about having when I was ten" to "actual existing product."
There's a few other companies/startups working on this too, but a lot
of the glasses they're producing are very ugly. There's a couple that
didn't look bad, but from what I'm seeing Meta's are a combination of
the best-looking ones and best display so far, and I'll be very
curious to see the reviews.
thomasfl wrote 3 hours 27 min ago:
Imagine talking to a "glasshole" for the first time. The "glasshole" is
being able to do facial recognition while talking to you, and see a ton
if info about you before you've been able to introduce yourself. What
could possibly go wrong?
seydor wrote 3 hours 43 min ago:
I wonder if they plan to use the glasses as some rudimentary EEG
device to read intent or emotions
maxehmookau wrote 4 hours 2 min ago:
I don't think I can state this hard enough, but there is no tech cool
enough that would make me comfortable allowing meta to see through my
eyes.
Just never in a million years.
weberer wrote 4 hours 7 min ago:
Privacy and vendor lock-in concerns aside, these glasses are ugly. They
look like generic nerd stereotype glasses from an 80's movie.
jmull wrote 4 hours 39 min ago:
> â¦based on data from nearly 200,000 consenting research
participantsâ¦
They had to clarify it was âconsentingâ since itâs the opposite
of their normal default.
(You also have to wonder how consensual it really was.)
Piraty wrote 4 hours 58 min ago:
so, everybody wearing this in europe will hand out 'may i take
photographs of you or your property'-forms + 'do you agree to
Facebook's TOS, as your photographs will be uploaded to and processed
by them'-forms prior to using this in public?
just like owners of all the rolling surveillance stations (some still
call them EV) do?
spy state actor's wet dream comes even more true with this, even more
than with already overly de-privaciced public spaces.
wpm wrote 41 min ago:
I was thinking today that I basically am going to have to start
wearing one of those IR face blocker things around just to stop my
visiage ending up in some god forsaken Meta server somewhere.
My god, how fucking grim our future looks. I miss when tech was fun.
holografix wrote 5 hours 9 min ago:
Canât wait to see Appleâs response. Only reason Iâm not buying
one of these September 30th is I know apple will release something
better.
Well that and it being a meta product.
cedws wrote 5 hours 10 min ago:
As many others have said, I also have no interest in buying a Meta
device, but Iâm glad that theyâre at least pushing this space
forward and hopefully other companies will start doing more R&D.
I had an Oculus CV1 in 2019 but sold it when it became mandatory to
migrate to a Meta account.
alex1138 wrote 5 hours 28 min ago:
yeah so if you need info on people at Harvard just ask
i have over 4000 emails, sns...
"what? how'd you manage that one?"
people just submitted it, i don't know why. they "trust me". dumb fucks
drakonka wrote 5 hours 43 min ago:
The evolution of smart glasses has totally passed me by since the
Google Glass thing. Whenever I heard about them I just thought they
were still in the "gimmick" stage. But last week I heard about Meta
glasses for the first time and realized that people actually seem to
use them, in a practical way?
If these things are now to the point of realistic adoption, I'd be
interested in getting a pair, specifically to record and get on demand
info/maps/AI integration maybe on runs, hikes, and other
adventure/exploration-type settings... and recording my cats... But now
a whole can of questions is opened:
- What products are developed enough this area that are worth choosing
between?
- Don't trust meta due to privacy and data exploitation concerns. Are
any other products on the same level in terms of hardware + software
quality, or is it just going to have to be a compromise (or waiting
until something else is good enough?)
- Responsiveness/UX/photo/video quality etc...
Part of me kind of wishes I was still ignorant to the advancements of
these so I could keep ignoring them as a gimmick and not be tempted to
dive into researching the product category...
epolanski wrote 5 hours 50 min ago:
I really like the product, but the fact it's tied to having a meta
account makes it a no go for me, won't test it.
XCSme wrote 6 hours 9 min ago:
Didn't Google Glass do the exact same thing and failed? Not because of
the technology issues, but social issues.
People nowadays want to disconnect from technology more, not to have it
even closer.
mcdonje wrote 2 hours 27 min ago:
Google Glass looked unusual and was nerd-coded. Social norms are
extremely strong. The only way something that looks like Google Glass
would take off is if the tech is established with the well-to-do
having elegant devices, and then something like Google Glass becomes
working-class-coded.
alex1138 wrote 5 hours 31 min ago:
Bet you GG though actually treated your PII with respect
For all my numerous complaints about Google
946789987649 wrote 5 hours 33 min ago:
Their problem was that they didn't look like normal sunglasses, so
people were immediately intrigued/suspicious of them. Although these
have the little light if you're recording, the amount of instagram
videos where creators are using these and the random people they're
directly talking to don't notice, should tell you all.
The rise of smart accessories (especially watches) should tell you
that a lot of people don't want to disconnect
Kwpolska wrote 6 hours 0 min ago:
Google Glass launched too early, when people cared more about
privacy.
jonplackett wrote 6 hours 19 min ago:
I donât see how this is any more socially acceptable than walking
around with your camera on filming everyone all the time.
The fact that itâs FB that can see through your eyes doesnât make
this any better.
jonplackett wrote 6 hours 21 min ago:
> designed to help you look up and stay present. With a quick glance at
the in-lens display
Right⦠so having notifications in your face ALL DAY is going to
_help_ you stay connected to the real world.
m4tthumphrey wrote 6 hours 30 min ago:
> Meta Ray-Ban Display is part of our vision to build the next
computing platform that puts people at the center so they can be more
present, connected, and empowered in the world.
Err what? How do glasses that let you procrastinate when physically
connecting to people help that?!
Also the video demo has no sound and one of the examples genuinely
looked like the wearer was having a text a convo with someone whilst
sat across from people at dinnerâ¦
guerrilla wrote 6 hours 36 min ago:
I'm sorry but these all look terrible still. Ya'll look like dorks
walking around on with them on. It's such a privacy invasion too. So
many people are just going to get punched in the face, literally.
amelius wrote 6 hours 37 min ago:
Already banned (no pun intended) in many places because of the
intrusive camera.
doublewhy wrote 6 hours 37 min ago:
Anyone using Meta Ray-Bans should be aware that your data is collected
and used for AI training. There is no opt-out unless you're from EU.
Also, the old Meta View companion app one day was renamed into the Meta
AI app and started to provide ChatGPT like functionality.
1) âMeta AI with camera use is always enabled on your glasses unless
you turn off âHey Meta", which basically makes glasses defunct.
2) âvoice transcripts and stored audio recordings are otherwise
stored for up to one year to help improve Metaâs products.â
URI [1]: https://www.theverge.com/news/658602/meta-ray-ban-privacy-poli...
xandrius wrote 5 hours 3 min ago:
Incredibile how people can still discuss the pure tech when it's
tainted with Meta's touch.
How much can they do before some people think twice? Or are they all
employees?
wigster wrote 6 hours 44 min ago:
Really needs the cigar and greasepaint mustache
abbycurtis33 wrote 7 hours 23 min ago:
Whether you like Meta or not, the success of their glasses line means
Apple and other companies will respond.
jamescontrol wrote 7 hours 34 min ago:
Nope. I like the idea, but that is just still way too bulky, and just
the fact that this is meta makes me want to steer clear.
OhMeadhbh wrote 7 hours 40 min ago:
Seems a bit "privacy eroding." Like Google Glass, but chonkeyer.
laidoffamazon wrote 7 hours 54 min ago:
Im sold, but it appears there isnât a single place in my major metro
of 7 million that will offer in store demo and purchase? Do they not
want my money?!
8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote 7 hours 56 min ago:
What's with the trend in photography with lighting the subject's face
in chunks? I know they're trying to drive your attention towards the
wrist and the eyeglasses, but having half the face be blocked out by a
flag or masked in post is super distracting.
victorbjorklund wrote 7 hours 58 min ago:
I saw a review on these glasses on YouTube end for the first time I
feel like: Okay now we're actually approaching something interesting.
This is the first point where I feel like there is some glasses that I
actually would want to wear almost. I probably still won't buy these
because it's still the first generation of these types of glasses but I
think it's promising in the sense that you know in a few years we
probably will have some things that are really really good.
anigbrowl wrote 7 hours 58 min ago:
Finally the Joo-Janta peril sensitive sunglasses I always wanted
_zoltan_ wrote 8 hours 2 min ago:
Incredibly cool!
luis_cho wrote 8 hours 9 min ago:
Meta is the second last company I trust to put an wearable on my face.
regnerba wrote 8 hours 21 min ago:
I wonât buy another Meta device. Bought the Quest 3 and now they keep
installing games and apps on the device that I cannot remove to promote
things. I donât want any of that. Will most likely be replacing it
with the Valve Deckard/Frame device as soon as possible.
pilooch wrote 8 hours 23 min ago:
I like the glasses path, well I do wear glasses, but some elements
remain unclear to me:
- are prescription glasses available for display ? I guess not ?
- these glasses need to be online, I guess they do so with a phone and
bluetooth connection nearby ? So that's the glasses, the band and the
phone, oh and the glasses case, seems a lot to carry.
- pedestrian navigation seems to be rolled out per city, so it's not
like having gmaps available right out of the box.
tempodox wrote 8 hours 28 min ago:
How does anybody see anything if they ban rays?
Giorgi wrote 8 hours 32 min ago:
They keep pushing this useless augmented reality to the sunglasses
sometimes without sometimes with vr, ai, whatever new hype is there, it
all failed, this one will fail too, there simply is no use.
gregwebs wrote 8 hours 36 min ago:
Is there a way to just use this as a computer monitor?
Thatâs what the Viture glasses are and itâs great to have a
portable monitor that focuses at a longer distance.
senectus1 wrote 8 hours 42 min ago:
gods the frames are always so thick and ugly...
nicman23 wrote 8 hours 52 min ago:
if there is a custom os for these i d buy them. i am not running meta
os
rossant wrote 9 hours 19 min ago:
Not a big fan of Meta but got to admit the tech is interesting. Can't
wait to see the competition on this market.
withinrafael wrote 9 hours 38 min ago:
I have the previous generation Meta Ray-Ban glasses and they're great,
but I wish I could use the underlying tech for... something more
useful. It has no API, no extensibility options, nada. I--and my
friends--don't use Messenger, Facebook, etc. I fear it'll be the same
w/ the Ray-Ban Display, so I doubt I will be upgrading. Such a shame.
sksum wrote 2 hours 49 min ago:
they demoed a spotify widget; will there be an sdk?
rashidae wrote 9 hours 42 min ago:
I got so excited watching these videos and going through the product
page. I completely ignored the price tag without putting any resistance
and I thought to myself: I'VE GOT TO HAVE THIS!
Not only that... I started to think about ways I could use this!! I
pictured myself using them... I visualized it all, and then remembered
when I felt this way when the Ipod was released, and then again, when
the first Pebble watch was launched or maybe even, the first kindle.
Although there's going to be some strong competition in the next 1-2
years with Apple, as we all know, the "thin phone" is nothing about the
phone, and all about their pathway towards wearables...
I must have this. This is a game changer. WOW!
Tepix wrote 4 hours 31 min ago:
You seem to be based in Europe. Do you not realize that using these
glasses in public will violate the GDPR, making this gadget useless?
rashidae wrote 9 hours 32 min ago:
who ever's downvoting my comment... You're literally trying to shut
up the positive review due to your lack of empathy? WTF? This is my
preference, I'm an expert in tech and I don't hold your negative
views... Stop trying to control the narrative.
cryptozeus wrote 9 hours 52 min ago:
$799 for this ?
qwerty_clicks wrote 9 hours 54 min ago:
I canât believe they believe this is what people want. Why isnât
Zuckerberg doing the demo in the metaverse? Ha
_ZeD_ wrote 9 hours 56 min ago:
The very first thing I though was: "yeah, they're gonna shovel
advertising directly into my retina"
psyclobe wrote 9 hours 57 min ago:
I would give up some privacy in order to get some cool future tech;
honestly Iâm so in love with sci fi that Iâm pretty excited to be
fully connected to my own ai 24/7 like how iron man did it.
nothrowaways wrote 9 hours 59 min ago:
What are the privacy guarantees for passerbys (non-wearers).
numpad0 wrote 5 hours 41 min ago:
You can sue the wearers for reparations and to work with Meta to
delete your data, perhaps
mdhb wrote 8 hours 12 min ago:
Zero⦠you can and will be filmed without your knowledge or consent
and your private conversations will be used to train ever more
invasive AI systems and profiles of you will be sold to advertisers
and governments all over the world.
I strongly recommend making owners of these things feel incredibly
unsafe and uncomfortable in social situations. I wouldnât hesitate
to break a pair when I get the opportunity personally.
mrcwinn wrote 10 hours 8 min ago:
Really excited about these types of products. Would never trust
anything with Meta, but I appreciate them trying to contribute a
product. Unfortunately, itâs a dead end. Markâs always regretted
missing mobile - and thus being the app rather than the platform - and
here itâs no different.
blondie9x wrote 10 hours 22 min ago:
Google Glass again ...
motorest wrote 10 hours 30 min ago:
[flagged]
tomhow wrote 5 hours 42 min ago:
Please don't do this. It's unfair on people who are commenting
authentically, which almost everyone turns out to be when we dig into
the data. The guidelines ask:
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling,
brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and
is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email
hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. [1] We detached this
comment from [2] and marked it off topic.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
URI [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45284046
Almondsetat wrote 10 hours 15 min ago:
[flagged]
motorest wrote 10 hours 11 min ago:
> Why do you lie? Clearly this is not the case if you look at the
user's submission and comment history
Do you think someone's comment history link is an obscure secret no
one can access?
> Clearly this is not the case (..)
Oh really? Please explain in your own words why you believe this is
not the case.
jibe wrote 8 hours 30 min ago:
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42499986
cowthulhu wrote 10 hours 8 min ago:
Itâs unclear to me what you are even accusing them of, could
you clarify?
masterjack wrote 10 hours 9 min ago:
> Please explain in your own words why you believe this is not
the case.
It wasnât 2023: Last post 11 months ago, last comment 8 months
ago, which is a typical level of lurking
pciexpgpu wrote 10 hours 30 min ago:
Meta really desperately wants to own a platform so they can avoid
paying the Apple tax and the Google tax and directly plumb a vision to
ads pipeline.
Just imagine the dollars in front of those glasses⦠if it only darned
worked.
I really hope they donât though because itâs beyond dystopian to
own such a billboard company with a sick twist.
solid_fuel wrote 10 hours 38 min ago:
Meta locked two games I already paid for - Blade & Sorcery VR and Beat
Saber - behind account verification on the Quest 2. I already bought
both of these, played them for a while, but now it won't let me use the
headset without "verifying" my facebook account by sending them a
photograph of my drivers license. Neither of these games are online,
neither allow me to interact with other users in any way.
I will never buy a Meta product again, the brand reputation is lower
than dirt to me. Even ignoring all the other awful things Meta does,
they have no reason to require a verified account to play two
local-only games that I already paid for. No matter how cool glasses
like these may look, I have no trust that the brand will not suddenly
demand more money or information from me to continue using a product I
have already purchased.
damnesian wrote 4 hours 10 min ago:
they don't look cool anymore. they are the eyes of skynet. I have
prescriptions coming up and I have always bought ray bans. I won't
anymore, I don't want anyone to think I am spying on them, because
that's what they are, spy tools.
benterix wrote 4 hours 48 min ago:
> now it won't let me use the headset without "verifying" my facebook
account by sending them a photograph of my drivers license.
I believe this would be the first time in my life that I would try to
generate a fake driver's license.[0] It's completely ridiculous.
[0] Not to mention that I'd only use a fake FB account first anyway,
there's no way I'd give them my real data. I know Zuck apologized by
"dumb fucks", but while the wording was offensive he was actually
right.
whywhywhywhy wrote 4 hours 53 min ago:
Switching from just basic Oculus accounts to Facebook accounts was
the dumbest move, I say that from someone who was really enjoying the
Rift and Quest 1 hardware. Whole thing was pretty effortless until
that moment, then logging into it became this massive chore where
you're bounding between the phone and headset twice, really tedious
if you're not a big facebooker so haven't used their login flow in
years and it was all just extremely janky.
Then there were a bunch of walls in the transition period where
Oculus accounts can do X,Y but Meta accounts are needed for Z.
Can really tell Zuck told the teams "All in on VR/AR" and the
accounts/FB team began "well if its core it's account should be the
core account we use".
Would have been much smarter to keep it like Instagram where it's an
entirely separate feeling account but under the hood deeply connected
in a way that allows the data syphoning they want but the end user it
rarely feels like a Facebook account.
bilsbie wrote 31 min ago:
A lot of big companies make this mistake and dont see how it hurts
them.
Iâm almost at a tipping point of leaving windows because of the
weird account integrations.
Even my Mac nags me to log in. Why do I have to log in online to
use a computer? This bothers gen x at least.
And I use google products way less than I would because of all the
login requirements.
daveguy wrote 6 min ago:
Same. I already left windows because of the weird integrations,
continuous cpu use, intrusive analytics, slow WSL, and forced
reboots.
Linux doesn't do any of that or bug you about logging in. It's
been a breath of fresh air. I have a windows VM in case I
absolutely have to have Office365, but so far LibreOffice has
been great.
No doubt that Facebook is losing people over it, but they're
gaining what they care about most -- your data.
illusive4080 wrote 3 hours 8 min ago:
Why did you have to switch to a Facebook account?
I was gifted a Meta Quest 3S, and I was forced to make a Meta
account, but I didnât have to make a Facebook account.
mbreese wrote 2 hours 21 min ago:
When the Quest 2 came out they shifted from using a specific
Oculus account to requiring Facebook accounts. It was a dumb idea
and my wife was questioning why I made a Facebook account for my
12 year old kid (who as a typical Gen Z will probably never use
FB proper).
They have since reversed that decision.
newman8r wrote 4 hours 30 min ago:
That was the day I stopped developing for VR completely. Kind of
dodged a bullet because the space didn't explode the way I thought
it was going to.
strogonoff wrote 5 hours 24 min ago:
Microsoft pulled the account verification trick with Minecraft after
forced account migration a few years back, locking accounts and
forcing customers to verify mobile phone number to even launch the
game.
__turbobrew__ wrote 32 min ago:
Yea, that was a major pain. I had a Mojang account since basically
day one when the Minecraft beta came out and then over 10 years
later I want to boot up the game to play with some friends for
nostalgia and my account no longer works.
lupusreal wrote 1 hour 25 min ago:
That was a real scumbag move. Thankfully its easy AF to "pirate"
Minecraft by simply commenting out account verification in a 3rd
party launcher. But I will never forgive Microsoft for stealing my
account with that dirty trick.
ToucanLoucan wrote 3 hours 36 min ago:
In the most minor defense of the devil: with Minecraft, you have a
substantial audience who is underage, the game features multiplayer
heavily, and I don't think it's the worst idea ever to have
verified accounts there.
FergusArgyll wrote 3 hours 42 min ago:
At least on nintendo switch that's not true
ramon156 wrote 4 hours 29 min ago:
iirc there's a YouTuber that wants to sue Microsoft for this weird
rugpull, although I doubt it will happen
afandian wrote 5 hours 20 min ago:
That's crazy.
If you want to play something minecraft-like, Luanti (VoxeLibre) is
really excellent. I play it with my child, and it's
indistinguishable from 'real Minecraft'.
URI [1]: https://www.luanti.org/
liendolucas wrote 7 hours 59 min ago:
This. Also (if possible) move away from Facebook. I have zero respect
for this company, no matter what they do or come up with.
Always remember that you are under their will, be your data, be the
devices you purchase from them or any other thing that is related to
them.
sneak wrote 8 hours 37 min ago:
The above post didnât even load for me because I have all of their
domain names DNS blocked at my router and in NextDNS on mobile.
zeroq wrote 8 hours 44 min ago:
This, plus the fact that if you dig deep enough into your google
account you'll probably find an audio file with you saying "really? I
can't play this game? Fuck you facebook, never buying your gear
again" recorded from your android phone without your consent or
knowing.
xdfgh1112 wrote 9 hours 12 min ago:
How does that work? The Quest doesn't even require a Facebook
account. They were decoupled in 2022.
kotaKat wrote 5 hours 19 min ago:
You canât tell me a Meta account isnât just a Facebook account
with extra steps.
Itâs still Facebook and will always be Facebook.
makeitdouble wrote 8 hours 6 min ago:
I'd assume the purchases were made with the Facebook account, when
it was still required, so the purchase can't be used on another
account ?
I haven't checked, but the Facebook decoupling was made kicking and
screaming so I assume there will be rought edges
whatsupdog wrote 10 hours 31 min ago:
Agree. And the constant spying doesn't help either. Who wants an
always online meta controlled camera/microphone in their bedroom all
the time?
immibis wrote 5 hours 40 min ago:
Objectively speaking, most people do. That's why Meta has so much
money.
epolanski wrote 5 hours 50 min ago:
You already have one, regardless of some companies repeating the
privacy claim 24/7 to make you believe so.
anal_reactor wrote 10 hours 20 min ago:
Lots of people, actually. This website is an echo chamber of those
privacy-conscious.
tonkinai wrote 6 hours 9 min ago:
Totally. Most people just click Accept All on the dumb cookie
banners, and they don't give a sh*t about privacy at all.
rhetocj23 wrote 2 hours 40 min ago:
Its not that they dont care at all. They just dont care until
they feel the pain of it, because they are optimising for short
term satisfaction.
bigyabai wrote 9 hours 46 min ago:
HN is typically slow to admit it, but Facebook and TikTok
wouldn't be popular if you were wrong. Consumers don't care.
Yeul wrote 5 hours 1 min ago:
I live in Europe so there are still rules keeping
Weyland-Yutani in line.
If you're in the US you're on your own I guess.
piltdownman wrote 6 hours 14 min ago:
Consumers don't know or want to know rather - ignorance is
bliss when it comes to getting Children to spend relatively
quiet time independently. Otherwise the GOP would be
virtue-signalling about getting Roblox as a platform getting
banned due to the preponderance of predators and material
unsuitable or unsafe for children.
fruitworks wrote 6 hours 51 min ago:
Google glass
t-3 wrote 5 hours 30 min ago:
People care about other people they meet spying on them or
doing creepy things. They don't care about people they don't
meet spying on them or doing creepy things, because they
don't notice it and it has a very low chance of showing up in
the social media feed of people they know.
ryandrake wrote 10 hours 21 min ago:
I'm never going to update a photo government ID to some company
just to use an app. What kind of a bonkers world are we living in?
Totally ridiculous. No app is worth this.
heavyset_go wrote 9 hours 50 min ago:
Some sites outsource their ID verification to platforms that want
live videos of different angles of your face, along with pictures
of your ID.
Literally all the data they could possibly need to build 3D
models of your face for even better facial recognition, along
with plenty of data to train models on. When that data eventually
leaks, it will be interesting.
It's insane that anyone puts up with it.
benterix wrote 4 hours 46 min ago:
I had to go through this shit show once in my life, in order to
use Airbnb.
It's been a few years since I last used Airbnb and I regret
that moment of weakness.
perihelions wrote 6 hours 44 min ago:
> "that want live videos of different angles of your face"
Hetzner (outsourcing to Idenfy) dared to demand this of me,
three years ago. I'm still mad about it.
> "When that data eventually leaks,"
Indeed, my understanding is these sensitive biometrics are
generically (i) uploaded in full to a remote server, where
they're (ii) retained for a nontrivial amount of time, because
they need to be (iii) manually QA'd by humans. It's nothing
like an iPhone's local-only biometrics enclave. My
understanding's based on the specific case of Idenfy, and an
ex-Idenfy HN'er explaining its workflow[0].
[0]
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33863625#33864440
martin_a wrote 5 hours 39 min ago:
Hetzner (in Germany) never did things like these to me. What
were you trying to do with them?
immibis wrote 5 hours 36 min ago:
Hetzner uses some kind of AI (the old kind) to assign risk
scores to customers. In my case they just wanted a photo of
my passport, but that was years ago. For some people they
just outright deny access no matter what you upload. Other
people just go right on through.
dahrkael wrote 8 hours 35 min ago:
people scan their retina in exchange of coupons amd shitcoins
in mall booths
1oooqooq wrote 2 hours 10 min ago:
desperate people do that. Scammer Altman went to Argentina
during the peak economic crise of the century to make that
offer.
likewise, most USA government backed benefits require people
to submit all sorts of biometric to a private company who
used to monetize coupons for military deployed personel,
called gov.id or something.
throw-the-towel wrote 1 hour 22 min ago:
I've seen them in Chile, which wasn't in crisis. Always had
a queue waiting to be scanned.
bilekas wrote 8 hours 5 min ago:
Some people also eat rocks, it doesn't mean it's common or
even a good thing to do.
mikae1 wrote 10 hours 11 min ago:
Most new accounts seem to require a face scan too (finally
they're true to their name?). I recently needed to get a Facebook
account and was not able to use it without providing the scan.
Luckily I was able to do an AI face swap, but far from everyone
is that savvy.
a5c11 wrote 7 hours 12 min ago:
Interesting. Did you swap your face on a computer, and pointed
the smartphone camera on the monitor?
bitwize wrote 11 hours 4 min ago:
Can I hack it? Can I load whatever OS and software I wish to run on it?
No? Then no thank you.
sharkjacobs wrote 11 hours 6 min ago:
I like the look of the Oakleys better than the Raybans. I get why they
want to make their glasses look like Rayban Wayfarers, because they're
the most neutral inconspicuous glasses frame style of the last 25
years, but, IMO, they missed the mark pretty bad, and they look pretty
conspicuous and pretty bad.
You won't blend in wearing the Oakleys, but they look like what they
are, which is an insane mirrorshades cyberpunk HUD, and if the wearer
can own that they could actually look kind of sick.
Of course, I'm technically underwhelmed and unimpressed by what I've
seen of the actual technology, but that's hardly the most important
thing.
chupchap wrote 11 hours 14 min ago:
I've been using the RayBan Meta glasses for a while now, and the main
reason I like them is because they do not have a display ( [1] ).
Another screen to glare at is the last thing I need, but I can imagine
there are people who want one of this.
I use them for taking videos when I'm out and for listening to music
without putting on headphones or earphones. While it is not the best at
anything, it is definitely capable of doing a lot of things well enough
and that is what matters a lot of times.
URI [1]: https://balanarayan.com/2024/12/31/ray-ban-meta-long-term-revi...
divan wrote 5 hours 22 min ago:
Same, but I would love to have map navigation displayed occasionally.
I use bicycle in the city a lot and so many times I had to pull the
phone (+unlock with face ID) while cycling, just to see the
directions, and it's both frustrating and dangerous.
wpm wrote 1 hour 20 min ago:
A smart watch or bike computer fixes this problem already.
Slow_Hand wrote 11 hours 17 min ago:
What is it with the Meta site disabling the back button on the browser?
I can understand why apps like Instagram - when used in the browser -
wouldn't be compatible. But this product release page? What's going on
here? Why?
wkat4242 wrote 11 hours 23 min ago:
I wonder if these are also available in prescription form? I imagine
this would be harder due to the light guide in the lens
paxys wrote 11 hours 19 min ago:
They are (only within +/- 4 though)
wkat4242 wrote 11 hours 18 min ago:
Oh that wouldn't be a problem but I would need astigmatism
correction. They might not have that.
pb060 wrote 7 hours 26 min ago:
And progressive lenses. Thereâs still a long way to go.
thrownawayohman wrote 11 hours 35 min ago:
The best part of this tech is the being recorded by random strangers
without you noticing. I canât wait to learn about who and what gets
access to this data. Letâs go surveillance state!
Octoth0rpe wrote 11 hours 38 min ago:
It's hard to imagine using these for more than 30 minutes in my day. If
I'm at work, whatever these can display I'd rather have on my monitor.
When I'm socializing, I wouldn't want random popups or notifications,
and I certainly wouldn't want whoever I was with to be looking at them
either. So that leaves some pretty narrow use cases such as the cooking
example in meta's demo, which might be interesting if it actually works
well (the demo did not inspire confidence). So I'd end up using this
maybe 30 minutes, every 3 or 4 days? Most of the time I know what I'm
doing with my ingredients and don't particularly need AI assistance to
combine noodles w/ sauce or whatever I'm doing. That's a very, very
hard sell.
cco wrote 11 hours 38 min ago:
I understand the existential problem that Meta faces here, but those
forces have created a worse product.
As a Meta Ray Ban owner my biggest takeaway is that these glasses
shouldn't have a CPU. They should be a dumb camera, mic, and speakers
for my phone.
Interacting with Gemini on my phone would be the ideal product here,
but of course that means Meta doesn't reap any of the data rewards.
So of course, since they don't make the phone in your pocket, they're
strapping a device to your head and everyone pays the price of a big
battery, CPU, and RAM in a sunglass form factor.
They're a remarkable product, but again, "dumb" glasses that just serve
the I/O directly to your phone would be an incredible product. I wish
Google or someone else would make them.
sundar_p wrote 1 hour 8 min ago:
I'm with ya. Meta is making these to get your data, not really to
make a compelling i/o-enriched pair of glasses.
The changes to their privacy policies plainly show the
bait-and-switch.
sidcool wrote 11 hours 31 min ago:
Amazingly, I agree with you. But the average HN user does not
understand the market and regular users' demands. It's been
repeatedly demonstrated in the past too.
chrischen wrote 11 hours 33 min ago:
Thereâs a Chinese AI glasses brands (Solos) that integrates with
ChatGPT and Iâm wondering if simply being paired with a better AI
model will make it significantly more useful. One thing Meta seems to
be completely ignoring up until now is Asians and Asian markets (lack
of low bridge fit models, lack of translation features for any Asian
languages despite ChatGPT being state of the art at it).
wrboyce wrote 5 hours 24 min ago:
Iâm almost certain there are low bridge fit Meta Ray-Ban glasses.
ghm2199 wrote 11 hours 39 min ago:
Zuckerberg's online actually quite slick @30 WPM. Brand concerns aside,
its a good tech leap forward for this fidelity of communication using
gestures(and costs will fall as apple, google, 3rd party get into
this). You have to realize that there are only smart glasses in the
market which are 1/2 way between smart and AR/VR and at the moment none
have any AR/VR that are commercially at this price point or massively
available like Orion. I still think the puck will make its usecase be
more specialized and will be a hindrance to massive adoption, but
things will get smaller and they have separated the power hungry screen
made it way less power hungry as an interface goes and they will go
after puck's size next.
I have been reading the book called Apple in China and hardware is so
hard. 30 hours of battery with wireless communication (I wonder if
this is BLE 6.0 alone) between the EMG + Wave guide tech is not easy.
This is the second long term bet by meta that is panning out, the first
being investing in long horizon AI projects(pytorch and a bunch of AI
models), though that org has had rough times it did yield something
good.
robin_reala wrote 10 hours 14 min ago:
Itâs six hours battery, not thirty:
with up to six hours of mixed-use battery life and up to 30 hours of
battery life total thanks to the portable (and collapsible!) charging
case
ghm2199 wrote 11 hours 27 min ago:
I would also say several other less known software and data
breakthroughs are probably going to also help this tech
1. A world wide localization map that can let the glasses SLAM system
do useful things.
2. I believe the Puck runs on a custom OS. The glasses are probably
on somekind of a real time Microcontroller driven thing(would be
surprised if its much more than firmware, code wise) that needs to
efficiently package sensor data and send it over BLE to the
puck/wristband. I am not sure they have open sourced those two
components.
I hope they open source both of those for public good.
oldfuture wrote 11 hours 42 min ago:
[1] Why they shouldn't be allowed
---
1.The glasses have cameras and microphones capable of recording people
nearby often without their knowledge (e.g. the recording indicator can
be subtle or blocked, âGhostDotâ stickers are being sold to block
the LED indicator light so others wonât see when recording is
happening)
2. As I remember Meta has changed its privacy policy so that voice
recordings are stored in the cloud (up to one year) and âHey Metaâ
voice-activation with camera may be enabled by default, meaning more
frequent analysis of what the camera sees to train AI models.
3.The possibility that anytime someone might be recording you wearing
glasses that look like ordinary sunglasses can create a chilling
effect: people may feel uneasy, censor themselves, avoid public spaces,
etc.
URI [1]: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-promotes-stickers-for-secre...
zmmmmm wrote 8 hours 12 min ago:
> e.g. the recording indicator can be subtle or blocked
if they are like the previous ones they have hardware level detection
and decativation of the camera if the indicator light is blocked
oldfuture wrote 9 hours 58 min ago:
the fact that surveillance capitalism, or we should rather say
surveillance oligarchy, is here does not mean we have to support it
going forward, it can only be worse if nobody reacts
TheDong wrote 11 hours 38 min ago:
As opposed to now? Everywhere you go in public, people are holding
their phone up watching tiktok or such. There's no recording
indicator on phones, they could be recording you.
Heck, go to a tourist location, like a famous area of london or tokyo
or new york, and there'll be dozens of wannabe influencers holding up
gopros on selfie sticks.
It's too late. It's already happening. If it has a chilling effect,
we're already chilled.
Octoth0rpe wrote 11 hours 33 min ago:
> wannabe influencers holding up gopros on selfie sticks
I think there's a huge difference in how one perceives these as a
privacy/self-censoring risk. Yes, a bunch of tourists with their
gopros might catch me in the background, but I think it's
reasonable to assume that their intended target is themselves, and
catching me in the background is incidental. If someone is
recording with their glasses, basically by definition their target
is not themselves (though perhaps a companion?), and it's more
likely that I am their target.
TheDong wrote 11 hours 24 min ago:
Holding a phone in front of your face in public is so normalized
at this point that targeted recording is not a matter of
hardware, but of someone wanting to do it.
As you point out, most influencer-types aren't aimed at you.
That generalizes pretty well, with or without glasses, no one
cares about recording you, other than incidentally as part of the
background
If someone does want to target recording you, i.e. you're a
semi-famous idol or such, they'll just pretend to watch tiktoks
on their phone and record without an indicator, right? At least
the glasses have an indicator, unlike phones.
Octoth0rpe wrote 11 hours 20 min ago:
I think the angle that a phone is held at is a reliable
determinant of intent. People look down at their phones to read
the screen. People hold their phones up vertically to record.
The difference seems immediately apparent to me.
ashu1461 wrote 11 hours 47 min ago:
Is it weird I went through the complete landing page and still did not
get what actually the features are
albert_e wrote 12 hours 12 min ago:
Is anyone else seeing concerns about where this technology is heading
--
(A) Are we going to consume food prepared by a human so incompetent
that he needs Live AI to tell him what ingredient to put and how much
... and that too an AI so unreliable that it can't tell whether the
bowl is empty, let alone what ingredients are in it.[1]
In what world is this a sane marketing proposition?
(B) Distracted driving due to smartphones is at least detectable -- how
do we escape distracted driving because of smart glasses?
When people eventually crash cars or walk into traffic or fall into
pits -- no tech company will so much as acknowledge that the tech they
are pushing so hard might have something to do with it.
Who should take the lead on saying: wait a minute we need some common
sense boundaries around this ... some ground rules around responsible
use of technology. [1] Failed demo of Live AI -
URI [1]: https://x.com/ns123abc/status/1968469616545452055
manco wrote 11 hours 3 min ago:
> Are we going to consume food prepared by a human so incompetent
that he needs Live AI to tell him what ingredient to put and how much
Yes, I have cookbooks full of recipes I follow.
> When people eventually crash cars or walk into traffic or fall into
pits -- no tech company will so much as acknowledge that the tech
they are pushing so hard might have something to do with it.
Adults have agency and I expect them to be held accountable for their
actions; not use technology as a scapegoat. If someone drives drunk
it's not the alcohol at fault.
enos_feedler wrote 12 hours 10 min ago:
Dont worry. The market decides what we want and we just wont go for
it
avlbk wrote 12 hours 20 min ago:
At first I was shocked by the price, but now I just sort of want it. If
they opened the OS it would be AMAZING.
dskhatri wrote 12 hours 21 min ago:
Someone help me understand why the Ray-Ban branding? Meta should be
able to make the frames themselves. Ray-Ban doesn't seem to be a strong
enough brand that Meta couldn't go it solo and build a glasses brand
themselves.
pm90 wrote 12 hours 24 min ago:
Seems like Apple should get the wristband tech so people can type on
their watches.
dagmx wrote 12 hours 24 min ago:
Tested has a hands on plus interview with Boz (their CTO)
URI [1]: https://youtu.be/1jDorDsi9JM?si=O1_g9Z-rgGjyVER3
pm90 wrote 12 hours 27 min ago:
This is very cool; It seems likely to be the next step in human
computer interaction. I could see Meta (or someone else) adding
cellular features and a small screen to the wristband and getting rid
of a phone entirely.
lolive wrote 12 hours 37 min ago:
Fight the future !
URI [1]: https://youtu.be/YJg02ivYzSs?si=nTLQO4G2OIPcMkwX
AvAn12 wrote 12 hours 38 min ago:
Use cases: 1: FPV "how-to" videos are marginally easier to make, though
GoPro remains a thing...
2: Users get to look like the nerd emoji
3: The rest seems like creepy-spying-on-friends-or-strangers kinds of
things. Any constructive suggestions? I'm willing to be enlightened...
gmueckl wrote 2 hours 2 min ago:
4. On-foot navigation without having to glance down at the phone or
watch
5. Being able to converse with friends in loud places (e.g.
restaurants have become louder and louder over the years due to bad
acoustic design)
culopatin wrote 12 hours 35 min ago:
I tried to record every day things with my action cam and I always
feel like a weirdo with a box hanging off, I think these would help
me not care about that as much,
AvAn12 wrote 12 hours 27 min ago:
Out of curiosity, for what purpose? Do you go back and watch your
videos of everyday things? Share them with friends? With
photography (and most visual media) the secret seems to be to take
many many photos, or draw many many pictures, or shoot tons of
video, and then curate and edit meticulously to find just the very
best parts. Do you really get much value out of recording lots of
day to day video? Is this part of some kind of art project?
culopatin wrote 2 hours 6 min ago:
At the surface they seem like Iâm recording for my parents (we
live very far from each other). Deep down I would like to get
YouTube income eventually.
sho_hn wrote 12 hours 38 min ago:
I'm not sure I'll ever get over my concerns about making people around
me uncomfortable to ever don one myself, but I hear the non-display
ones are breakthrough assistive devices for impaired folks and this one
might be too with the captioning.
I wonder how the etiquette will evolve for people with legitimate needs
to use them in polite company.
pm90 wrote 12 hours 31 min ago:
I do see them being recognized more and sometimes banned (eg i saw a
video of a strip club stopping someone with those glasses from
entering). But otherwise⦠meh? We already know everyone around us
is carrying incredibly high powered cameras in their pockets.
jnaina wrote 12 hours 39 min ago:
This is beginning to mirror the evolution of the Smart Phone.
The Apple Vision Pro is AR glasses at the Apple Newton evolutionary
stage, an early smart PDA (Yes I'm the sucker that bought both at their
respective launch, 3 decades apart).
The Meta Ray-Ban Display is AR glasses at the Windows Mobile/Blackberry
stage.
Apple will likely swoop in and launch the final refined version of the
AR glasses (thin, 8 hour battery, eye gaze control, retina based
authentication, tethered to the iPhone, Apple AI, etc), when the tech
is available at a decent price point for mainstream launch.
And yes, being the unrepentant Apple FanBoi, will be buying the Apple
iGlass at the launch.
cco wrote 11 hours 35 min ago:
Apple is very well positioned since they also sell you a super
computer in your pocket.
One of my biggest annoyances is the OS on the Ray Ban Metas. If they
just served as dumb I/O they'd be an incredible product and
everything else about them, e.g. battery life, weight etc, would be
so much better.
pm90 wrote 12 hours 29 min ago:
I really hope that Apple is working on this. It seems like they have
at least some of the framework through the Vision; if they fire that
team/abandom this software its gonna be a huge mistake.
jnaina wrote 12 hours 4 min ago:
Apple really plays the long game. More than 10 years ago, on a now
defunct website for AAPL investors, there was an Apple employee who
inadvertently blurted out about how his work at Apple was related
to researching saccades & micro-saccades, the small rapid eye
movements of the eye, as it never stays completely still, even
during âfixation".
Apparently eye tracking must distinguish meaningful gaze from the
natural jitters. I was thinking at that time, as an AAPL investor,
that Apple seems to be wasting money on worthless R&D endeavors.
It only became apparent to me, much later with the launch of the
Apple Vision Pro, how his seminal research on saccades contributed
to the design and realization of the AVP.
jayd16 wrote 12 hours 41 min ago:
I was a bit disappointed to see it was a single display and no mention
of AR. Even if it wasn't stereoscopic you could still have world
locked visuals.
But I realized this is a pretty clever move. Only allowing a fixed,
inset screen really hides any issues with display field of view.
iammrpayments wrote 12 hours 44 min ago:
Iâm 99% sure that EMG band is collecting several biomarkers and
sending them all to facebook headquarters, get ready to get mattress
ads when your HRV goes down.
Philpax wrote 12 hours 45 min ago:
I'd be the first one to buy these if they weren't made by Meta. I've
wanted a pair of smartglasses for a very long time, and these seem like
the first viable pair in terms of capabilities - aside from the
thickness, which I can live with.
Unfortunately, Meta, and Zuckerberg, have been involved in far too much
malfeasance. I just can't ethically justify buying a product from them
again. I'm hoping that viable competitors become available, but it's
going to be hard to compete with Meta's investment, especially on the
HCI front.
pm90 wrote 12 hours 21 min ago:
Fwiw i donât have a facebook/instagram account (have whatsapp) and
am still able to use all functionality in my Meta Rayban glasses.
I struggled with this question too. Unfortunately our current system
doesnât make it easy for startups to build this stuff at scale
without being gobbled up (the FTC under Lina Khan seemed to want to
change that but oh well) so Im resigned to using Big Tech products if
theyâre the only option.
solid_fuel wrote 10 hours 29 min ago:
> Fwiw i donât have a facebook/instagram account (have whatsapp)
and am still able to use all functionality in my Meta Rayban
glasses.
That was the promise when I originally bought the Quest 2, but a
year later they forcibly tied those accounts to Meta accounts and
through that, facebook accounts. Now I can't use my Quest 2
because it is locked into an account verification screen, demanding
that I upload a photograph of my drivers license to access the
games I already purchased from the quest store.
Meta cannot be trusted.
grumbel wrote 9 hours 15 min ago:
That was the promise with the original Rift, not the Quest. The
Quest2 required a Facebook account from day one and never worked
with an Oculus account, unlike Quest1. They relaxed the
requirement in 2022 to only require a Meta account and converted
all old accounts to Meta accounts later on (and if you didn't
login to 'ok' that change they deleted your account completely
including all the games).
If you created the account early in the Quest2's life, or hit the
wrong button in the UI, your Meta account will end up linked to
your Facebook account.
You might be able to unlink the Facebook account from your Meta
account at [1] , though I don't know if you can still reach the
page.
URI [1]: https://accountscenter.meta.com/accounts
ryukoposting wrote 11 hours 44 min ago:
It's a tough needle to thread. I mentor a high school robotics team
that's using a Quest 3S as odometry. You'd be astonished at how
well a Quest keeps up while both spinning around and moving
laterally at 12mph. Imagine an IMU that never, ever drifts no
matter how much you whip it around. And you can just buy this thing
from the local Best Buy! And it's cheap!
And yet, Meta is squeezing every cent they can out of our attention
spans, and knowingly tearing apart the fabric of our society in the
process. Do I discourage the kids from doing amazing stuff with
Meta's gadgets? I don't think so. They're not my kids. It's not
really my place to be having those conversations with them.
neilv wrote 12 hours 50 min ago:
What do people think about the (almost hidden) cameras in glasses?
With traditional cameras, feature phones, and smartphones, if someone
wanted to be creepy with the camera, they'd have to point the device at
someone, which tended to look exactly like they are using the camera.
(IIUC, some countries even required a shutter sound, for anti-creepy
reasons, when the pointing of the phone wasn't enough warning.)
Now, the wearer of the glasses spy camera just has to look in the
general direction that creepiness should be sprayed.
The creepiness isn't even that of the wearer; it could also be that of
the tech company.
Is this going to end up another Google "Glassholes" situation, with the
wearers shunned?
anal_reactor wrote 10 hours 0 min ago:
Many years ago there was some summer camp and the staff organized a
game "take a picture of your team leader without having them realize
you're taking a picture". I completely obliterated the game by
downloading an app that allowed me to record "in the background". I
got a few good shots by showing a funny picture to people while
having the front-facing camera on. Then I got other shots by turning
on the back camera, locking the phone, and then just casually holding
it in my hand like any other locked phone and waving it around.
The point is, if you want to secretly record, it's already trivial to
do it.
lfaw wrote 2 hours 29 min ago:
So, your point is: "things are already bad now, no harm in making
it worse"?
pesus wrote 12 hours 34 min ago:
I'm really not a fan of them. There's already too much recording
going on on a daily basis. I would personally avoid anyone wearing
these. They say the mandatory LED activation prevents the issue, but
I still don't trust it, and find it very off putting either way.
paxys wrote 12 hours 46 min ago:
There's a pretty bright light that turns on when the camera is
recording, and if you try and cover the light the camera won't work.
Their existing glasses are pretty popular and there haven't been big
compaints about it. If you really wanted to do secret recordings
there are plenty of better and cheaper glasses in the market for it.
hollow-moe wrote 1 hour 20 min ago:
What a relief, they really thought about it, exactly like the
AirTags with the warning buzzer.
jayd16 wrote 12 hours 47 min ago:
They've had the camera glasses part for a few years now.
neilv wrote 12 hours 45 min ago:
But currently not very popular.
zmmmmm wrote 12 hours 31 min ago:
there are millions in the wild ... so maybe not super popular but
it's above penetration of anything you would call a niche product
jsheard wrote 12 hours 22 min ago:
Millions in the wild, but mostly sitting in a drawer.
URI [1]: https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/metas-ray-ban-s...
zmmmmm wrote 12 hours 20 min ago:
That's about gen 1, gen 2 is vastly more successful
postexitus wrote 4 hours 0 min ago:
Is it? I've seen zero people wearing them in central
london.
boxerab wrote 12 hours 53 min ago:
I continue to be amazed by people rushing to give away even more of
their personal data to a large corporation, especially one with Meta's
privacy-challenged history.
SchemaLoad wrote 12 hours 58 min ago:
>Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses are designed to help you look up and stay
present. With a quick glance at the in-lens display, you can accomplish
everyday tasksâlike checking messages, previewing photos, and
collaborating with visual Meta AI prompts
Can you imagine trying to talk to someone face to face, but they are
giving you a blank stare as random notifications and tiktok videos are
being beamed inbetween their eyeballs and you.
Meta seems like one of the few large tech companies where if the whole
company vanished, the world would be purely a better place.
dlandis wrote 3 min ago:
> Can you imagine trying to talk to someone face to face, but they
are giving you a blank stare as random notifications and tiktok
videos are being beamed inbetween their eyeballs and you.
It would be just like in the Dungeon Crawler Carl books (and probably
other scifi/fantasy books)
bluecheese452 wrote 1 hour 22 min ago:
That is the pretty close to the world we already live in. They call
it then genz stare.
devin wrote 1 hour 14 min ago:
the millennials I know are worse than their children
bluecheese452 wrote 50 min ago:
For sure. Maybe it should be renamed the tik tok stare or
something.
dennis_jeeves2 wrote 1 hour 30 min ago:
>Meta seems like one of the few large tech companies where if the
whole company vanished, the world would be purely a better place.
In the 'developed' world I'd extend that concept to many other other
organizations. Around 90% of the work they do is useless or harmful:
banks, govt, fast food chains etc.
ToucanLoucan wrote 1 hour 26 min ago:
Mmm you're making me want to read Bullshit Jobs again.
neya wrote 1 hour 46 min ago:
Everyday, we get closer to that Wall-E scene where everyone's just so
pre-occupied with virtual displays all around that they forget to
live their life!
moolcool wrote 1 hour 56 min ago:
All while sending the entire interaction to one of the most harmful
companies in the world, no less. What a uniquely awful product.
stetrain wrote 2 hours 0 min ago:
The Verge's video on these was mostly footage that looked like the
person was staring down at the tip of their nose. It definitely
didn't feel natural or like the person was looking through the
glasses at the world around them.
pj_mukh wrote 2 hours 4 min ago:
Honestly, Iâm an avid user of Ray-Ban metas and I agree that if
Zuck doesnât want to re-hash his old original sin (distracting
algorithmic feeds) into this new form factor, he would block out any
feeds and notifications from the glasses when it detected someone was
talking to you, which the glasses can do really well. Iâm hoping
whatever answer Apple comes up with here has this behavior as default
because they donât have an active user axe to grind.
The glasses shine bright when youâre alone, on a walk.
Also while youâre at it, kill the Facebook and Instagram feeds to
save humanity. Too much to ask?
1shooner wrote 46 min ago:
>if Zuck doesnât want to re-hash his old original sin
(distracting algorithmic feeds) into this new form factor
Out of curiosity, is there a specific reason to expect different?
To me this is designed for attention primacy, for exactly that
purpose.
baby wrote 2 hours 9 min ago:
Can you imagine trying to talk to someone face to face, eventhough
you're not speaking the same language
sva_ wrote 1 hour 57 min ago:
Yeah I've been getting into such situations quite frequently
recently here in Germany.
rayiner wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
Also it makes you look like a dork.
xg15 wrote 2 hours 43 min ago:
Yeah, I was amazed at the brazenness of doublespeak present in that
press release.
> Itâs technology that keeps you tuned in to the world around you,
not distracted from it.
Using this to sell a technology that will keep the wearer even longer
in virtual spaces...
Marc evidently hasn't let go of his Metaverse dream and small
details, like most of the population finding those ideas completely
horrible, aren't gonna stop him...
rhetocj23 wrote 2 hours 44 min ago:
Meta has no real internal product innovation since FB desktop.
Every internal innovation after that has been a disaster. Hence the
continuous acquisitions they have done.
artursapek wrote 2 hours 50 min ago:
And you know that Facebergâs plan with these is to sell advertising
spots directly on your eyeballs haahaha
kypro wrote 3 hours 14 min ago:
If you have kids this happens today, except they don't look up from
their smart phone.
This isn't a new problem.
seydor wrote 3 hours 41 min ago:
It's more like, Meta gets people continuously wrong, like they did
with metaverse. I dont think people like walking around with a
teleprompter. At least when using a phone it's obvious what they are
doing, and that's respectful.
Plus, i dunno, i hate glasses that's why i did LASIK and it was the
best decision ever.
bondarchuk wrote 3 hours 29 min ago:
There's plenty of people who don't mind using their phone in a
socially disrespectful way. Maybe they got it right.
Eggpants wrote 40 min ago:
People donât walk around pointing a live phone camera and
microphone at people. Facebook got it wrong.
Itâs takes special kind of dbag that thinks itâs ok to wear a
Facebook recording device on their face.
maxwellito wrote 6 hours 47 min ago:
> Meta seems like one of the few large tech companies where if the
whole company vanished, the world would be purely a better place.
+1
...and I think about it everyday
numpad0 wrote 7 hours 6 min ago:
Every sufficiently tech obsessed kids dream about being able to look
at the screen while walking. It takes experiencting for them to
accept it doesn't work.
rhetocj23 wrote 2 hours 41 min ago:
In this world even a self driving car doesnt help if an individual
sporadically walks infront of a car at close range due to being
distracted.
ajuc wrote 2 hours 18 min ago:
Fucking pedestrians even more and destroying cities is a big
reason self driving cars should never happen.
elAhmo wrote 7 hours 20 min ago:
This might be good for public transport zombies, at least they wont
be using their speakers to watch TikTok
Findecanor wrote 7 hours 44 min ago:
That's already happening with cell phones and wireless earbuds, just
without video.
... and I personally find that horrible.
makeitdouble wrote 7 hours 58 min ago:
Imagine talking with someone face to face and there's a giant tv
right behind you pumping inflammatory news headlines.
That's a present day situation but I never seen anyone shaking their
fist at tvs screens in cafes.
izacus wrote 3 hours 55 min ago:
Probably because many of us avoid such cafes? The "wall plastered
with TVs bar" seems to be much less popular here and those places
are aggressively unpleasant for me.
incone123 wrote 6 hours 1 min ago:
The square in the middle of Woolwich, London has a giant screen
showing BBC News all day. No idea who decided to put that there but
it gives the place a strong 1984 feel.
Vinnl wrote 7 hours 36 min ago:
Oof, I hate that. Luckily most cafes over here don't have TVs, or
even clocks, for exactly that reason. I've been in countries where
TVs in cafes are more common, and I don't know how you put up with
it.
pnut wrote 7 hours 38 min ago:
Obviously, they don't have the gesture bracelet for the TVs yet.
BatteryMountain wrote 8 hours 37 min ago:
Now imagine people driving at 130km/h with a 4 ton SUV with these
things...
_ink_ wrote 8 hours 43 min ago:
> Can you imagine trying to talk to someone face to face, but they
are giving you a blank stare as random notifications and tiktok
videos are being beamed inbetween their eyeballs and you.
You spelled ads wrong.
gorgoiler wrote 8 hours 46 min ago:
In my culture itâs considered extremely casual â and therefore
quite rude in social situations other than the most private and
familiar â to talk with someone while wearing sunglasses. I can
imagine the same thing would apply to AR devices too.
What you describe sounds like it could be a real problem, but one
Iâd blame on rudeness rather than Meta. We already live in a world
where people order coffee while reading E! news on their phones.
pjmlp wrote 6 hours 38 min ago:
That is indeed pretty much culture dependent, in Southern Europe
sunglasses only go out during Winter, when indoors or when bumping
into a friend.
xdfgh1112 wrote 9 hours 10 min ago:
They made quest 2 and 3. Despite their recent pushing of shitty
horizon worlds, the hardware is extremely solid and affordable for
VR.
rhetocj23 wrote 2 hours 42 min ago:
And yet there isnt any large magnitude of buyers in the market,
despite the fact that over a billion people use Meta products every
month.
milkshakes wrote 9 hours 14 min ago:
I disagree.
Among Meta's many technical contributions:
React
PyTorch
osquery
GraphQL
Presto/Trino
RocksDB
Jest
OCP
Llama
dakiol wrote 8 hours 0 min ago:
We donât need any of those. So many brilliant people working at
facebook and wasting their talent.
milkshakes wrote 2 hours 33 min ago:
with the exception of maybe llama, each of these releases
represented not only solid, accessible implementations, but
actually also a paradigm shift and a massive investment. then
they gave each away for free, and continued to invest in them for
years. _you_ might not need any of these, but the internet as we
know it today certainly is built on the shoulders of each of
them, and in some cases, continues to use them directly.
crimsoneer wrote 4 hours 48 min ago:
I mean, if people working on PyTorch, GraphQL and React are
"wasting their talent", then bloody hell that is a high bar.
Arainach wrote 8 hours 3 min ago:
And among their non-technical contributions, you have genocide in
Myanmar, election interference worldwide, the explosive growth of
hate speech, countless teenager suicides, and more.
Any large company can write a web UI framework, but only a truly
special one can directly contribute to genocide, know about it,
have employees bring it up and suggest intervening, and decide that
nah, they'd rather let people die and make more money.
milkshakes wrote 2 hours 3 min ago:
> Meta seems like one of the few large tech companies where if
the whole company vanished, the world would be purely a better
place.
This is what I disagree with. Specifically, I don't disagree that
Meta has caused serious harm. I just don't think we live in such
a black and white world "where if the whole company vanished, the
world would be purely a better place".
endemic wrote 1 hour 45 min ago:
The tech contributions are fungible, to be honest. Sure,
they're popular because ~Facebook~ Meta is a giant company, but
if they disappeared overnight, other equally good solutions
would soon take their place.
milkshakes wrote 42 min ago:
everything is obvious after the fact, yet still it was meta
who made the contributions. and meta who made them stick.
what other company has contributed more widespread, enduring,
and game changing open source projects than meta? asking
seriously here because the list i put up there is just off
the top of my head.
jayd16 wrote 9 hours 33 min ago:
Probably about what you get now except their neck isn't craned down
to a phone.
ATechGuy wrote 9 hours 47 min ago:
> Meta seems like one of the few large tech companies where if the
whole company vanished, the world would be purely a better place.
100%
anal_reactor wrote 10 hours 16 min ago:
I think this is going to be very funny to observe as a third person.
zmmmmm wrote 12 hours 34 min ago:
I do think we're in for a bit of a reality check on how human
attention works.
I have a HUD in my car that shows me directions, speed etc and when
I'm looking at that the rest of the view out the windscreen is hardly
even there to my visual perception even though I'm looking right at
it. This seems to be getting largely overlooked but I feel like over
time statistics are going to emerge that HUD type displays are
increasing accidents rather than preventing them.
creaghpatr wrote 35 min ago:
Meanwhile, I saw someone using their windshield mounted phone to
watch videos while sitting in traffic yesterday (and driving
erratically as a result which led me to notice). The self-driving
cars can't come soon enough.
FuriouslyAdrift wrote 1 hour 46 min ago:
Eye tracking and depth of field adjustments are the missing pieces.
A HUD has to be able to stay in the same focal range as what is
viewed beyond it so you don't lose concentration on the task at
hand.
In fighter jets, they project onto the visor. Obviously not the
most convenient method for an automobile. There have been attemtps
to figure out depth of field but it's tough.
URI [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S003...
Someone wrote 4 hours 44 min ago:
I think thereâs plenty of evidence that theyâre better in jet
fighters (where users are well-trained), possible also in
automotive (where they have been sold for decades; see [1] ), but
of course, it will depend on the design of the HUD and on what it
displays.
Extreme example: showing random ads every ten minutes, even if the
glasses c/should suspect youâre driving a car. I have my doubts
as to whether Meta will make the right choices here.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_head-up_display
fraboniface wrote 5 hours 23 min ago:
"The World Beyond Your Head" from Matthew Crawford is exactly about
this. Definitely recommend reading!
teepo wrote 15 min ago:
Thanks for the tip. I added this to my audio book queue.
It's pretty interesting how today's cars come with features like
remote braking and monitoring cameras, all designed to make
driving less demanding for us. So as these researchers work to
make vehicles less distracting, these cool features somehow end
up making us even more distracted. It's an ironic cycle that
leaves you more distracted, and maybe more unsafe.
immibis wrote 5 hours 38 min ago:
Is this a physical or mental focus thing?
As in, are you just concentrating on the speedometer instead of the
road, or do your eyeballs have to adjust because the optics aren't
set correctly? I believe a HUD is supposed to focus at infinity,
same as a road that's many times farther away than the size of your
eyeballs.
thefz wrote 7 hours 51 min ago:
Even less is needed to generate danger: I found myself checking my
phone twice during a car trip because when listening to music
through the USB-C to Jack dongle, it believes I am blasting music
at full volume through my ears and decides to cut off the volume to
10% after 20 minutes.
Don't, and I mean DON'T decide things for the user.
Tepix wrote 4 hours 27 min ago:
Can't you let your phone know that the USB-C is not connected to
headphones?
Youden wrote 8 hours 56 min ago:
You mean a HUD projected on the windshield itself? That's not my
experience with it at all; I don't have to "look at" it, when my
eyes are focused on the road in front of me, the HUD is sharp
enough and positioned so that I always know my speed etc. without
having to actively look for it.
Your car might have settings to adjust it somehow, have you tried
those?
gpderetta wrote 5 hours 59 min ago:
Same. In fact it is significantly better and less distracting
than having to glance at the dashboard. Owning a car with a HUD,
I definitely miss it in other cars.
I recently hired a car where I had to duck under the steering
wheel to check my speed!
dostick wrote 2 hours 25 min ago:
Next time adjust steering wheel position so it doesnât
obstruct
stetrain wrote 2 hours 2 min ago:
That is sometimes hard to achieve depending on the car and
your height.
gpderetta wrote 2 hours 0 min ago:
To be fair, I didn't even try.
NamlchakKhandro wrote 4 hours 21 min ago:
Steering Wheel?
wahhhh? is this real life.
Here in the future we use our thoughts.
ludicrousdispla wrote 9 hours 29 min ago:
"Change blindness" is how this is characterized in the research
field. Basically any abrupt change in your visual field will
prevent you from seeing another change on the road.
URI [1]: http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/#CBdemos
croes wrote 10 hours 8 min ago:
There is a difference between status information like speed and
directions and messages from other people.
Your attention reacts differently
cbsmith wrote 10 hours 34 min ago:
What's amusing is the original use case for HUD displays was to
reduce attention problems. ;-)
ryukoposting wrote 11 hours 55 min ago:
A HUD reduces the difference in focus distance between "looking at
road" and "looking at speedometer." It matters more as you get
older, because your eyes focus slower.
Krssst wrote 9 hours 19 min ago:
Somewhat unrelated, but this discussion made me go from "I don't
see what I would need something that tells me tomatoes are
tomatoes" (though realtime translation looks very useful), to
kinda wanting it only to have a figher plane HUD-like display all
the time (to be clear, minus all the fighting parts). Almost
useless (at least the attitude and vertical speed part) but would
feel kinda cool. Can see some value in having the heading all the
time, and speed display to motivate myself to walk faster. (well
they have directions which provides much more value than all
that).
Though I don't feel comfortable having more Meta in my life.
armadsen wrote 10 hours 28 min ago:
Yep. My new car has a digital rear view mirror. You flip a switch
and the rear view mirror becomes a screen showing a feed from a
camera on the back of the car. Itâs nice for night time as well
as when the rear window is blocked by rear seat passengersâ
heads, or cargo or whatever.
But itâs uncomfortable for me because it requires my eyes to
refocus from distant to close and back when I glance at it, which
isnât needed with an actual mirror. So I donât use the
feature.
aikinai wrote 5 hours 46 min ago:
Once I had a rental car (a Nissan) that only had a screen
instead of a mirror. It was absolutely useless since the
resolution and dynamic range were too low, and as you
mentioned, you have to change your focal distance which
drastically increases time/friction to check the mirror.
I found myself actually using the incidental reflection on the
surface of the screen instead of the actual pixels. I can't
believe this arrangement is legal.
arcanemachiner wrote 5 hours 36 min ago:
Should have just taped a mirror over it. What a ridiculous
use of technology!
m463 wrote 9 hours 47 min ago:
Wonder why they don't optically refocus the display at a
distance?
There are ways to do stuff like this.
murderfs wrote 5 hours 37 min ago:
I had an old mazda3 (2014) with a little pop up plastic
screen HUD, and it was focused at some distance significantly
greater than the distance between my head and the screen.
numpad0 wrote 5 hours 43 min ago:
Like a light field display? ...
Kirth wrote 9 hours 33 min ago:
The people working on these things likely don't use the end
product.
m463 wrote 8 hours 43 min ago:
lol, probably the bane of every industry.
imp0cat wrote 9 hours 37 min ago:
Since we are talking about car companies, it's cost-cutting,
probably.
drdaeman wrote 12 hours 15 min ago:
Isn't it a general rule of driving (or operating any sufficiently
dangerous machinery) to keep the eyes on the road, constantly
reminding oneself to do so, so the attention is kept where it is
needed? I mean, in theory. In practice, I see people deep in their
damn phones all the time - and it's scary - but I think that's more
of an attitude (social) issue than a display (technology) problem.
And, yes, surely, one needs to periodically switch attention to
mirrors and instruments, and I must imagine that shorter gaze
movement distance shouldn't hurt. It's the same as checking the
speedometer - you don't see the road, only have a rough idea from
the peripheral vision.
Although I can imagine that a HUD can be actively distracting,
constantly intercepting attention, e.g., flickering.
jfim wrote 8 hours 19 min ago:
I have one in my car and it's not distracting. It basically
displays the current speed, the speed limit, the current cruise
control state, the current gear (PRND), and the current
navigation instruction (eg. turn left in 1.5 miles).
It doesn't display notifications or other distractions, nor is it
possible to configure it to do so.
It's not flickering when viewed in person, but when filmed with a
phone camera they do flicker due to how the display works.
It's a pretty good system, and allows one to keep their eyes on
the road without having to look at other screens, and keeping
ones eyes focused on far objects.
spike021 wrote 8 hours 37 min ago:
My 2025 Corolla has a HUD and it doesn't flicker. it's also
fairly minimal and very easy to keep in peripheral vision such
that while looking at traffic and such, I can still grasp what
it's saying without messing up my attention.
tsimionescu wrote 10 hours 12 min ago:
I think the point is that it's much easier to forget you're
focusing on the speedometer instead of focusing on the road when
the speedometer is physically displayed by a HUD right on the
road. Especially if the speedometer keeps changing, since your
eyes are naturally attracted to movement in your current field of
view.
With a normal car dashboard, you're much more aware you're not
seeing the road while checking your speed, and you don't actually
see the speedometer moving while you're looking at the road, so
it can't accidentally catch your attention.
Of course, none of this will matter in the vast majority of
cases. But driving safety is all about the tail end, when you're
slightly tired or when someone in front of you does something
unexpected and maybe illegal, or someone jumps on the road -
these are the times where accidents are avoided, and a HUD might
well hurt rather than help for these cases.
SoftTalker wrote 12 hours 40 min ago:
Exactly. It is bad enough trying to talk to someone with earbuds in
and this just seems 10x worse. Zero chance I would buy something like
this or try to talk to someone wearing them.
SchemaLoad wrote 11 hours 13 min ago:
I've been making an effort to keep my phone in my pocket or even
bag when talking to someone, and not having it sit on the table so
I can't get distracted. I just can't imagine having notifications
literally shoved in your vision automatically all the time.
The whole product category seems to be everything wrong with tech
turned up to 11.
drdaeman wrote 12 hours 41 min ago:
> Can you imagine trying to talk to someone face to face, but they
are giving you a blank stare as random notifications and tiktok
videos are being beamed inbetween their eyeballs and you.
They wouldn't do this if the conversation is important to them. Not
as much as one would glance on a smartwatch when they get a chirp,
which, I believe is perfectly socially acceptable in most
business/casual situations.
And if they do it's nothing new - it's a literal equivalent of
talking to a person deep into their phone. Exact same audiovisual
media consumption - just a different form factor and display
technology. Or, in a pre-phone era, a newspaper.
I don't think this technology introduces anything new to this issue.
jajko wrote 23 min ago:
No its not perfectly socially acceptable, in contrary. Rude is the
best description, be it personal or professional life.
When I see such person who simply can't resist looking at their
displays during conversations, I know I am seeing a hard addict
with host of other attention disorders. And the fool is feeding
those, actively making them worse for some ultra short dopamine
kicks that keep getting shorter till they make new baseline.
Not a stellar person in any meaningful way, rather an addict or an
asshole. So much for perfectly acceptable.
j4coh wrote 3 hours 13 min ago:
You can tell that some people who grew up addicted to video content
already sort of just stare at the real world like they are watching
a video and don't quite realise they are present. If they were
wearing glasses where they were actually watching videos while they
stare into space not much would change.
Vinnl wrote 7 hours 37 min ago:
Possibly I'm a horrible conversation partner, but even today
already it happens with some regularity that someone is checking
their phone while I'm in a conversation with them. It's even more
common in group conversations.
And tacking on some personal experience, I've also noticed when I'm
meeting over Zoom (i.e. with the rest of the internet within arm's
reach), I get distracted way more easily than when meeting in real
life. Sure, maybe not all those meetings are super important to me,
but I'm not sure if the world would be a worse place if that wasn't
possible.
heavyset_go wrote 9 hours 26 min ago:
The glasses close the attention loop faster, and the brain really,
really likes quick stimuli -> dopamine release loops.
The faster it happens, the more addictive it is. It's the
difference between oral administration of drugs and IVing them
directly into one's veins.
hengheng wrote 2 hours 11 min ago:
I don't even think it's cynical anymore to assume that this is
the entire reason why Meta are pursuing this.
They see themselves in a race to produce the most radical, most
efficient machine that produces the most effective addictive
response. Content has been interchangeable for decades,
everything is about the naked control over people's attention,
because that is having power over people.
There is a very modernist logic in the whole effort. Everything
must be taken to its extremes, nothing is ever enough, and
nothing good sits in the middle of anything, and having values is
only a detriment in this race.
brandon272 wrote 11 hours 49 min ago:
It's quite different. Both are rude. But in one case the person is
looking at their phone, and in another case the person is basically
looking directly at you but engaged with some other thing happening
on their device, as if they are in some drug induced stupor or
having a neurological episode.
jkestner wrote 3 hours 2 min ago:
The visual equivalent of the etiquette breaches when Bluetooth
earpieces became a thing.
zhyder wrote 13 hours 1 min ago:
Neural band is huge, glad they're shipping it already rather than
waiting (years?) for a production version of Orion (the full AR glasses
they demo'd a year ago together with this neural band). TheVerge found
the controls great, even tried an alpha of handwriting for text input:
[1] These glasses are just "annotated reality" rather than full AR,
with just 1 small display; think Google Glass but 100x more discreet.
So discreet input and output on a device with a camera.
URI [1]: https://youtu.be/5cVGKvl7Oek
askvictor wrote 8 hours 35 min ago:
I think the backlash against Google Glass was counterproductive - the
product was intentionally made to be obvious that someone was wearing
it. But because of the backlash, companies that want to do this kind
of tech now have to hide it, such as this.
xandrius wrote 5 hours 4 min ago:
Let's forget that Google, just like Facebook, is an evil
corporation with its main line of product being the sale of
personal information, with absolutely no regards, except for when
some country manages to slap their wrist.
So, it's quite a stretch to say "counterproductive", I'm for one
very glad that happened. Sure, I love the tech and what really
mind-blowing we could do with it (I was part of devs working with
Gglasses) but I don't want these ruthless corps being the ones
owning the output.
I'll wait until it is open, with self-hosted infra, and until then,
I'll politely ask to remove the glasses if someone is talking to
me.
m3kw9 wrote 13 hours 4 min ago:
nobody is gonna use this, it's the Humane device except on a glasses.
aacook wrote 13 hours 5 min ago:
It seems like there are a lot of negative comments about Meta's glasses
which is surprising to me as a regular user. I bought these both in
clear and sunglasses and I love them. I've recorded some of the most
amazing videos of my baby with them. Listening to music is fantastic as
it's different from regular headphones since you can still hear the
world around you â I've even done a few longer bike rides with them
and it's been great. I haven't enabled any of the AI or smart features
on the glasses, although I've been meaning to give it a try. Some
things I don't love about them is the proprietary charging cases, the
battery life seems to degrade over time (not totally certain though),
and they're sensitive to sweat. Overall I think they show a ton of
promise.
Quitschquat wrote 39 min ago:
I am curious: does Meta deliver ads to you based on what youâre
looking at?
For example ads for diapers while looking at your baby etc.
0_____0 wrote 1 hour 13 min ago:
These specific glasses haven't been released yet. Hitting brick and
mortar at the end of the month per TFA
taco_emoji wrote 1 hour 37 min ago:
Wow yeah, there's no other way to take pictures or listen to music
with environmental pass-through
makeitdouble wrote 58 min ago:
Taking pictures of small kids is a different thing altogether.
Many of the shots you want are very fleeting moments that you won't
get after you took your phone from the other room. Then holding a
phone will often redirect attention on the phone or hide your face,
and again you'll have lost the moment.
The best alternative is someone else taking the picture (that can
include auto photographing devices, like the one Google made and
discontinued), the second best is you taking the pictures/videos
with the most intrusive and practical device you can get. Smart
glasses sound pretty good for that.
On the music part, I see a niche where glasses are unbeatable: most
buds need to either stick into the ear canal or hook on the
external ear, or both. If you hate things in your ears and also
wear glasses, having the glass act as headphones is the best of
both world.
None of that is mainstream IMHO, but there will be a sizeable
public clamouring for these.
chaostheory wrote 3 hours 12 min ago:
Metaâs brand problem wonât be solved until Gen Alpha comes of
age. Theyâre the first generation to accept VR and they wonât
remember the Facebook debacle since they wonât be using Facebook,
but they will use metaâs AR and VR
postexitus wrote 4 hours 5 min ago:
How do your friends feel when you are having a conversation and you
are constantly pointing a camera at them?
baby wrote 2 hours 4 min ago:
Nobody cares, and everyone loves the candid videos I take with it
postexitus wrote 1 hour 58 min ago:
Interesting. I would have hated it.
latexr wrote 4 hours 5 min ago:
> It seems like there are a lot of negative comments about Meta's
glasses
The negative comments are about Meta the company. Many here donât
trust them, and with good reason, letâs not forget Zuckerberg
literally called âdumb fucksâ to people who trust him. [1] > I've
recorded some of the most amazing videos of my baby with them.
Those are now property of Facebook, inarguably one of the most
privacy-invasive companies in history.
> Listening to music is fantastic as it's different from regular
headphones since you can still hear the world around you [2] > I
haven't enabled any of the AI or smart features on the glasses
Oh, donât worry, theyâll do it for you. Whatever they want to
get, they will.
URI [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/17/facebook-...
URI [2]: https://shokz.com
bamboozled wrote 4 hours 26 min ago:
You record your intimate family encounters using Meta products? Sorry
for your family.
simianparrot wrote 5 hours 4 min ago:
After oculus rift Iâm never buying another Meta product either. It
doesnât matter how good it is they have bo trust left for me.
Will happily try an alternative from someone like Valve or, heck,
even Apple â although not for a few generations when the price is
reasonable.
epolanski wrote 5 hours 49 min ago:
And yet users here were super bullish at how Apple was reinventing
AR/VR with their visor flop 2 years ago.
latexr wrote 3 hours 55 min ago:
In every popular thread there are tons of people optimistic and
pessimistic about the subject. Saying âusers hereâ shared an
opinion is always wrong. Just look at the commend thread, there are
all kinds of opinions.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36201593
johnjames87 wrote 6 hours 26 min ago:
You look smart when you complain. Even if you're not.
Vinnl wrote 7 hours 34 min ago:
For me it's not so much about what those glasses could do for me if I
were to wear them... It's what they do to me if someone else wears
them.
qingcharles wrote 8 hours 30 min ago:
I got some of these for a friend who has severe vision problems. They
don't seem to be able to read out texts or emails from your phone? If
something is in your notifications, it can get to it, beyond that it
just constantly complains it doesn't have access or can't do it,
despite the app having damned near root on the phone, with every
permission possible granted.
Videos are limited to 3 mins, up from 1 min originally.
He says you can't hear the audio or use them for anything useful if
there is much noise around you, i.e. in a busy area they become
completely useless.
I still think they hold great promise, the main letdown is the awful
software. Amazing miniaturization.
baby wrote 2 hours 4 min ago:
I put my hands over my ears if I need to use them in a noisy
environment. Not perfect but it works
BatteryMountain wrote 8 hours 35 min ago:
So META now has videos of your baby. Let that sink in. Hope they were
clothed at least.
People never learn. One day your children will be your judge when
they are grown up, when they realise what you did to them. I hope it
was worth it.
losvedir wrote 2 hours 23 min ago:
Because kids sure hate putting pictures on instagram...
Wurdan wrote 6 hours 1 min ago:
As someone with a very opinionated 11 year old nephew (so he grew
up in the time of ubiquitous social media and he is getting to the
age where he starts to understand its upsides and downsides) - I
dare say that most children don't hold any grudges against their
parents for making digital images and videos of them as babies and
storing those on cloud platforms.
AuryGlenz wrote 7 hours 40 min ago:
Thats such a ridiculously extreme viewpoint. What exactly did the
user âdo to them?â
maldonad0 wrote 9 hours 34 min ago:
I wamt less screens, not more.
tempodox wrote 8 hours 4 min ago:
*fewer* screens.
DonHopkins wrote 6 hours 17 min ago:
Maybe that's what you wamt, but not them.
michelb wrote 9 hours 47 min ago:
I think most of the negative comments are about morality and
Zuckâs, Metaâs, Metaâs workers and Meta supporters lack
thereof.
ainiriand wrote 10 hours 9 min ago:
Zuckerberg: Our baby.
dav43 wrote 10 hours 38 min ago:
I use them too for similar uses. Brilliant. I also use zero AI. I
donât care. I totally understand ppl not buying them because they
are meta. I get it.
vunderba wrote 10 hours 39 min ago:
> It seems like there are a lot of negative comments about Meta's
glasses which is surprising to me as a regular user.
Really? Does nobody remember the "Glasshole" debacle with another
equally large FAANG corporation who tried to push a similar
technology? There were incidents of people getting physically
assaulted JUST for wearing the things.
Jyaif wrote 10 hours 13 min ago:
In 10 years the mentality evolves.
It used to be considered extremely rude to pull out your phone
during a conversation, now all the under 20 do it.
DonHopkins wrote 6 hours 15 min ago:
Yet I highly doubt Robert Scoble's tech bro man-child mentality
has evolved in 10 years. [1] [2]
URI [1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/guy-ruined-google-glass-s...
URI [2]: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/10/robert-scoble-wr...
URI [3]: https://onemanandhisblog.com/2017/10/scoble-utterly-tone...
wkat4242 wrote 6 hours 57 min ago:
20 years ago the world wasn't so tense and deeply polarised as it
is now either. I think many people would object more now, not
less.
Google glass isn't that old though. It started in 2012 with
selected testing users and in 2014 it became possible to just buy
one.
JustExAWS wrote 10 hours 57 min ago:
The camera is worse than any phone camera and you have been able to
buy headphones with active pass through forever to âhear the world
around youâ including adaptive ones.
And being sensitive sweat is kind of a deal breaker when you are
working out.
ugh123 wrote 11 hours 22 min ago:
What's the sweat issue about? Does the display fog up?
SilverElfin wrote 11 hours 29 min ago:
These things have cameras and mics in them. Am I the only one
concerned about people walking into every space with surveillance
systems that are capturing us and sending that data to some random
set of companies who have no obligation to keep our information
confidential? How can I have a conversation with a friend wearing one
of these? And surely workplaces will ban these?
BatteryMountain wrote 8 hours 32 min ago:
Hookup culture or any space (bars, clubs, festivals) where some
level of shenanigans are expected will be destroyed by this even
further than what smartphones has already done.
Imagine you take your kids to the beach and people are wearing
these things. So even the beach won't be safe anymore.
ghostpepper wrote 10 hours 34 min ago:
Most of the people in this thread are agreeing with you. You are
not even close to the only one.
polyomino wrote 11 hours 16 min ago:
Perhaps or maybe they will require them?
ghaff wrote 11 hours 18 min ago:
> And surely workplaces will ban these?
For all but the most security-conscious companies, that ship has
probably sailed. Bringing a camera into many companies used to be
an exercise involving forms, approvals, and so forth. Now everyone
has camera, video, and audio recording in their pocket.
SonOfKyuss wrote 11 hours 9 min ago:
To those around you, there is a big difference between having a
video recording device in your pocket compared to on your head. I
would personally feel pretty uncomfortable if someone pulled up
to the next stall in the workplace bathroom with these on
wkat4242 wrote 7 hours 0 min ago:
Yes huge difference. If someone at work was pointing their
phone camera at me especially while we're having a discussion I
would object also.
asdev wrote 12 hours 15 min ago:
they also don't have an app store and are a closed platform which is
a big downside.
aacook wrote 11 hours 41 min ago:
Agreed, hopefully that changes as things are more ironed out
lurking_swe wrote 12 hours 56 min ago:
> Listening to music is fantastic as it's different from regular
headphones since you can still hear the world around you
Many earbuds, like Airpods, have transparency mode. The end result is
the sameâ¦music while hearing background noise. In fact airpods are
better because of the ANC mode that tunes out noise except
conversation and other âimportantâ sounds. I can also wear
airpods indoors without looking like a dork, so thatâs also plus.
Iâm not seeing why this is novel or interesting?
> I've recorded some of the most amazing videos of my baby with them.
This seems like a compelling use case. How is the video quality?
garbawarb wrote 12 hours 41 min ago:
I wouldn't want to wear earbuds while doing anything active, the
chance of them falling out is too high.
bamboozled wrote 4 hours 25 min ago:
I ski, run, weight lift and do construction work in mine, never
had them fall out, ever.
anal_reactor wrote 10 hours 21 min ago:
I developed a reflex that I periodically press above my nose to
make sure the glasses are in place, which was super funny when I
switched to lenses but kept pressing for no good reason.
0_____0 wrote 11 hours 50 min ago:
I've only had earbuds fall out as the result of actively crashing
a bicycle, and even then they usually stay in.
ptmcc wrote 12 hours 14 min ago:
I've run many hundreds of hours with two variations of AirPods
and they've never once fallen out
rossant wrote 9 hours 23 min ago:
Might depend on the shape of your ear canal. Mines seem to be
weirdly shaped so nothing holds.
paxys wrote 11 hours 21 min ago:
Not everyone's ears are the same. MKBHD famously does not use
Airpods because he can't get them to stay in. I have tried
jogging a couple times with Airpods Pro and they pop out every
time.
numpad0 wrote 8 hours 13 min ago:
EarPods/AirPods designs assume that you have certain genetic
feature on ears called antitragus that hugs the stem with two
opposing wings. I looked mine in the mirrors and one of the
wings is basically missing altogether, making it not
"anti"-ing. Tim Cook visibly has a pair of bulbous ones.
I kind of have different ethnic background than MKBHD, so, it
kind of makes me wonder how that design got the shape it got
and how it stayed that way.
elondaits wrote 10 hours 26 min ago:
In his review of AirPods Pro 3 he says they now stay on
better.
Mtinie wrote 11 hours 2 min ago:
> MKBHD
For those like me who werenât familiar with the moniker, it
refers to Marques Keith Brownlee, a YouTuber who reviews
technology devices.
lurking_swe wrote 12 hours 33 min ago:
Has not been an issue for me (walking, jogging, basketball
practice)
but i understand the concern! sometimes itâs sketchy haha. Like
riding a bicycle.
SketchySeaBeast wrote 12 hours 39 min ago:
I use shockz for running - stable and your ears are totally
unobstructed.
bchris4 wrote 6 hours 31 min ago:
Yea AirPods transparency is great, but Shockz is another level.
Itâs even better than the ray bans because other people
canât hear the audio, and way more comfortable than any
in-ear ones.
roelschroeven wrote 6 hours 12 min ago:
Wait, are you saying that audio from the ray bans will be
heard by anyone around??
aembleton wrote 3 hours 44 min ago:
Well, it's a speaker. Its not using bone conduction.
Probably not a very loud speaker but if someone is next to
you then surely they'd hear it.
JKCalhoun wrote 12 hours 58 min ago:
They have a brand problem. Absolutely no way I buy anything from
Meta.
Aurornis wrote 1 hour 39 min ago:
This is why HN comments about personal preferences for Meta
products arenât informative. Meta really does have billions of
users who donât care in the slightest about boycotting the
company. They just want to use their products because thatâs
where other people are.
unsupp0rted wrote 5 hours 11 min ago:
Only on HN do they have a brand problem.
The vast majority of the world doesnât care. Half donât know
that Meta and Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp are the same
thing.
And even if they know itâs no more concerning than that
conspiracy video they just watched and 100% believed about Bill
Gates, as they log into Windows or power on their Xbox.
mft_ wrote 5 hours 21 min ago:
This. The tech would have to absolutely world-alteringly amazingly
unmissable for me to even consider using anything tied to the Meta
ecosystem.
mrweasel wrote 6 hours 32 min ago:
Which makes you wonder about Ray-Ban. Are they aware that their
involvement with Meta risks hurting their brand? Those of us who
are critical of Meta might be niche enough that it doesn't matter,
but they must have factored that in.
ml-anon wrote 4 hours 16 min ago:
Luxxotica is already terrible, predatory brand that makes shitty
products.
mft_ wrote 5 hours 20 min ago:
I doubt it is to any measurable extent.
The (literally) billions of people around the world using
Facebook and Instagram don't care.
incone123 wrote 5 hours 22 min ago:
You would avoid ray ban conventional glasses in protest at their
association with meta? Don't forget to avoid the rest of
Luxottica Group's products. I would bet (on Polymarket) against
such a boycott gaining traction.
mrweasel wrote 4 hours 3 min ago:
I wasn't talking about a boycott, I was talking brand damage.
It's entirely possible to put less value in a brand, without
boycotting it. Previously I had Ray Ban in the "Makes high-end
expensive sunglasses" category, but now I mentally moved them
to "Makes stupid smart glasses in collaboration with Facebook".
This means that I'm willing to pay less for their products,
compared to ten years ago, they are no longer a luxury brand,
but a gimmick.
incone123 wrote 3 hours 6 min ago:
I see what you mean now. But all Luxottica brand name glasses
have a big mark-up on a quite cheaply made product. They are
better made than what you find on the rack at the supermarket
but the perception of luxury comes from marketing.
gausswho wrote 5 hours 32 min ago:
Huh. I genuinely thought they were already acquired.
wickedsight wrote 5 hours 40 min ago:
Ray-Ban is part of EssilorLuxottica. They own pretty much every
single (sun)glasses brand on earth. I'm sure someone in their
organization has made the decision that Ray-Ban was the best fit
for a brand in their portfolio to do something together with
Meta.
Also, you're right about the niche. A lot of 'normal' people
probably don't even have a clue that Meta and Facebook are the
same thing.
mrweasel wrote 4 hours 0 min ago:
They probably had two brands that made sense, Ray Ban or
Oakley, but just by listing those two, it's fairly clear that
the products would be perceived vastly different, had they gone
with Oakley.
The rest of the brands are either luxury or fairly unknown
brands. Picking a smaller brand would automatically flop the
product and going with e.g. Burberry could limit sales or the
risk to the brand would be to high.
brador wrote 4 hours 54 min ago:
Mark made the choice to go with RB (MIB inspired).
MengerSponge wrote 10 hours 34 min ago:
It's deeper than a brand problem. [1] Meta delenda est.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People
zmmmmm wrote 10 hours 41 min ago:
The brand on display here is Ray Ban. That's why they spent
billions to lock in the partnership.
ghostpepper wrote 10 hours 37 min ago:
Facebook changed its name to Meta. Meta is the company with the
brand problem, not Ray Ban.
paul7986 wrote 10 hours 52 min ago:
I own two pair and love them yet hate them also because they are
not durable and my 1st pair bought Oct 2023 stopped being smart in
April so I bought a 2nd pair. After some big-ish water splashes
the second paired died in June.
Smart glasses are great for ppl who wear some type of glasses and
use their phone to take pics. Also, when I was in Europe asking
about my surroundings enhanced my trip per my learning of about
many sights I explored in Berlin and Amsterdam.
I do love and miss them but Iâm not buying another pair til they
are rock solid durable! Also the Ray Ban stores need to act just
like Apple stores in terms of tech support but they do not ..and
thus both Meta and Ray Ban are just selling a toy that easily
breaks / doesnât last. Even a Ray ban customer service rep said
these things break I get so many calls.
jryle70 wrote 11 hours 10 min ago:
Are you using Chinese brands? Tiktok, AliExpress, ByteDance,
Binance, Tencent? If you have no problems with them but with Meta,
that's hypocrisy on your part.
I myself don't really have problems with them, and neither with
Meta. I don't think they have a brand problem other than in bubbles
like HN.
JustExAWS wrote 10 hours 55 min ago:
The Chinese government canât do anything to affect my daily
life. I would much rather the Chinese government know everything
about me.
signatoremo wrote 10 hours 33 min ago:
So you wouldnât have problems with Meta if they werenât
American? Do you think Chinese people should use Metaâs
products, if they were available there?
JustExAWS wrote 7 hours 57 min ago:
That kind of seems logically to me if Meta isnât sharing
data with the Chinese government.
bitwize wrote 11 hours 6 min ago:
One of these options (Meta vs. Chinese brands) is in bed with a
dangerous totalitarian regime.
The other is the Chinese brands.
splatter9859 wrote 11 hours 12 min ago:
100% this. I'd love to have some of these features in eyewear, but
there is no way in hell I purchase anything like this from Meta.
Less those bastards get of anything I control (data, finances,
time) the better.
mdhb wrote 8 hours 42 min ago:
Youâre about to be in a world where your consent is totally out
of the picture with Meta releasing this product and people will
be recording you all the time now and sending that data directly
to Meta where they can then build models about where you are, who
youâre with, what youâre doing and what you are talking about
and all without providing you and way to opt out other than
breaking the glasses when you encounter them in public.
brazukadev wrote 2 hours 55 min ago:
You are expecting meta to succeed and that's won't be
happening.
paxys wrote 11 hours 34 min ago:
Meta has close to 4 billion people worldwide using one or more of
their products. Their brand problem doesn't extend much further
than the HN comment section.
taco_emoji wrote 1 hour 39 min ago:
Those 4 billion people are using a free product with strong
network effects. That has basically zero bearing on who's going
to buy useless spyware glasses.
rmonvfer wrote 7 hours 43 min ago:
In my (totally limited) experience, most non-tech people donât
even know what Meta is. WhatsApp is almost the only messaging
platform used where I live (and pretty much everywhere outside
the US).
I remember doing Bug Bounty for Meta a while ago and telling some
friends and family about it, and I had to repeatedly explain they
_are_ Facebook and WhatsApp and Instagram and many other things
because they would look at me like I was talking about aliens.
leokennis wrote 7 hours 58 min ago:
Actually Facebook and WhatsApp are the only products I know of
where even completely non-tech people like my mom or the other
parents at my soccer game have ever mentioned something along the
lines of "yeah I did X on Facebook so now whatshisname Zekkerburg
knows about it too..."
These people probably have zero awareness about cookies,
tracking, online disinformation campaigns and online security in
general...yet the one "tech" thing they know is that Facebook
spies on you.
Everyone is aware of how Meta kills privacy in their products.
The products are still useful, especially at price point "free".
And they are still riding on an installed base and network effect
from a time before we cared that much about the privacy
infringement.
But, actually paying for the privilege of being the
product...that seems like an extremely hard sell from Facebook
for me.
motorest wrote 10 hours 27 min ago:
> Meta has close to 4 billion people worldwide using one or more
of their products.
If you ask any of those 4 billion people if they know WhatsApp is
related in anyway to Meta, your answers will be split between
"no" and "what's a Meta?"
paxys wrote 2 hours 39 min ago:
So you are saying people won't buy these glasses because Meta
is evil, but they also don't know what Meta is?
1oooqooq wrote 1 hour 36 min ago:
the glasses require a FACEBOOK account. they got away on
whatsbook by not mentioning Facebook anywhere. including NOT
requiring a Facebook account.
paxys wrote 1 hour 16 min ago:
> the glasses require a FACEBOOK account
They do not
YetAnotherNick wrote 7 hours 11 min ago:
People in HN treat non tech people as illiterate. Everyone
knows what meta and facebook is and who owns whatsapp. At least
if you remove the >50 years old folks.
Most non tech folks believes that Meta listens to their
conversation for ads in Instagram, but that's a different
issue, and even with that belief they are fine with that. I
have seen this discussion so many times with so many different
groups.
mrheosuper wrote 8 hours 40 min ago:
and do you think they will stop using Whatsapp if they know
Meta is the parent ?
leokennis wrote 7 hours 55 min ago:
I think 99% of WhatsApp users would gladly stop using
WhatsApp and switch to something like Signal, if they had
verbal agreements of "everyone else" that they would also
switch.
Everyone is only on WhatsApp because everyone is on WhatsApp.
That is why they tolerate the Meta ickiness of it.
Aurornis wrote 1 hour 36 min ago:
> I think 99% of WhatsApp users would gladly stop using
WhatsApp and switch to something like Signal, if they had
verbal agreements of "everyone else" that they would also
switch.
Most users do not care. If you told them other users agreed
to switch platforms, theyâd be annoyed about having to
learn a new app when they already had one that was set up
and they knew how to use.
HN is part of a small bubble that doesnât understand
product management for common people. Average users do not
care. They just want a product that works.
aembleton wrote 3 hours 52 min ago:
I bet more than 1% of Whatsapp users make use of their web
interface and/or live location. Signal doesn't have either
of these. Yes, you can install a Signal app on your
computer, but not everyone wants to do this.
Also, that "everyone else" would have to include all
business accounts, which I think would require Signal to
build out an API
mnmalst wrote 6 hours 36 min ago:
This sounds like a product idea to me. Make a website that
shows the status of your friends that are willing to switch
to signal. You send an invite to all your friends first so
the list keeps up to date as soon as one of your friend
made a decision. If everybody agreed you can switch as a
whole. Even better if signal would implement it themself!
incone123 wrote 5 hours 40 min ago:
As far as I can tell, Signal automatically tells me which
of my contacts are already on the app. If someone is
willing to switch, the obvious thing to do is install it.
aembleton wrote 3 hours 51 min ago:
I find that list out of date. It shows friends that
deleted the app months ago so don't receive the
message.
mrheosuper wrote 5 hours 54 min ago:
Well, your plan could work if all your future friends
also agree to this.
pjmlp wrote 6 hours 36 min ago:
I bet there are more people knowing what Meta is than
Signal or Telegram.
pier25 wrote 10 hours 43 min ago:
You can use their products and still hate the brand.
I use Whatsapp daily (as does everyone I know) and there's no way
I'm buying anything from Meta.
bergie wrote 1 hour 20 min ago:
I was able to avoid WhatsApp until we started our current
multi-year sailboat cruise. All the local cruiser communities
are on WhatsApp. So when we got to the Canaries, I created an
account.
But I'm making sure WhatsApp will not be used for anything
outside this context. That way I can nuke it when we're back
home.
pier25 wrote 22 min ago:
Yeah it has replaced SMS everywhere but the US and China.
lotsofpulp wrote 10 hours 11 min ago:
You might not be buying anything from Meta with cash, but you
are with information about yourself and your network.
pier25 wrote 9 hours 54 min ago:
Yes, but that's besides the point.
My comment was in the context of "Meta has a brand issue"
which is absolutely true.
mgh2 wrote 11 hours 9 min ago:
Mark was right:
URI [1]: https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_du...
bitmasher9 wrote 11 hours 27 min ago:
Instagram or WhatsApp are absolutely critical for daily
functioning in certain circles of humanity.
crossroadsguy wrote 10 hours 46 min ago:
WhatsApp. Instagram not really. WhatsApp has unfortunately
become "official" (not in a figure of speech) mode of
communication in certain countries, one of which has more than
a billion people in it.
input_sh wrote 7 hours 58 min ago:
Instagram as well absolutely. There's all sorts of "small
business owners" whose entire existence is conducted via an
Instagram account and DMs, the same way there were entire
businesses that operated via Facebook pages in the past.
Aurornis wrote 1 hour 31 min ago:
Itâs interesting to see how out of the loop many HN
commenters are on social media. Any teenager or even
occasional social media using adult could confirm that
Instagram is a hotbed for business operations and marketing
for many business. I barely use it myself but this is
plainly obvious.
The number of overly confident yet entirely incorrect
comments about how other people use WhatsApp, Instagram,
and Facebook from people who obviously arenât familiar
with this platforms is interesting.
SchemaLoad wrote 10 hours 6 min ago:
Depends on who you are. Quite a lot of careers require you to
market yourself on social media now. You can hate Meta with a
passion but acknowledge that you still have to reach
customers who are on Instagram.
crossroadsguy wrote 8 hours 0 min ago:
Well, what you are pointing out sounds like a role
âInfluencers neededâ. So thatâs obvious.
splatter9859 wrote 11 hours 11 min ago:
WhatsApp I can buy due to the communication factor, but
Instagram you're really going to have to sell me on fitting
into the category of 'critical for daily functioning'.
Instagram. Critical to life. Naah.
xeromal wrote 11 hours 2 min ago:
I kind of agree but a lot of modern american small businesses
run completely on facebook. At least in the 4wheeling
community they do
jachee wrote 11 hours 17 min ago:
Yeah, but facebook^WMeta didnât develop those⦠they bought
them to stifle competition.
jlarocco wrote 11 hours 39 min ago:
100% They couldn't pay me to use it. I fully expect it's
violating the user's privacy in every way they think they can get
away with.
notpushkin wrote 12 hours 4 min ago:
I would probably buy a pair once thereâs some progress on an
alternative firmware for those. The price is (hopefully)
subsidized, so putting Meta in the red while getting some cool tech
would be nice. (Same reason I own a Quest 3.)
mavamaarten wrote 8 hours 46 min ago:
Hah, same reason I bought my Quest 2. Figured I could buy a
device that is subsidized by them, and then buy zero games on
their platform and stream from my PC instead.
I was very angry though when they suddenly took away my USB
debugging and had to go through another round of "verification".
JSR_FDED wrote 12 hours 10 min ago:
Meta has a Musk/Tesla problem
Handy-Man wrote 11 hours 48 min ago:
Not even close to that level lol
bigyabai wrote 12 hours 35 min ago:
Well, your loss. My Oculus Quest remains the best $400 I ever spent
on consumer tech.
jodrellblank wrote 7 hours 58 min ago:
8 days ago you would never buy a gimmicky device. Now a screen
facehugger (which does even less than an iPad and is useful in
even fewer situations) is the best thing you ever bought?
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45188372
AuryGlenz wrote 7 hours 50 min ago:
One manâs gimmick is anotherâs useful device.
I donât use my iPad muchâ¦or didnât, until I had a toddler
and long car rides. I either used my phone or my PC, or a
projector for movies. The iPad didnât really fit in there.
I use my Quest 3 often. I can see why someone would have his
opinion.
cosmic_cheese wrote 11 hours 37 min ago:
I use my Quest 2 constantly but the moment that rumored Valve
Index with inside-out tracking becomes available I'm switching.
Not only is the association with Facebook not great, their
Windows desktop software is awful and constantly breaking. PCVR
took a big back seat to the weak on-board stuff with the Quests.
mupuff1234 wrote 12 hours 27 min ago:
Almost everyone I know who got a quest stopped using it after a
week.
It's a fun toy, but gets boring pretty quickly.
xenobeb wrote 3 hours 44 min ago:
I used mine everyday for about 2 months but eventually reached
the boredom stage.
There is just shockingly so little going on in VR.
There is also the issue that it is like a drug that the first
few times are so mind blowing but your tolerance builds so
fast. Then there is nothing stronger to up the dosage.
fidotron wrote 10 hours 16 min ago:
At one point it told you everyone on your friends list that had
also got one - and in my case it was basically everyone I knew
from work over the years. Literally the only people that used
it more than two weeks were those working on VR.
Even if you try to stick with it you grow to dread all
interaction with their app or OS. They have some superb
technology but the product management is atrocious.
samplatt wrote 10 hours 30 min ago:
Meanwhile I have a friend group (mostly build from real-life
relationships) that gets together once a week for the last ~3
years to play VR games.
YMMV :-)
bigyabai wrote 12 hours 10 min ago:
I use mine for flight simming. The screen looks great for the
price, and lets me stream games like DCS World from my desktop.
Far as fun toys go, the Quest sits head-and-shoulders over my
Nintendo Switch.
FergusArgyll wrote 3 hours 33 min ago:
For flight simming it really is much better. Being able to
look to one side while "feeling" the offset (I can't explain
it but you know what I mean) is a huge deal
wkat4242 wrote 7 hours 4 min ago:
For me too, I use mine for hours every week
al_borland wrote 12 hours 35 min ago:
This is my #1 issue. I simply donât trust them and I donât know
that there is a realistic path to build that trust at this point.
Theyâve been violating my trust for decades.
Iâm happy to let them prove out the tech, and if/when a company
enters the market with a compelling product that I can trust, I
will consider that competing product.
JKCalhoun wrote 3 hours 9 min ago:
> I donât know that there is a realistic path to build that
trust at this pointâ¦
I suspect it's impossible as long as Zuckerberg is involved in
the company.
throwoutway wrote 11 hours 20 min ago:
OP is taking videos of his baby with these when Meta's page here
doesn't event mention data privacy or security of the user's
information or how it protects them
frosting1337 wrote 10 hours 37 min ago:
Yes, it does, the link to Data & Privacy is at the bottom.
vasco wrote 10 hours 58 min ago:
All babies look the same, out of anything private you could
film by mistake, a baby seems pretty harmless.
lynndotpy wrote 51 min ago:
I disagree with your assumption, but you also need to
consider that the baby is going to be a person for decades.
JKCalhoun wrote 3 hours 7 min ago:
Note: user has baby.
latexr wrote 4 hours 12 min ago:
URI [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/g...
SXX wrote 7 hours 21 min ago:
Well. Until that film or metadata getting uploaded on Meta
servers or checked by some local child-safety AI, getting
flagged for inappropriate meterial and police knocking on
your door.
dweekly wrote 10 hours 44 min ago:
Face recognition is uninuitively good. Google Photos was able
to pick out faces from my baby photos pretty easily.
koolala wrote 5 hours 46 min ago:
Custom ads based on your baby facial expressions 15 years
later?
jrrv wrote 6 hours 30 min ago:
Really? Mine lumps together completely unrelated people
whilst failing to group together the same person.
ramraj07 wrote 7 hours 5 min ago:
Google Photos works in a near perfect extremely constrained
closed system: your photos have fewer than a hundred faces,
it likely biases uncertainties with more confidence due to
those constraints.
vasco wrote 5 hours 0 min ago:
Funny because I don't use the feature and in my review
tab I have like 15 versions of myself that google thinks
are all different people for me to individually name.
Mostly different phases of facial hair.
SchemaLoad wrote 10 hours 9 min ago:
I was thinking about that a while ago and came to the
conclusion that it's likely massively helped out by the
narrow search space. They aren't trying to match between
every single person, just the ones in your photo library
which is an extremely small group compared to what most
facial recognition is doing.
KPGv2 wrote 10 hours 10 min ago:
Google's face recognition can't tell the difference between
my 5yo and my newborn. And, most hilarious, my 8yo could
unlock my wife's iPhone with face recognition when she was
2yo.
jahsome wrote 10 hours 52 min ago:
Yeah and stupid babies are too stupid to consent anyway
dhjilop wrote 12 hours 36 min ago:
I would buy something from them, but until I know I could wear them
safely at work while developing, using the bathroom, driving, and
watching TV at home, and that Iâd want to do that without being
distracted all day by texts, etc., I wouldnât wear them. I have
to wear glasses, so theyâd have to be clear, prescription glasses
with reasonable small and stylish frames. This product isnât for
me, and I donât see how it makes sense to continue spending money
on this boondoggle, which is effectively a massively expensive
human-testing project to help them develop reasonable-looking
glasses. I love Ray-Ban glasses, but not this style or size, and
not with these features.
mgh2 wrote 12 hours 39 min ago:
Why do you think they rebranded? They are chasing after Gen Z,
brainwashing that clean slate.
AvAn12 wrote 12 hours 35 min ago:
"rebranding" takes more than saying "oh, now we are 'meta'" FB
launched with great positive repetitional aura, but, at least to
me, they have worn that away bit by bit over the years to the
point where it becomes hard to earn back,.
ethbr1 wrote 12 hours 24 min ago:
You'd be amazed how many <25s have no idea Meta owns Instagram
and WhatsApp.
dymk wrote 10 hours 52 min ago:
The big âFrom Metaâ at the bottom of the splash screen
doesnât tip people off?
mcintyre1994 wrote 9 hours 23 min ago:
I suspect itâs more that they donât know who Meta is
and because itâs meaningless they donât link the
âFrom Metaâ between the two apps, if they even use both
of them.
ethbr1 wrote 3 hours 30 min ago:
The inability of most people to notice 11 fingers should
have adjusted our estimate of the average person's
attention to detail.
pchristensen wrote 12 hours 16 min ago:
> 25s have no idea either!
xnx wrote 12 hours 33 min ago:
> FB launched with great positive repetitional aura
As a site that ranked how hot girls were?
vasco wrote 10 hours 54 min ago:
The most popular dating apps do basically the same now but
since there's no leader board and they aren't side by side
it's all good I guess. All the same except for the UX
brandall10 wrote 12 hours 21 min ago:
To the larger public they were the opposite of that... a
clean, uncluttered alternative to MySpace that had none of
its social baggage, in spite of its DNA which was clearly
unknown during the early phases of social media.
mortenjorck wrote 12 hours 22 min ago:
The vast majority of users knew nothing about Facebookâs
origins until The Social Network. In the mid-to-late 2000s,
the perception was of simply a much better designed, much
more exclusive alternative to Myspace.
Hard to imagine nearly two decades later, but for a brief
moment in time, it was cool to be on Facebook.
bigiain wrote 11 hours 57 min ago:
> The vast majority of users knew nothing about
Facebookâs origins
They are all
"dumb fucks." -- Mark Zuckerberg, 2004 personal
correspondence documented in
URI [1]: https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_tr...
fkyoureadthedoc wrote 2 hours 2 min ago:
Bro we get it. It's been done ad nauseam. It's now the
equivalent of putting the dollar sign in Micro$oft.
Probably the most relatable thing he's done anyway.
AvAn12 wrote 12 hours 30 min ago:
Ok, I was trying to give as much benefit of the doubt as
possible. You are 100% correct of course...
alex1138 wrote 12 hours 59 min ago:
One thing with technology is "iron sharpens iron" - I'm sure as
advances in batteries (although I imagine there comes a point where
that stops) occur it will have downstream effects of making all these
things better
...unless part of the package for the improvements are things like
"more likely to catch fire"
65 wrote 13 hours 10 min ago:
It's cool in theory, but frankly my mental health is significantly
improved if I don't stare at a screen all day.
t0lo wrote 13 hours 15 min ago:
considering meta is short for metadata, this opens up whole new avenues
of data harvesting
thot_experiment wrote 13 hours 15 min ago:
Just in case someone is working on this type of thing. I will easily
pay $1000 for an open source glasses thingy that has a monochrome laser
display projecting directly onto my retina. IIRC Bosch and Intel have
tried this before and the prototypes never went anywhere so there's
probably a really good hardware reason why it's not happening but I
want that more than any other hardware, it doesn't even have to be both
eyes.
(admittedly with the recent Android news perhaps non-exploitative
mobile computing is about to be dead and buried but shit, I'd lug
around a backpack module everywhere running linux if it came to that)
numpad0 wrote 8 hours 24 min ago:
Meta's probably losing tons of cash on this one at $799. Realistic
retail price for what they're shipping is likely couple times over
that. No way they're even fully covering the hardware cost with this
price.
Nevermark wrote 6 hours 48 min ago:
You think its more expensive that Apple Vision Pro? [0]
Estimates for that are around $1500.
[0]
URI [1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/apple-vision-pros-...
numpad0 wrote 5 hours 13 min ago:
yeah, yeah probably. AVP uses less hardcore displays and
accompanying optics. Fundamentally they're fancier Apple Watch
displays, though it has more by mass. The front-back aligned
polarizers for VR pancakes might be a bit complicated, but the
lenses itself are rotationally symmetric. This one uses LCoS
which will require front illumination combiner prisms, and also
the big flat lens thing is probably built using lithography of
some kind. I reckon it might not be holographic but something
equally exotic like strategically laid out micro wedges suspended
in the transparent stuff.
The earlier Meta prototype was quoted on media articles as
costing over $10k or something and used transparent SiC for
lenses, and they said work is ongoing to find a cheaper material.
I don't think they meant the lens cost $9.75k and the rest $0.25k
by that.
mietek wrote 8 hours 59 min ago:
Old Microvision Nomad units from around 2004 pop up on eBay from time
to time. I have one; it's a monocular red laser retinal projection
display, with a permanently attached computing unit running an
ancient version of Windows CE. It's bulky, finicky, and nowhere near
open source; there's hardly any documentation for it, but it does
work somewhat. I haven't done anything interesting with it yet,
because it doesn't have a IMU, and integrating one with it has been
difficult.
Microsoft Hololens 2 also used Microvision-derived laser retinal
projection technology. I don't have one, so I can't say how well it
really works, but Microsoft seems to have given up on it as well.
If you relax your requirements and allow for a green holographic
waveguide display, there are a few other options, but still nothing
open source that I'm aware of.
zmmmmm wrote 12 hours 28 min ago:
No display but perhaps you can support these guys and hope they get
there:
URI [1]: https://mentra.glass/
Philpax wrote 12 hours 36 min ago:
Apple is rumoured to have tried this and caused eye damage as a
result: [1] It's quite difficult to do that safely, as it turns out!
I would love a virtual retinal display, but I assume there's a good
reason that nobody has managed to ship one in the last two decades.
URI [1]: https://macdailynews.com/2017/04/20/leaked-document-details-...
mietek wrote 8 hours 49 min ago:
Microvision Nomad was indeed two decades ago, but Microsoft
Hololens 2 also used laser retinal projection.
geuis wrote 13 hours 17 min ago:
Interesting tech, but the item is completely without any attractive
style. Look up "army birth control glasses"
(Sorry about the google search link. Apple and Google go out of their
way to hide the url when doing searches on Google from mobile Safari.)
[1] This is what no one else can seem to understand. The iPad was
created in Apple's labs before the iPhone. But Jobs and other staff
made the decision to wait several years to launch the phone until the
tech caught up to the ambition. They had a certain ascetic they wanted
in addition to the hardware and it required time.
In this case, it looks like opposite. The tech is finally getting
there, but the design team has no sense of making a daily wear product
that people should reasonably want to wear. If I imagine a large
population of people wearing these daily, it's going to look like
middle and high school students from the 70s and 80s in yearbook
photos.
What's awful is that I'm one of the most fashion ignorant people I
know. I wear the same type of shirts and shoes because they're
comfortable not stylish. And my glasses are as minimal frame as
possible because I don't want a large mass of matter sitting on my
face. Even that being said, this product just reminds me of my buddy's
army photo of him wearing the Army issued glasses. Not good.
URI [1]: https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=046dc2c9c0fa6748&udm=2&f...
dylan604 wrote 13 hours 11 min ago:
>Apple and Google go out of their way to hide the url when doing
searches on Google from mobile Safari.
What? It's only 2 clicks away. You can click the copy button after
hitting the share button. /s
geuis wrote 12 hours 46 min ago:
Yup. I can go to any other of billions of domains in the world and
just see the url, but because Google and Apple have a special
compensatory friendship we can't do that.
wrboyce wrote 5 hours 21 min ago:
I use Kagi so I donât get the search terms in my address bar, I
get the full url like you would any other site, and I find it
very annoying. Well, I did, Iâm used to it now but it is
definitely a step backwards imo.
dylan604 wrote 32 min ago:
To me, combining the search bar into the url/location bar was
the step backwards. i'm not a mobile first user, so it just
makes no sense to me. there are many times i've wanted to just
use the url for quicker navigation with things like pagination
and other forms of updating the url to the page I want rather
than clicking < or > type buttons. there are plenty of other
types of non-hacking url updating directly that the hiding of
the url is annoying
lostmsu wrote 13 hours 19 min ago:
The camera access is limited to Meta, no 3rd party developers. For
privacy reasons. Meta ⥠privacy
hanief wrote 13 hours 22 min ago:
I refuse to buy hardware from Meta again. I bought two Portal TV from
them and it discontinued and not supported within two years. Now I have
two junks in my drawer. :(
amatecha wrote 13 hours 18 min ago:
cries in Oculus Go :(
> released on May 1, 2018 to generally positive reviews. By July
2019, the Go was estimated to have sold over two million units. On
June 23, 2020, Facebook Technologies announced it would be ending the
sales of the Oculus Go later that year
TiredOfLife wrote 7 hours 18 min ago:
URI [1]: https://developers.meta.com/horizon/blog/unlocking-oculus-...
laweijfmvo wrote 9 hours 46 min ago:
ending sales is not the same as ending support; use the correct
dates!
grumbel wrote 9 hours 7 min ago:
The Oculus Go was discontinued June 2020, the shop was locked
down for any further updates or new games December 2020, that's
just six months apart. They did "support" it with security
updates until 2022, but it's pretty dead when no new games can be
sold.
amatecha wrote 9 hours 19 min ago:
I used the correct dates, at least the text is copied/pasted from
[1] At least they released an update in 2021 that allows people
to "root" the device so it won't rely on the cloud services
anymore -- a pretty rare occurrence for abandoned products!
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oculus_Go
laweijfmvo wrote 8 hours 43 min ago:
John Carmack was the driving force behind this!
nomilk wrote 13 hours 23 min ago:
Looks like there were some bloopers during the demo: [1] Huge respect
to Zuck and co; I much rather authentic demos where stuff goes pear
than some glossy marketing spiel by a non-technical exec.
Also, I didn't know this demo was taking place until afterwards, meta
really should do more to publicise their demos, especially given
they're actually making cool new stuff, unlike a lot of other big tech
companies who are more about rent-seeking, advertising and enshitifying
than inventing.
URI [1]: https://x.com/nearcyan/status/1968473003592990847
babelfish wrote 13 hours 23 min ago:
Pretty disappointed that prescription is limited to -4/+4!
303uru wrote 13 hours 26 min ago:
I could not be less interested. As the world determine their
relationship with their phone needs distance, Zuck has decided everyone
wants a phone on their face. Doubt it.
josephpmay wrote 13 hours 27 min ago:
It's weird that they give a figure for PPV but not FOV. That tells me
that the FOV must be pretty terrible
jsheard wrote 13 hours 17 min ago:
The Verge's article says it's 600x600 over a 20 degree FOV.
LorenDB wrote 13 hours 27 min ago:
Well, Apple might be Cooked (pun very much intended). Tim is apparently
very focused on AI glasses, but here is Meta with display-enabled
glasses a year before Apple is planning to release anything.
Source: [1] or some other Mark Gurman leak
URI [1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/05/21/apple-smart-glasses-every...
solid_fuel wrote 10 hours 31 min ago:
If Apple launches a similar product it already comes with a huge
brand advantage, although Tim Cook has been working to squander that
reputation recently. Regardless, an Apple version would like be
local-first and come with stronger privacy controls than anything
Meta releases, and that alone is a huge advantage for glasses that
will be worn into the bathroom.
blackqueeriroh wrote 13 hours 17 min ago:
We all love to say this, but everyone forgets: Apple has never beaten
competitors by being the first â theyâve beaten them by being the
best.
Personal computers? Apple wasnât first.
Smartphones with screens? Apple wasnât first.
Tablets? Not first by a mile.
True Wireless Earbuds? Nope, not at all first.
Smartwatches? Hell no, not first.
And yet, Appleâs a category leader in every single one of these
areas.
I donât think it matters if Meta releases something first; Apple
wins by doing it way better. Arguably, Vision Pro was way too early,
even though itâs an incredible experience.
jhatemyjob wrote 10 hours 17 min ago:
Wat. Vision Pro was a complete flop, Airpods aren't the best on the
market, Apple Watch isn't the best on the market
apwell23 wrote 3 hours 20 min ago:
i love love my airpods pro. curious what is better than those?
SchemaLoad wrote 9 hours 50 min ago:
VR in general was a flop. Airpods and Apple watch I'm fairly sure
are way ahead of the rest in sales. Airpods on their own are
bigger than most tech companies in sales.
jhatemyjob wrote 9 hours 34 min ago:
Ya sure, they have more sales volume. Doesn't mean they're
better. Toyota tells more cars than Rolls Royce.
Top-shelf wireless earbuds aren't from Apple. Same for smart
watches.
xandrius wrote 5 hours 0 min ago:
Sells like a Toyota for the price of a Rolls Royce, kind of a
win to me? And with a much better brand than Google or
Facebook.
SchemaLoad wrote 9 hours 21 min ago:
"better" is subjective. Competitors might offer advantages in
a narrow scope, but clearly as an overall package, consumers
think the Apple product is best since they choose to buy them
over the alternatives.
jhatemyjob wrote 9 hours 10 min ago:
You are absolutely right. The average consumer is super
smart. Has great taste. Definitely knows what's best.
jayd16 wrote 12 hours 51 min ago:
What does wins even mean, then? Apple doesn't dominate a market.
They make competitive hardware that integrates well with its
ecosystem. If there's a market for smart glasses they'll probably
use the same strategy.
wklauss wrote 13 hours 1 min ago:
To be fair, Meta is also not the first company to launch smart
glasses with a display.
But the reality of it is that it's probably still to early to say
if these devices will have mainstream appeal. I see a lot of people
saying "well, i no longer need to take the phone out my pocket",
but that has been the case for a couple of years with smartwatches,
for example, and it has not meaningfully changed our dependency
from the smartphone or the smartphone market dynamics that much.
cflewis wrote 13 hours 4 min ago:
I think it's a "yes but" here. AI is the first transition point
since the smartphone. Apple knows how to make hardware, and knows
how to make software. I am extremely unconvinced Apple has a clue
about what to do with AI.
You can't just jump in, the lead up to getting this stuff going is
a 5 year+ horizon, and Google, Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic are still
moving exceptionally fast. Apple has shown they are nowhere near.
They missed the boat on buying Anthropic, OpenAI was never going to
sell with Musk behind it. There's no path forward for them, let
alone catching up.
wpm wrote 37 min ago:
There are a lot of AI companies that don't have a clue about what
to do with AI. I would argue almost no one really knows what to
do with it, which is why it's being shoehorned in everywhere.
I think Apple is being smart by sitting out this "light barrels
of money on fire" phase, because we have no idea where it ends or
whether it'll be worth a damn. Apple has a big enough warchest
that once real solutions do start to coalesce out of the fog,
they can just acquire what they need to build actual products.
JSR_FDED wrote 12 hours 12 min ago:
They also donât own a search engine, yet google pays them $20B
annually
paxys wrote 13 hours 7 min ago:
People keep saying this, but it is absolutely not true.
Apple was first to the personal computer. First to the smartphone.
First to the tablet. First to wireless earbuds. The vast majority
of the company's revenue comes from segments where they had a
multi-year head start over their competitors.
In fact products where they play catch up are more prone to failing
(Vision Pro, Airpods Max, Homepod, Maps, MobileMe, Ping, Music
Connect, AirPower, Airport).
postexitus wrote 3 hours 55 min ago:
Not the first to personal computer. maybe first mass produced
with a GUI with Lisa. We can always narrow a definition and find
a first. Not first to the smartphone, but first to combine
desktop quality browsing with mobile touch screen etc.
stavros wrote 11 hours 12 min ago:
I don't remember about the rest, but we definitely had
smartphones long before the iPhone.
blackoil wrote 12 hours 37 min ago:
They were first in phone with touch interface and no keyboard. In
terms of other capabilities/apps there were other phones much
more powerful and capable.
Edit: even for touch LG Prada was first.
Philpax wrote 12 hours 53 min ago:
...what?
Aside from maybe the personal computer, they were not the first
to any of those. BlackBerry/Palm/Windows Mobile devices all
existed prior to the iPhone; the LG Prada was announced prior to
the iPhone and had a similar form factor. Many tablet PCs existed
before the iPad. Many Bluetooth earbuds existed prior to the
AirPods.
They did a much better job of integrating each of these into a
cohesive experience, but they absolutely had predecessors in each
category.
DonsDiscountGas wrote 13 hours 0 min ago:
They absolutely were not first to the smart phone, that was
blackberry. It's just that blackberry sucked. They were first to
PC but I don't think they were first to laptop.
paxys wrote 12 hours 51 min ago:
Sure you can go back well before blackberry to find even
earlier versions of the smartphone but the type we all use
today was introduced by Apple.
SchemaLoad wrote 9 hours 47 min ago:
They just removed the physical keyboard. Pretty much
everything else about a modern phone was either added in
later years or already existed. The first iphone was
extremely basic.
t0lo wrote 13 hours 13 min ago:
No- they beat them by squatting on the most generic logical human
friendly style so that other companies can't copy the most natural
conception. They're copyright colonialists.
tinyhouse wrote 13 hours 30 min ago:
So this is like Alexa in glasses with a band that lets you do things
without speaking? Sounds like a cool technology. I can see how it is
useful for sport (bike riding, running, etc; hopefully people don't use
it while driving), but to be honest, not something I'm too excited
about buying. It feels more of the same.
post_break wrote 13 hours 31 min ago:
Still no way to replace battery, so in 3 years tops this thing is
e-waste.
Philpax wrote 12 hours 39 min ago:
That is also true of most smartphones. Smartphone batteries can be
replaced, but specialty equipment and training is required. It's the
same problem here, but much worse: they have to pack a significant
amount of hardware into the space available. Even if they wanted to,
it's unlikely that they could offer user-serviceable batteries.
blackoil wrote 12 hours 27 min ago:
TWS are better comparison. Smartphone battery need to be changed in
3-5 years and should cost < $50. People throw them away because new
one is better and they have money.
klik99 wrote 13 hours 31 min ago:
I believe the wristband came from this acquisition: [1] Insanely cool,
and awesome to see a viable wave guide device.
It's so cool that it might outweigh my reluctance to strap facebook to
my face.
URI [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/23/20881032/facebook-ctrl-labs...
jorvi wrote 13 hours 3 min ago:
Disney is about to have a serious talk with Facebook. Disney Research
has had a prototype on gesture detection via wristband electric
sensing tech since 2012:
URI [1]: https://youtu.be/E4tYpXVTjxA?t=2m8s
sva_ wrote 49 min ago:
Besides it being different technology, the original Myo wristband
was also introduced around 2012. The parents were later acquired by
CTRL-labs which was then acquired by Meta. So you can be pretty
confident that they have the patents.
Although surface electromyography is quite a bit older than that.
spot wrote 12 hours 48 min ago:
not the same tech at all.
jayrhynas wrote 13 hours 19 min ago:
CTRL-Labs themselves acquired the wristband tech from North/Thalmic,
who pivoted into smart glasses for a few years before being acquired
by Google.
> In an interesting twist, CTRL-Labs purchased a series of patents
earlier this year around the Myo armband, a gesture and motion
control device developed by North, formerly known as Thalmic Labs.
The Myo armband measured electromyography, or EEG, to translate
muscle activity into gesture-related software inputs, but North moved
on from the product and now makes a stylish pair of AR glasses known
as Focals. It now appears the technology North developed may in some
way make its way into a Focals competitor by way of CTRL-Labs.
etrautmann wrote 9 hours 52 min ago:
That's not true. Thalmic did develop an sEMG band, but the tech
developed here was created by Ctrl-labs and continued development
within Meta.
teleforce wrote 13 hours 8 min ago:
> measured electromyography, or EEG
Should be EMG, but is it normal EMG or sEMG?
spot wrote 12 hours 41 min ago:
surface!
teleforce wrote 11 hours 17 min ago:
Yes, it seems that the gesture detection is based on the raw
time-frequency sEMG signals with data and code for model
implementation from the Nature paper available here [1],[2].
[1] sEMG data: [1] [2] Code for exploring surface
electromyography (sEMG) data and training models associated
with Reality Labs' paper:
URI [1]: https://fb-ctrl-oss.s3.amazonaws.com/generic-neuromoto...
URI [2]: https://github.com/facebookresearch/generic-neuromotor...
spot wrote 13 hours 9 min ago:
nope. the technology was invented by CTRL-labs, and at Meta after
the acquisition. [1] yes the Myo was a similar, earlier, and less
capable technology also based on EMG sensing.
URI [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09255-w
swordsmith wrote 7 hours 25 min ago:
The technology was "invented" by CTRL-Labs like how OpenAI
"invented" transformer-based language models.
spot wrote 3 hours 2 min ago:
Do you have any evidence or are you just going to go with
repeating a bald-face lie?
prawn wrote 12 hours 22 min ago:
I had one of those Thalmic Myo armbands 12ish years ago. Used it
a couple of times and then forgot about it. From memory, there
were only a few gestures available to program, and anything I
could think to sync them to was just as easily handled with
keyboard shortcuts (show desktop, close window, change workspace,
etc).
chatmasta wrote 13 hours 31 min ago:
This is getting closer to the ideal product, but Iâm gonna wait for
the one from Apple that I know it will be well-tested and integrate
with my device. Iâm sure itâs coming in the next few years. I can
only imagine the pain that will come with trying to get the half-baked
Meta ecosystem to cooperate with my iPhone.
jrowen wrote 13 hours 33 min ago:
I think continuing to go for the classic Ray-Ban look is a mistake. I
don't think this product is enticing to the Ray-Ban crowd at this
point. Ray-Bans are for looking effortlessly cool, not maybe secretly
filming people, it's a wolf in sheep's (bulging) clothing. I would go
for more steampunk goggles. Get nerds and hobbyists really excited
about it. Create a new lane.
jaccola wrote 7 hours 47 min ago:
Why are Ray-Ban doing this, is Meta paying them a boatload?
I'm not negative on the Meta glasses, I think a device like this is
the future, even still this hurts Ray-Bans reputation in my eyes.
It's like if Rolex made a smart watch, the tech just doesn't mesh
well with a "luxury" brand.
kstrauser wrote 13 hours 22 min ago:
I don't think these look like classic Ray-Bans. It looks like someone
selected Wayfarers and then ran stroke path 30px. They're basically
the clip art version of Ray-Bans.
JKCalhoun wrote 12 hours 50 min ago:
Ray-Buns.
yakz wrote 13 hours 26 min ago:
A version that is just plainly nerdy (and more comfortable) might not
be a bad idea; maybe call it the developer version or something to
avoid any association with fashion or luxury.
smitty1e wrote 13 hours 34 min ago:
As a theoretical matter, this is some nifty stuff. Hats off to everyone
involved, as a simple matter of engineering.
As a practical matter, this feels too Orwellian. I don't want
necessarily want to emit that much information (he said, looking at his
Galaxy smart phone and watch) all the time.
Possibly I'm trending Luddite in my dotage.
kstrauser wrote 13 hours 35 min ago:
Very interesting.
And also, I hereby ban them in our office. Thou shalt not wear spyware
while looking at the screens that contain our company IP.
paxys wrote 13 hours 28 min ago:
Do you also ban cellphones in your office? And email? Text messaging?
If an employee wants to steal your IP, they will.
oldfuture wrote 9 hours 54 min ago:
You have more control, in theory, on a cellphone, and so do people
around you. With the glasses you really have no way to say if they
are listening or watching what you see. The phone has most of the
time the sensors partially blocked by a bag or a pocket so it
really can't be compared with eyewear.
AvAn12 wrote 12 hours 23 min ago:
Yes. I work on a trading floor. Personal tech is a big issue in the
world of private equity, investment banking, capital markets, law,
medicine, proprietary research, coding, national defense, homeland
security, most government roles, law enforcement, and may other
professions. An employee may try to steal IP, but in the case of
regulated industries, they can wind up in jail very quickly for
doing so. This is no joke, and there is no room for sloppy
move-fast-and-break-things jackassery.
mylifeandtimes wrote 12 hours 4 min ago:
Fortunately this is no longer true in most US government roles.
AvAn12 wrote 12 hours 0 min ago:
RU kidding? You don't think a monitoring for loyalty is
happening right now?
dylan604 wrote 13 hours 13 min ago:
at a company I used to work at, yes, very much so. our personal
devices were checked into a locker with security before entering
the secured part of the building. you were free to come back out to
use it when you needed during the day. the USB ports to our
workstations were covered with epoxy. the desktops didn't actually
connect to the internet, so email/etc used a remote citrix
connection to isolate networks. any network transfer over a set
size would send notices. to be honest, it was glorious to be
without the device. the shit part was everyday when leaving the
office you had to have your bags searched.
kstrauser wrote 13 hours 24 min ago:
I'm not unreasonably worried about my coworkers, compared to a
software-controlled camera they'd be wearing on their heads and
pointing at our code, internal docs, customer information, etc.
And yes, if someone made a habit of pointing their cellphone camera
at the screen all day, I would ask them to please knock it off.
I don't trust Facebook installing cameras in our workspace, or
trust that they couldn't be compromised by another party who might
want to watch what we're doing.
AceJohnny2 wrote 13 hours 4 min ago:
Indeed. Time and time again Facebook/Meta has secretly or openly
breached privacy boundaries for their own gain. They cannot be
trusted with user data.
moralestapia wrote 13 hours 29 min ago:
So, no smartphones in your office?
Edit: Lmao, fake downvotes while another comment which is essentially
the same gets upvoted. The veil has been lifted :D.
ivape wrote 13 hours 37 min ago:
I feel like this and this ( [1] ) are going to converge into the same
thing. If you really think about it, the average person will only ever
use AR glasses for hands free camera, mic/headphone, and to see
notifications. If they get really good, then a map overlay of the
world. But real productivity will require it to start converging into a
bigger visor type headset that is definitely not the same bulky VR form
factor. The bulky VR form factor is DOA ergonomically for productivity
imho.
Lastly, I don't put it past humanity to actually be interested in
seeing ad overlays throughout the world because it's just ... cool, at
least at first.
Killer feature for me:
I'd like to see that 3D marker in the world that I need to walk towards
like a video game.
URI [1]: https://www.visor.com/
herval wrote 13 hours 19 min ago:
Visor is largely vaporware (to put it mildly). Itâs the form factor
Apple is aiming with version 2 or 3 of Vision Pro
Itâs a very different experience to passthrough, no matter how
small you make the glasses, so Iâm not sure thereâs a clear path
to convergence
moralestapia wrote 13 hours 37 min ago:
>The only wave guide device out there with > 42 pixels per degree (ppd)
is a giant headset that isnât sold commercially anymore.
Magic Leap.
blululu wrote 10 hours 50 min ago:
The Magic Leap was around 30 pixels per degree when it was still
sold.
URI [1]: https://kguttag.com/2022/01/31/magic-leap-2-at-spie-ar-vr-mr...
dylan604 wrote 13 hours 7 min ago:
Are you countering that's the name of a device that does this, or the
name of the device that isn't sold any more? I didn't think ML ever
made it to anything viable. They just gave great demo
Philpax wrote 12 hours 50 min ago:
The Magic Leap 1 and 2 were commercially available to some degree,
but they were not successful. I can't speak to their PPD, but I
can't imagine it was that amazing.
The HoloLens devices might be another set of candidates.
tomhow wrote 13 hours 38 min ago:
Pre-release discussion yesterday:
Meta RayBan AR glasses shows Lumus waveguide structures in leaked video
- [1] - Sept 2025 (124 comments)
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45266215
bryant wrote 13 hours 39 min ago:
The biggest thing stopping me from getting these is knowing that a
derivative of Meta's Orion AR prototype will release to manufacturing
in the next few years, and this just feels like a stop-gap.
But the wrist/hand control is the thing that impressed me the most in
today's release. I'd hope for this to go far beyond just the glasses.
zmmmmm wrote 10 hours 35 min ago:
> knowing that a derivative of Meta's Orion AR prototype will release
to manufacturing in the next few years
You actually know that? how? Just the leaked road map or something
more concrete?
paxys wrote 12 hours 42 min ago:
Every piece of tech has a better version a year or two away. If you
keep waiting then you are never going to buy anything.
xandrius wrote 5 hours 2 min ago:
I can end up buying from a non-evil company?
SequoiaHope wrote 12 hours 54 min ago:
The nice thing about AR/VR is that a better version will always come
out in a couple of years so you can always wait. I love VR as a
concept and some years late I bought a Valve Index and am considering
a Bigscreen 2 but really the best thing to do is always wait.
wronglebowski wrote 13 hours 40 min ago:
The live demo of this is brutal.
URI [1]: https://x.com/ns123abc/status/1968469616545452055
baby wrote 1 hour 59 min ago:
The demo gods were not present that day
losvedir wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
Ouch. Kudos for trying, though. I miss the days of live demos at
Apple events, instead of all these polished videos of people standing
in silly poses around the Apple campus.
anonu wrote 2 hours 27 min ago:
It was the WiFi though
santiagobasulto wrote 7 hours 28 min ago:
This one was also pretty bad: [1] I think thereâs some respect to
give cause theyâre doing it live and non-scripted.
URI [1]: https://x.com/jason/status/1968496622884495847?s=46&t=9d1Ha4...
whywhywhywhy wrote 4 hours 42 min ago:
Respect for trying it live now Apple just does pre-recorded with a
ton of VFX.
jansan wrote 6 hours 16 min ago:
Non-scripted? You must be kidding.
_1 wrote 3 hours 31 min ago:
I take it they meant pre-recorded. It was definitely scripted
and practiced.
HaZeust wrote 7 hours 56 min ago:
I have mad respect to them for actually attempting this on the fly -
especially a public company. Nothing really to gain versus a scripted
demo, and absolutely everything to lose. Admirable.
xandrius wrote 5 hours 10 min ago:
Obviously scripted, just the LLM didn't follow its part of the
script.
anal_reactor wrote 10 hours 9 min ago:
Hearing this AI-generated voice awakens some primal aggression in me.
llmthrow0827 wrote 12 hours 59 min ago:
All the VR/AR/XR demos are so insanely trivial and yet still manage
to be much more difficult than current methods of doing things. Like,
really, cooking?
Normal method:
* Search for a recipe
* Leave my phone on a stand and glance at it if I forget a step
Meta glasses:
* Put glasses on (there's a reason I got lasek, it's because wearing
glasses sucks)
* Talk into the void, trying to figure out how to describe my problem
as well as the format that I want the LLM to structure the response
* Correct it when it misreads one of my ingredients
* Hope that the rng gods give me a decent recipe
Or basically any of the things shown off for Apple's headset. Strap
on a giant headset just so I can... browse photos? or take a video
call where the other person can't even see my face?
rhetocj23 wrote 2 hours 34 min ago:
People dont realise how amazingly efficient touch interfaces
already are.
THere is no need for these stupid glasses. Some refuse to accept it
- especially Zuckerberg who relies on folks like Apple to make his
money. Thats really whats driving this project if you tear away all
the BS.
jackbrookes wrote 3 hours 59 min ago:
This reads a bit like like a pre-PC take: "Why use a computer when
a cookbook works fine?"
Imagine itâs 1992:
Cookbook: Open book, follow steps.
PC: Turn on tower, wait for DOS, fiddle with floppies, pray the
printer works, hope the shareware recipe isnât weird.
Not saying you're wrong but its easy to miss the big picture
rs186 wrote 1 hour 45 min ago:
Not the same.
Internet and recipe websites solve a real problem: accessing
recipes was expensive and not easy
AR headsets don't solve any problems. If anything, they make up a
nonexistent problem, attempts but fails to solve the problem,
during which the experience becomes even worse.
endymion-light wrote 2 hours 46 min ago:
honestly cookbooks genuinely are better
i got the art of italian cooking recently and it's genuinely far
easier to get a recipe than trying to scroll through a 50 page
monologue about the intracicies of someones childhood before even
listing the ingredients
makeitdouble wrote 53 min ago:
To note, you can buy the recipes and skip the dumpster internet
or register to a site like cookpad. At this point even YouTube
is a decent place for that.
I agree random recipes are hell on the internet, but it's also
not something we're forced into if we care any bit about
recipes in the first replace.
rhetocj23 wrote 2 hours 32 min ago:
Indeed. There is an element of trust with an actual cookbook -
it signals quality.
The internet over time has been riddled with junk, especially
since the cost of production of information is just your
opportunity cost of time. Even that is going away with the use
of LLMs....
endymion-light wrote 2 hours 21 min ago:
Core issue within the content age that I don't see being
readily resolved. Unfortunately, I think the SEO marketing
crowd are slowly catching up with LLMs, which is leading to
poorer actual output when attempting to get information.
In the same way that google search used to be amazing before
it was taken over by optimization, I think we're seeing a
mass influx of content production to attempt to integrate
itself into training corpus.
rhetocj23 wrote 2 hours 14 min ago:
TBH I for one am glad about this.
I have always believed there is a cost borne to get the
best of something. This means a sacrifice is entailed.
Theres something very important about this re. the culture
- a culture in which everything is free is how you get crap
stuff produced. And people settle for crap stuff just
because its free.
People who can see the bigger picture when you have this,
can see the dangers of it.
aembleton wrote 3 hours 39 min ago:
> "Why use a computer when a cookbook works fine?"
I still feel that way. I have cookbooks because I find the UX
better than searching for recipes.
wpm wrote 1 hour 27 min ago:
So I can read the 20,000 story about how the author was told
this recipe by their brothers husbands step-grandmother while
vacationing at the lake house with their golden retriever named
Max before I can get to the recipe.
atrus wrote 44 min ago:
While this joke is never mentioned and is hilarious every
time, you'd be hard pressed to find a recipe site that didn't
have either a "print" or "go to recipe" button at the top.
twalichiewicz wrote 8 hours 52 min ago:
Watching the announcement, every feature felt like something my
phone already doesâbetter.
With glasses, you have to aim your head at whatever you want the AI
to see. With a phone, you just point the camera while your hands
stay free. Even in Metaâs demo, the presenter had to look back
down at the counter because the AI couldnât see the ingredients.
It feels like the same dead end we saw with Rabbit and the Humane
pinâclever hardware that solves nothing the phone doesnât
already do. Maybe thereâs a niche if you already wear glasses
every day, but beyond that itâs hard to see the case.
Gareth321 wrote 7 hours 4 min ago:
If executed well I think this could reduce a lot of friction in
the process. I can definitely unlock my phone and hold it with
one hand while I prepare and cook, but that's annoying. If my
glasses could monitor progress and tell me what to do with what
while I'm doing it, that's far more convenient. It's clearly not
there yet, but in a few years I have no doubt it will be. And
this is just the start. With the screens they'll be able to offer
AR. Imagine working on electronics or a car and the instructions
are overlaid on the screen while the AI is providing verbal
instructions.
01100011 wrote 7 hours 32 min ago:
I'm oldish, so maybe I'm biased, but this sort of product seems
like something no one will want, outside a few technophiles, but
that industry desperately needs you to want. It's like 3d TV, a
solution in search of a problem because the mfgs need to make the
next big thing with the associated high margins.
To me the phone is a pretty good form factor. Convenient
enough(especially with voice control), unobtrusive, socially
acceptable, and I need to own one anyway because it's a phone.
I'm a geek so I think this tech is cool, but I see zero chance I
would use one, even if it were a few steps better than it is.
dyauspitr wrote 10 hours 58 min ago:
I wear my glasses all the time. If I could just talk to the void
and get help with things Iâm directly seeing reliably that would
be a game changer. Iâve used Geminiâs video mode and weâre
not all that far away.
hdjrudni wrote 11 hours 17 min ago:
I dunno, if these worked perfectly I don't think it'd be awful to
be able to open my fridge and say "what can I make with this" and
it could rattle of some suggestions based on my known preferences
and even show me images in their new display.
Hands-free while cooking (not having to touch my phone with messy
hands) is not a bad thing either.
aembleton wrote 3 hours 38 min ago:
I suppose thats a bit easier than reading it out to ChatGPT.
croes wrote 5 hours 21 min ago:
But your $800 glasses are exposed to the cooking area with steam,
grease fumes, heat etc.
hattmall wrote 7 hours 37 min ago:
It sucks now, no idea why, but a few years ago, with the Google
Home mini, I could just yell out all kinds of cooking related
questions with "Hey Google" and it would always give me a good
answer, was great for doing stuff hands free when cooking, like
when I just don't want to get raw chicken or whatever on my
phone.
But yeah, it doesn't give me good answeres any more, usually trys
to start an unrelated YouTube video or email me something about
Youtube plus or w/e
vasco wrote 10 hours 50 min ago:
I touch my phone with messy hands all the time. They are water
resistant now, just wash it after
mewpmewp2 wrote 5 hours 11 min ago:
I think more so I feel like after touching the phone I should
really wash my hands before touching the food or doing anything
food related etc.
vasco wrote 5 hours 1 min ago:
Yeah but I already live by the 5 second rule anyway so I'm
more careless, you do have a point though, it's less hygienic
for sure.
mewpmewp2 wrote 2 hours 44 min ago:
Yeah, I care less myself, and I'd probably believe I was
training my immune system, but my partner would kill me
though.
SchemaLoad wrote 12 hours 56 min ago:
These companies are reaching really hard for use cases while
ignoring the only ones VR actually works well for. If they just
went all in on gaming it would be a much better product than trying
to push AI slop cooking help.
numpad0 wrote 7 hours 53 min ago:
No offense, but there it this chart, and what this tells me,
maybe just me, is that gaming is a niche within VR, not even
majority use case. Zuck is probably right about VR/AR being the
next big social media, only he's wrong that it'll be like
Facebook/Instagram type of social media; it's old Twitter type of
social media.
[1]:
Most played VR games
Rank Name Curr 24h pk All-time
1. VRChat 33,032 46,652 66,824
2. War Thunder 26,388 65,589 121,318
3. PAYDAY 2 23,513 31,619 247,709
4. No Man's Sky 22,509 46,010 212,613
5. OBS Studio 11,434 22,388 27,334
6. Phasmophobia 7,716 22,789 112,717
7. Forza Hz 5 4,940 13,617 81,096
8. Assetto Corsa 3,885 13,598 19,796
9. OVR Adv. Sett. 3,030 4,299 6,418
10. Tabletop Sim. 2,902 7,755 37,198
1:
URI [1]: https://steamdb.info/charts/?tagid=21978
croes wrote 5 hours 14 min ago:
To me the chart shows that VR is mainly used for games. And the
steam chart don't include the games played directly on the
Quest headsets.
numpad0 wrote 4 hours 36 min ago:
That's certainly one useful spin, but the red flag here is
that these don't correlate well with games known as best VR
games to VR communities. What I believe to be a more accurate
interpretation is, there's nothing but VRChat in VR, and
gaming demand in VR can be ~10x smaller per title relative to
it.
tempodox wrote 8 hours 15 min ago:
Games are not a prolific spy tentacle for hoovering up all kinds
of data. They may have changed their name, but this is still the
facebook company.
thepryz wrote 10 hours 10 min ago:
In my experience, the biggest obstacle to broader AR and VR
adoption beyond reducing the price, size, and weigh of the
hardware will always be the lack of good content creation tools.
I've been involved with two VR projects that were ultimately
cancelled because, while we developed a sexy tech demo that
showed the potential, building things out into something
sustainable required too many resources and took too much time to
maintain.
intrasight wrote 11 hours 10 min ago:
> the only ones VR actually works well for
I had really expected a different "only one"
bayarearefugee wrote 11 hours 40 min ago:
As a gamer, in my experience people don't want to play VR games
either.
Beat Saber as a social party experience with friends in the same
room, sure, that's fun... but for day to day gaming the amount of
people who want to play VR games on the regular is nearly zero.
If they really want to lean into the VR use case that people
want, its porn, but I suspect they won't put that front and
center.
swalsh wrote 11 hours 28 min ago:
I LOVED VR gaming, but after playing the same 2 games for 10
years, it never really evolved. They stopped innovating and
went all in on AR.
tsimionescu wrote 10 hours 7 min ago:
I think you're very much in the minority. Also, VR games
didn't really evolve because it can't really evolve - the
fundamental thing that makes it attractive (immersion in a
digital space) can't work well because of motion sickness.
So, the only way to make an immersive VR game is to have an
extremely tiny game world or an on-rails experience, and that
drastically reduces the appeal.
Of course, you could make all sorts of traditional top-down
or isometric games work well without motion sickness - but no
one is going to pay for VR to play Civilization or Star Craft
or Baldur's Gate 3, since these would be fundamentally the
exact same experience as playing on PC or console, but with a
display strapped to your head.
swalsh wrote 22 min ago:
> can't work well because of motion sickness.
This is an overated problem. You play VR for a small
amount of time then you adapt to it. You get your "VR
Legs" as they say.
xdfgh1112 wrote 9 hours 5 min ago:
This is such nonsense. The new Batman game on VR has full
motion and smooth turning. It's not on rails at all. Games
have got better at reducing motion sickness, and players
also adapt over time.
DonHopkins wrote 6 hours 10 min ago:
They adapt to the taste of their own vomit? Or mitigate
it by drinking lots of chocolate milk before playing?
swalsh wrote 20 min ago:
Your brain just learns to understand it's in VR, and
then it feels normal.
dontlaugh wrote 7 hours 20 min ago:
The many of us who get motion sickness have simply
stopped bothering with VR. Since the market has shrunk
anyway after the initial excitement, the few VR games
left can afford to be less accessible.
isoprophlex wrote 5 hours 24 min ago:
Indeed. I put on any kind of VR helmet for more than 2
minutes and I'll be queasy and/or throw up outright. My
level of motion sickness is maybe extreme... but i
guess that definitely messes with the total addressable
market.
SchemaLoad wrote 11 hours 16 min ago:
I had a HTC Vive and I really loved playing VR games,
particularly a shooter called Pavlov. Felt pretty social with
a ton of absurd custom maps where the actual game was almost
secondary to experiencing the immersive and strange maps.
But since I moved I didn't want to screw the base stations in
to the walls again and haven't played in a long time. I feel
like I probably still would like VR gaming but haven't been
tempted enough to buy any of the newer systems since it seems
like Meta has fully captured the market and it all seems
pretty distasteful now.
bee_rider wrote 12 hours 36 min ago:
VR gaming seems like it is a bit of a niche, though. I think they
want to sell glasses in quantities more like cellphones than
gaming peripherals.
I agree they are reaching (and not finding) for an application.
ubb_server wrote 11 hours 36 min ago:
I agree that VR gaming is a niche, but I think it could be
explosively improved if we had the kind of all-in idealism that
the previous commenter referred to. I think because VR gaming
IS niche, we haven't yet delved into what VR/AR could do in
non-gaming.
An idea that I've had before is like 'augmented curated
experiences' for all kinds of things--for example imagine
playing a Magic the Gathering (or similar) card game, and
watching your cards come to life on the board in hologram-esque
3D. Or while watching a sports match, being able to pull up the
stats or numbers of any players, or flip through channels of
POV camera from helmets. Car navigation that shows you what
turns to make by augmenting lanes or signs with highlighting.
Brick and mortar stores having a live wayfinding route to
products in their store based on your grocery list, recognizing
and highlighting items you like.
tsimionescu wrote 10 hours 36 min ago:
> for example imagine playing a Magic the Gathering (or
similar) card game, and watching your cards come to life on
the board in hologram-esque 3D
This is the kind of thing that buries VR ideas. It's very
cute in a demo, but as an actual product, the cost of coming
up with 3D models and animations for all MTG cards currently
being played is many orders of magnitude more than the total
number of people who would pay for this. Ultimately this is
completely unnecessary fluff for the game, like chess games
where the pieces actually fight: irrelevant, and it actually
detracts from the game because it interrupts the flow of what
you're actually doing.
jdprgm wrote 10 hours 47 min ago:
I remain convinced VR gaming is niche because despite these
companies being willing to drop boatloads of money on all
kinds of things they for some reason never decided to just
allocate a few billion to create a handful of true AAA games
and jumpstart the industry. I think even just 3 proper games
with several hundred mil budgets and VR gaming might be in an
entirely different space than it is now.
bee_rider wrote 9 min ago:
Maybe a really high budget VR shooter game could be
successful, I donât know.
I played some VR sword-fighting games and they were bad in
a way that AAA budgets would not fix. Stuff like an attack
animation being pre-scripted feels incredibly goofy in VR.
I think this is a general problem. VR worlds need to be
more dynamic than typical games. AAA games tend to have
higher quality assets, but arranged in a more restrictive
and scripted configuration. More innovative indie work is
needed to work out what the language of VR should be (it is
a bit weird compared to the past because stuff like Quake
was innovative, AAA-equivalent for the era, but also small
and independent enough to be innovative).
xdfgh1112 wrote 9 hours 2 min ago:
Facebook made a very expensive new Batman game in VR,
there's also Resident Evil, Assassin's Creed, a ton of
other high budget games like Red Matter.
It just isn't taking off. In my experience even though VR
is unique and amazing, it's not that much better than
playing those games flat screen. I tend to spend most of my
time in Beat Saber.
jdprgm wrote 8 hours 15 min ago:
Expensive in the context of other VR games sure. I
couldn't find any official numbers but i'm sure it pales
in comparison to dozens of other games that came out this
year.
Also i'm not sure what these single player relatively
short playtime/runtime games accomplish as you buy it
play it in less than a week and are done. What I would
like to see is the large scale infinitely playable MMO
type game done on VR with at least at 250M budget.
tsimionescu wrote 10 hours 22 min ago:
I think this is extremely doubtful. The reality remains
that it's impossible to make a first person or even third
person VR game with free movement, because of fundamental
limitations in how human brains process movement. Having
your eyes tell you are moving but your muscles and inner
ear tell you that you are not makes you extremely sick very
quickly, and technology can't actually fix this. The better
and more immersive the visual illusion of movement, the
worse the movement sickness you'll experience.
And without free movement, you can't build any of the
mainstream game genres. You can't build and get people
excited in a Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed or Fortnite
or Elden Ring or Zelda where movement works like Riven, the
sequel to Myst. Valve actually tried with the first
Half-Life game in a decade, and even that didn't work.
Add to this massive gameplay limitation the second massive
issue that you can't get a mass audience to pay hundreds of
dollars extra for a peripheral without which they can't
play your 70-80 dollar game.
WhiteNoiz3 wrote 3 hours 31 min ago:
> Valve actually tried with the first Half-Life game in a
decade, and even that didn't work.
Half Life Alyx is still considered to be one of the best
VR games ever made and one that is still consistently
recommended to new users even years after release. IMO
people buy hardware because of the exclusive content. If
a standard game console came out and it only had one AAA
game on it, I probably wouldn't bother buying it. But if
there were 3-4 games that looked really interesting it
starts to look more worth the investment. Playing VR
games takes a lot of committment (time / physical space /
$$$) so the payoff has to be worth it or you'll lose
people. With the huge amount of money spent on R&D for
new hardware I think it's a valid argument to say that
maybe funding content would have been a better investment
in terms of ensuring platform growth.
Also, side note but not every game requires free motion.
Plenty of hits had no movement or teleport etc. A lot of
these were completely new (sub-)genres that didn't exist
or hit the same as they would in a traditional pancake
game. Plus lots of kids seem unaffected by free movement
(maybe as high as 50% of users by my rough estimate).
xdfgh1112 wrote 9 hours 1 min ago:
Those games literally exist now. Almost all new VR games
use free movement not teleportation. It is frustrating
that you seem to be talking confidently when your
knowledge is 5 years out of date.
swalsh wrote 14 min ago:
10 years out of date. Free motion has been the norm
for indie games since HTC vive. The bigger studios
kept using teleportation because that was the "best
practice" gamers got their VR legs and preferred free
motion.
Aeolun wrote 10 hours 54 min ago:
We should re-watch Dennou Coil every few years to be reminded
of what weâre working towards :)
explorigin wrote 13 hours 6 min ago:
I've done live demos of AI. Even with the same queries, I got a
different answers than my 4 previous practice attempts. My demos keep
me on my toes and I try to limit the scope much more now.
(I didn't have control over temperature settings.)
danjc wrote 8 hours 36 min ago:
It looks like true 0-temperature (i.e. determinism) will happen.
Here's some good context:
URI [1]: https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeating-nondeterminism-...
FergusArgyll wrote 3 hours 23 min ago:
But 0 temp is much less "Creative" and may not be conducive to
showing off the AI's latest tricks
ayewo wrote 3 hours 31 min ago:
HN discussion
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45200925
hdjrudni wrote 11 hours 13 min ago:
> (I didn't have control over temperature settings.)
That's...interesting. You'd think they'd dial the temperature to 0
for you before the demo at least. Regardless, if the tech is good,
I'd hope all the answers are at least decent and you could roll
with it. If not....then maybe it needs to stay in R&D.
danpalmer wrote 11 hours 5 min ago:
Reducing temperature to 0 doesn't make LLMs deterministic.
There's still a bunch of other issues such as float math results
depending on which order you perform mathematically commutative
operations in.
riffraff wrote 10 hours 9 min ago:
I keep reading this but I don't get it: for the same input
shouldn't the order of resulting operations be deterministic
too?
NitpickLawyer wrote 8 hours 54 min ago:
It gets more complicated with things like batch processing.
Depending on where in the stack your query gets placed, and
how the underlying hardware works, and how the software stack
was implemented, you might get small differences that get
compounded over many token generations. (vLLM - a popular
inference engine, has this problem as well).
bschwindHN wrote 9 hours 34 min ago:
Previous discussion: [1] And a quora link (sorry):
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19567011
URI [2]: https://www.quora.com/If-floating-point-addition-isn...
danpalmer wrote 9 hours 58 min ago:
Not necessarily. This is a good blog post from a few days
about it:
URI [1]: https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeating-nondeterm...
m3kw9 wrote 13 hours 7 min ago:
so when I talk but not to it, it may response like i accidentally say
siri? Except is every time?
joshdavham wrote 13 hours 10 min ago:
For those who didn't pick up on it, they were being sarcastic about
the issue being wifi related haha
bigtones wrote 12 hours 55 min ago:
That was not sarcasm. They were being serious.
stavros wrote 13 hours 0 min ago:
It didn't sound like sarcasm at all to me?
zmmmmm wrote 13 hours 11 min ago:
If you watch it carefully, he preempts the AI with "What do I do
first" before it even answered the first time. This strongly suggests
it did this in rehearsal to me and hence was far more than just "bad
luck" or bad connectivity. Perhaps the bad connectivity stopped the
override from working and it just kept repeating the previous
response. Either way it suggests some troubling early implications
about how well Meta's AI work is going to me, that they got this
stuck on the main live demo for their flagship product on such a
simple thing.
exitb wrote 10 hours 14 min ago:
The way he clung to âwhat do I do firstâ makes me think that
the whole conversation was scripted in the prompt and AI was asked
to reply in specific way to specific sentences. Possibility not
even actually connected to the camera?
whywhywhywhy wrote 4 hours 47 min ago:
Yeah as a fully integrated system and the selling point I'd
expect you'd say something like "Look again I think you're
getting ahead of yourself".
Maybe the tech wasn't quite fool proof and they tried to fake it
and then the fake version messed up.
mrandish wrote 10 hours 35 min ago:
> Either way it suggests some troubling early implications about
how well Meta's AI work is going
I fully expect the AI to suck initially and then over many months
of updates evolve to mostly annoying and only occasionally mildly
useful.
However, the live stage demo failing isn't necessarily supporting
evidence. Live stage demos involving Wifi are just hard because in
addition to the normal device functionality they're demoing, they
need to simultaneously compress and transmit a screen share of the
final output back over wifi so the audience can see it. And they
have to do all that in a highly challenging RF environment that's
basically impossible to simulate in advance. Frankly, I'd be okay
with them using a special headset that has a hard-wired data link
for the stage demo.
hattmall wrote 7 hours 25 min ago:
I run multiple live streams from speakers to conference rooms and
other bandwidth intensive offerings throughout the day in an
incredibly crowded RF space. WiFi is certainly up to the task.
Meta is a nearly 2 Trillion dollar company a failure of this
order is ridiculous.
bauruine wrote 8 hours 55 min ago:
I assume you couldn't watch the video because it's just a live
stream of a guy standing in a kitchen and talking to his glasses.
He's not on the stage with hundreds of people on the wifi and you
can't see what the glasses are displaying at all.
daemonologist wrote 11 hours 29 min ago:
I think preempting the AI the first time was meant to be a feature
(it's not trivial to implement and is something people often ask
for). Failing from there definitely wasn't great, although it's
kind of what I'd expect from an(y) LLM.
WD-42 wrote 11 hours 0 min ago:
No, he preempted it because it was about to list all the
ingredients necessary to make a steak sauce, despite having them
in front of him. These are glasses, it should have skipped that
part and went straight to what to do first.
herval wrote 13 hours 23 min ago:
Typical Meta product. I used to believe and wasted money on multiple
generations of Quest & Ray-bans. I expect this device to be
unsupported at launch, just like Quest Pro was
hattmall wrote 7 hours 19 min ago:
The portal was like their best product and they just abandoned it.
303uru wrote 13 hours 28 min ago:
Itâs the WiFi, ya sure.
klabb3 wrote 6 hours 7 min ago:
Yeah I was also cringing at that cop out. It doesnât appear
connectivity related. Plus even if it was, it beautifully
highlights the connectivity requirement which sucks for so many
reasons.
TIPSIO wrote 13 hours 30 min ago:
If youâve ever used the current Meta Ray Ban and AI, this almost
exactly happens when the connection is bad. Pure confusion but the AI
still tries to give you an answer.
I bet the device hardware is small/cheap and susceptible to
interference
stavros wrote 12 hours 55 min ago:
I have the Meta glasses and I've never noticed this, and don't even
understand why it could be the connection's fault. The AI gets your
audio and your image, if it gives the wrong answer, it's because
the AI went wrong. How would the bad connection ever affect it?
vunderba wrote 10 hours 35 min ago:
Exactly. Like... what are they even saying here - that if the
connection drops then it falls back to a tiny "dropped on their
head as a child" 4b parameter LLM embedded in the physical
firmware and so that's why it is giving inane responses?
Mad props to the presenter for holding it together though.
dmbche wrote 12 hours 5 min ago:
The ai is in the cloud
Edit0: ie without internet access the ai is unable to produce an
answer other than some prerecorded ones I guess
In the live showcase the presenter even mentions that the wifi
must have been bad for the ai to repeat the answer
stavros wrote 11 hours 22 min ago:
You're saying "you've already used the first two ingredients,
so go ahead and add the sauce" is the prerecorded response when
it doesn't have a connection?
zmmmmm wrote 10 hours 44 min ago:
the thing is, if it loses the connection, why on earth would
the correct behaviour be to just keep repeating the last
response? It should just straight up say, "Sorry I'm having
trouble connecting". Even the best case scenario here
suggests terrible product design.
dmbche wrote 10 hours 36 min ago:
Hard agree on terrible. I guess i'd have disabled the no
connectivity message for the demo to give it a chance to
reconnect gracefully/quickly if at all (by non stop
querying even without wifi) but that's just guessing on my
part. I think they're garbage and same for meta, if that
needs saying
dmbche wrote 11 hours 17 min ago:
No, that's the last queried answer. There is no ai in the
glasses without a connection, so all it (edit1:it here being
the program being run on the glasses, client to the ai
between other things)can do (seemingly) is loop around and
re-read the last queried answer, which was the mistaken
"you've already...".
In the glasses is just a client to the ai. Like there is no
ai in your phone when you talk to chatgpt, you are querying
it and it will not keep talking to you if you cut off the
wifi
The prerecorded responses I speculated about would have been
things like "i'm having some connectivity problems, I'm
unable to chat at this time, I'll let you know when I'm
back." - the same kind of prerecorded things your earbuds
tell you when they're low on power.
tsimionescu wrote 9 hours 35 min ago:
This can't possibly be the case, because the AI voice says
slightly different things between the two attempts. The
first time it says "you've already combined the base
ingredients, so now grate a carrot to add to the sauce";
while the second time it says "you've already combined the
base ingredients, so now grate the carrot* and gently
combine it with the base sauce".
Unless you think they've added some inference logic on the
device to slightly re-state the last answer they got from
the cloud, it's clear that the glasses were connected and
receiving the same useless answer from the cloud.
* side note, but it can also sound like "pear" to me this
second time
dmbche wrote 9 hours 17 min ago:
Oh could very well be the case I've only listened once!
stavros wrote 11 hours 14 min ago:
If you believe that they made the glasses repeat the last
answer when they don't have connectivity, instead of saying
"I don't have connectivity", I don't know what to tell you.
I own a pair of Meta glasses, and the response when they
don't have connectivity is "this function is not available
at this time".
dmbche wrote 11 hours 3 min ago:
Isn't this a very odd discussion to keep going? I'm not
sure why you're being so confrontational as well. I see
you have a lot of points, is that a way to drive
engagement?
WD-42 wrote 10 hours 55 min ago:
Are you a bot? Also "It must be the wifi" has got to be
the lamest, unimaginative, predictable demo failure
excuse I've ever heard, and you're trying to defend it.
dmbche wrote 10 hours 47 min ago:
yes, i am a bot, and i'm paid by meta to convice you
to buy their glasses by telling you they are shit?
what are you on about?
Edit0: and what are you even doing? Where do you
think this is going?
m3kw9 wrote 13 hours 5 min ago:
next time they need 1 public and 1 private router and shut the
public off right before the demo.
krustyburger wrote 13 hours 13 min ago:
Even if itâs small/cheap, if the item is scanned multiple times
this will prevent any electrical infetterence.
chatmasta wrote 12 hours 3 min ago:
I donât even think thatâs a word!
klik99 wrote 13 hours 38 min ago:
This is why Jobs spent months prepping for each presentation.
But hey, at least it's not all faked
SoftTalker wrote 12 hours 53 min ago:
I saw Jobs give a demo of some NeXT technology and the system
crashed and rebooted right in the middle of it. He just said
âoopsâ and talked around it until the system came back up.
garbawarb wrote 12 hours 58 min ago:
I appreciate the live demo but I'm suprised they didn't at least
have a prerecorded backup. I wanted to see how video calls work!
paxys wrote 12 hours 38 min ago:
Considering there's no camera pointing to your face they can't be
all that interesting.
neilv wrote 13 hours 4 min ago:
"At least it's not faked" was my main reaction, too. Some other
big-tech AI-related demos the last couple years have been caught
being faked.
Zuckerberg handling it reasonably well was nice.
(Though the tone at the end of "we'll go check out what he made
later" sounded dismissive. The blame-free post-mortem will include
each of the personnel involved in the failure, in a series of
one-on-one MMA sparring rounds. "I'm up there, launching a
milestone in a trillion-dollar strategic push, and you left me
@#$*&^ my @#*$&^@#( like a #@&#^@! I'll show you post-mortem!")
gretch wrote 13 hours 23 min ago:
When I was at Meta (then facebook), people lived and died by the
live demo creedo.
Pitches can be spun, data is cherry picked. But the proof is always
in the pudding.
This is embarrassing for sure, but from the ashes of this failure
we find the resolve to make the next version better.
Anon1096 wrote 12 hours 57 min ago:
Yep I hope that mindset never dies. Meta is one of the last
engineering-first companies in big tech and willing to live demo
something so obviously prone to mishaps is a great sign of it.
It's not unlike SpaceX and being willing to iterate by crashing
Starships for the world to see. You make mistakes and fix them,
no big deal.
gcr wrote 13 hours 16 min ago:
why did they choose to air this live?
For an internal team sure absolutely, but for public-facing work,
prerecorded is the way to go
whywhywhywhy wrote 4 hours 36 min ago:
Watch their big "Metaverse" presentation where its all
vaporware and faked, presumably this is a cultural shift from
that era.
bee_rider wrote 12 hours 30 min ago:
If it was pre-recorded weâd know it was staged and that
assume they didnât have a working product.
Their actual result was pretty bad, but, ya know, work in
progress I guess.
com2kid wrote 13 hours 3 min ago:
One of my internships was preparing Bill Gate's demo machines
for CES. I setup custom machine images and ran through scripts
to make sure everything went off w/o a hitch (I was doing just
the demos for Tablet PC, each org presumably had their own team
preparing the demos!)
Not doing it live would've been an embarrassment. I don't think
the thought ever crossed anyone's mind, of course we'd do it
live. Sure the machines were super customized, bare bones
Windows installs stripped back to the minimum amount of
software needed for just one demo, but at the end of the day it
sure as hell was real software running up there on stage.
stonogo wrote 13 hours 10 min ago:
The same unwarranted sense of confidence that tells them this
product is worth making tells them that they can easily pull
off a live demo. This is called "culture fit"
postalcoder wrote 13 hours 23 min ago:
i love jobs but i do remember the âeverybody please turn off your
laptopsâ presentation.
live demonstrations are tough - i wish apple would go back to them.
paxys wrote 13 hours 16 min ago:
Totally agree. Up until a few years ago failures during live
demos on stage used to be a mark of authenticity, and companies
playing recordings was always written off as exaggerated or fake.
Now all of Apple's keynotes are prerecorded overproduced garbage.
barbazoo wrote 13 hours 41 min ago:
My neighbour is gonna buy this one as well and I bet itâs going to
end up in the same junk drawer as the last one.
jsheard wrote 13 hours 34 min ago:
It seems like a pattern that Meta hardware usually sells relatively
well, but then struggles with user retention. It happened with the
Quest and so far it's happening with the glasses too. People like the
idea of the products much more than the reality of actually using
them.
URI [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/3/23818462/meta-ray-ban-stor...
dylan604 wrote 13 hours 8 min ago:
It's not so much the hardware, it's the lack of software to use
with the hardware. Nobody wants to wait until real hardware exists
and risk losing consumer interest, yet they risk losing consumer
interest with these half baked products. Sibling comment claims a
killer app, but there hasn't truly been a killer app that makes
people willing to use the product all the time. The new wears off,
and then the use just craters.
aerostable_slug wrote 13 hours 27 min ago:
Good point.
OTOH, for me the Quest killer app is Ace. I can practice pistol
shooting any time I want, which keeps me using the headset every
day. For the glasses, the killer app might be translation. Now, I
couldn't say if that will 'translate' into widespread user
retention, or â like Ace â only really keep a smaller community
engaged (I don't think most users need translation services on a
regular basis).
moron4hire wrote 13 hours 43 min ago:
CapitalOne Meta Ray-Ban Display, brought to you by Costco.
homeonthemtn wrote 13 hours 46 min ago:
It's fine. I still don't have a need for this in my life, and it's
impractical as a replacement (good luck keeping them on once you start
sweating) - you're still going to need your phone.
So that means this is just adding 2 more gadgets, both of which I now
need to wear?
Nah. Not happening.
Neat gestures though.
JKCalhoun wrote 12 hours 46 min ago:
> So that means this is just adding 2 more gadgets
Yeah, I see where this is going. (And here I am wanting less
gadgets.)
paxys wrote 13 hours 25 min ago:
You'll still need to have a phone, yes, but if the glasses reduce the
number of times you pull it out of your pocket then I'd consider them
worthwhile. Same as a smartwatch.
ugh123 wrote 13 hours 48 min ago:
English link:
URI [1]: https://www.meta.com/blog/meta-ray-ban-display-ai-glasses-conn...
tomhow wrote 13 hours 41 min ago:
Updated, thanks!
addaon wrote 13 hours 49 min ago:
Pretty cool hardware. Count me in if and when it supports interesting
software.
tootie wrote 13 hours 3 min ago:
There's the rub isn't it? We've been doing AR for over ten years at
this point and I can't name a single blockbuster app besides Pokemon
Go.
bpiche wrote 13 hours 49 min ago:
[1] regina dugan's f8 keynote 8 years ago
where they announced they were working on a 'haptic vocabulary' for a
skin interface as well as noninvasive brain scanning technologyu\
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCDWKdmwhUI
paxys wrote 13 hours 49 min ago:
I saw the keynote, and while everything about the glasses was more or
less as expected, seeing Zuck easily navigate the interface and type 30
words per minute while barely moving his fingers was a true WTF moment.
If they can actually make the neural interface work that well then Meta
has won this round.
NamlchakKhandro wrote 4 hours 16 min ago:
If it was going to blow up then why hasn't those laser beam projected
keyboards blown up, or why have mechanical keyboards become so damn
popular and not "keyboards on screens?"
This isn't going anywhere.
jackbrookes wrote 3 hours 56 min ago:
> why have mechanical keyboards become so damn popular and not
"keyboards on screens?"
I mean... have you ever used a phone?
dandellion wrote 3 hours 2 min ago:
My phone has so far replaced zero of my keyboards.
paxys wrote 2 hours 31 min ago:
The vast majority of the planet uses a touchscreen phone or
tablet as their primary (and sometimes only) computing device.
The tech audience on HN is very far removed from how the rest
of the world uses technology.
_zoltan_ wrote 8 hours 0 min ago:
there are only a few companies where very strong vision, long time
horizon and pouring money into said projects come together.
NVIDIA, obviously and Meta are definitely on this list.
xandrius wrote 5 hours 8 min ago:
Yep "vision" because they are trying to sell you glasses. /s
But Meta's business is clearly getting more and more sweet data
from its users. How anyone can not see past this being a
surveillance tool for a vast amount of data is unbelievable to me.
_zoltan_ wrote 3 hours 46 min ago:
the vision is not the glasses. the vision is a connected world.
maybe this is not something that you understand, especially if
you're in the US, as there it's common to move farther than the
distance between Madrid to Budapest,
as an example, but for a lot of people I know, like me, who live
more than a 1000km from their childhood friends and 3/4 of the
family, any innovation that helps us meet more often and do more
things together is welcome.
forget the glasses. it's a step in a direction. there will be
many more steps. if you have not already, I urge you to watch
Mark's interview at the Acquired event, he talks about his vision
there.
do they need money to make all of this happen? of course. you can
be part of this as well just by buying META stock.
in the EU I do not need to log in with my facebook account
anyway.
xandrius wrote 2 hours 22 min ago:
From the EU, I really do not care for mr. Zuck. Fool me once,
fool me twice, so to speak.
stavros wrote 11 hours 18 min ago:
While I agree this is extremely impressive, when I'm out walking, I'm
not going to be looking for a convenient flat surface I can rest my
hand on so I can type a message. It seems useless in practice.
etrautmann wrote 9 hours 57 min ago:
That's not a limitation - it works in the air, on your leg, other
hand, etc.
stavros wrote 7 hours 23 min ago:
Does it? Zuckerberg looks like he had to rest his hand on that
desk to write, wouldn't he have written in the air if this
weren't a limitation?
zmmmmm wrote 12 hours 33 min ago:
yep. whatever else you say, Meta's willingness to throw some tech out
there is thrilling from a geek / tech perspective.
cflewis wrote 13 hours 9 min ago:
How does the finger thing work? What's he doing? I saw him
tippy-tappy but it didn't seem like he's moving through some
invisible keyboard.
swordsmith wrote 7 hours 28 min ago:
He's scribbling with his finger.
Typing can also work, but handwriting is simply faster and easier
to decode.
sEMG signals correlate with *muscle* activation. When your fingers
move, the actuators are the muscles in your forearm, and the
tendons relay the force on the joint. Placing the band higher up on
the forearm would actually give you better signals, but a wrist
placement is much more socially acceptable.
dagmx wrote 12 hours 56 min ago:
Itâs tracking the EMG signals that trigger your finger tendons.
Doing that it knows how your fingers are moving.
It can therefore translate it to a handwritten stroke and then do
classical handwriting to text conversion.
jay_kyburz wrote 8 hours 11 min ago:
But I only type with my index fingers!
You've got to type with your shoulders if you want to avoid RSI!
jwrallie wrote 13 hours 6 min ago:
It was hard to see, but it looked like handwriting to me.
phire wrote 10 hours 15 min ago:
For marketing reasons, it needs to be something that people can
pick up with absolutely minimal practice.
I doubt it has enough accuracy for a virtual keyboards (since
keyboards require precise absolute input and it measures
relative), besides, most people aren't experienced with
single-hand typing.
A bespoke gesture based shorthand would be optimal, but then
users would need to spend months learning this new shorthand.
But (almost) everyone already has experience with handwriting,
which is a single hand relative input method. It's the easiest
option for people to quickly pick up and enjoy.
Though, it's far from perfect, you can see he is struggling to
trick his muscle memory into writing without a pen, and he needs
to do it on a solid surface (I'm not sure if that's a technology
limitation, or a muscle memory limitation).
swordsmith wrote 7 hours 27 min ago:
Virtual keyboard is completely doable, but too slow.
bemmu wrote 13 hours 17 min ago:
Exactly, felt like the wristband was the big thing. I don't want the
glasses, but I'm somewhat curious if it'd be useful as an extra input
device when using a computer.
sigmar wrote 12 hours 24 min ago:
they've been bragging about how good that neural wristband is for
years. It's strange they haven't ventured to make a smartwatch with
it. Maybe because Zuck has been so focused on AR/VR
swordsmith wrote 7 hours 33 min ago:
One device at a time!
encoderer wrote 13 hours 39 min ago:
I canât find this demo. Am I blind??
paxys wrote 13 hours 37 min ago:
[1] Skip to around 53:00
URI [1]: https://www.facebook.com/Meta/videos/1927325824791552/
babelfish wrote 13 hours 27 min ago:
YouTube link:
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80s0chTOsK0
layer8 wrote 13 hours 17 min ago:
YouTube link with time mark:
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80s0chTOsK0&t=3210
yakz wrote 13 hours 45 min ago:
Doesnât that make the wrist accessory the important part? The
chunky glasses look like theyâre still too early, not enough tech.
oever wrote 4 hours 7 min ago:
Meta sells your eyes and ears, not your fingers.
NitpickLawyer wrote 8 hours 51 min ago:
> still too early, not enough tech.
At one point I was tracking a company researching beaming images
straight on your eye. I think they were MS related, but not sure.
After a while they stopped updating, so I guess that went nowhere?
It seemed really promising.
jayd16 wrote 13 hours 5 min ago:
It's still certainly early adopter tech. We have the technology
for stereo vision and augmented reality. It's just a matter of
getting the display and battery and compute bill of materials in
order now that they have the screen and a feasible input path.
zmmmmm wrote 13 hours 8 min ago:
i was disappointed they didn't say you could connect it to other
devices too. I would buy it just as a bluetooth keyboard!
paxys wrote 13 hours 41 min ago:
That's why they are sold as a pair. The glasses are simply a screen
strapped to your face. How to control it was always the real
problem to be solved (and no, voice was never the answer).
nubela wrote 13 hours 52 min ago:
I think the tech is really cool. But I was actually hoping for a device
that does the whole "phone strapped to my face" thing without actually
looking like one. I mean if I'm already staring at my screen, why not
make it easier?
rvz wrote 14 hours 4 min ago:
This is very impressive for a first version of the AI glasses from
Meta.
Zuck really has cracked this one.
To Downvoters:
Give credit where credit is due.
I think you are going to realize in a few years why tens of billions
was poured into Reality Labs and Oculus.
Version 2 or 3 of these glasses is going to set Meta ahead of the rest
(except at least Apple).
spot wrote 14 hours 5 min ago:
AI Glasses With an EMG Wristband available Sept 30 for $799
bix6 wrote 14 hours 18 min ago:
> you can accomplish everyday tasksâlike checking messages,
previewing photos, and collaborating with visual Meta AI prompts â
all without needing to pull out your phone.
Why do I need to pay $800 for this? I already paid a grand to have a
phone disrupt my every waking moment!
swaptr wrote 10 hours 18 min ago:
"We appreciate your honesty! While our data shows a few unoptimized
pauses, those afternoon naps, weâre happy to confirm your six-hour
rest cycle remains respected. This isnât just a device; itâs your
partner in reclaiming every waking moment with seamless efficiency."
jayd16 wrote 13 hours 4 min ago:
Now you can wear clothes without pockets.
imachine1980_ wrote 13 hours 26 min ago:
this include the band which is also pushing the envelope of HCI
mark writing clip
URI [1]: https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxfmPX0hba7ulSVL2MyVaS60I0IPm-CQU...
gumby271 wrote 13 hours 37 min ago:
Sorry, is "collaborating with visual Meta AI prompts" just a casual
everyday task we're all doing? I must be missing out!
ww520 wrote 13 hours 42 min ago:
A Ray Ban sunglasses can run up to $500 already.
elicash wrote 2 hours 8 min ago:
They go up to $4,500 (solid gold), but they start at $81 on their
website.
bix6 wrote 13 hours 38 min ago:
Love me some luxottica monopoly pricing!
paxys wrote 13 hours 31 min ago:
There's no monopoly. You can buy identical glasses on the side of
the street for $10. Except you aren't going to get the RayBan
logo, and that's what people are paying for.
gretch wrote 13 hours 13 min ago:
> You can buy identical glasses on the side of the street for
$10. Except you aren't going to get the RayBan logo
That's funny because the ones sold on my street are $10 and
they definitely have the rayban logo
dmix wrote 12 hours 36 min ago:
Itâs usually the build quality which is usually noticeable
by other people looking at it and how theyâll break in a
week from light wear
efskap wrote 12 hours 16 min ago:
The main reason I avoid cheap sunglasses is that if they
only dim in the visible spectrum, your pupil dilates and
lets in more UV light than it would have otherwise,
damaging the retina. Not that the full spectrum protection
explains away the entire premium, but it is a reason not to
go for bottom of the barrel ones sold on street corners.
tsimionescu wrote 9 hours 22 min ago:
Common glass absorbs most of the UV light, and your lens
and cornea absorb the rest. If UV light did hit your
retina, you'd actually notice it - people who lack a
cornea and/or lens can actually notice UV light, which is
why artificial lenses like you'd get after in cataract
surgery are now made of UV-absorbant materials.
So unless you have a rare medical condition AND you're
buying plastic lens glasses, I think you're worrying for
nothing.
igorstellar wrote 6 hours 19 min ago:
All that is true except almost no sunglasses made with
the glass lenses. Itâs almost all plastic with UV
shielding layer.
bix6 wrote 13 hours 24 min ago:
Technically not a monopoly but colloquially I disagree.
They account for 30% of the global market. They own key brands,
license key premium names, and control key distributors like
sunglass hut and LensCrafters.
Their cost to manufacture vs sale price shows a clear ability
to price like a monopoly. As does their ability to box out
competitors.
The $10 look alikes are not identical. They generally are
cheaper materials, not polarized or coated, etc.
lotsofpulp wrote 10 hours 1 min ago:
>Their cost to manufacture vs sale price shows a clear
ability to price like a monopoly.
No, it doesn't. It shows there exists demand for their
products at that price point.
>As does their ability to box out competitors.
They have none. Anyone can go to various websites and order
cheaper sunglasses that work just as well, or go to Costco
and buy them for $25.
paxys wrote 11 hours 59 min ago:
> Their cost to manufacture vs sale price shows a clear
ability to price like a monopoly
Again, you are getting confused by branding vs monopoly. They
sell luxury goods and can mark them at wild premiums, same as
Hermès and Ferrari. None of them are monopolies. Very far
from it.
bix6 wrote 10 hours 52 min ago:
No Iâm not. Hermes and Ferrari are one off brands not
massive conglomerations of multiple brands. LVMH is also
monopoly-like. Ferrari is not even close to 1% of global
auto sales, they arenât moving the market the way
Luxottica can. Sure Ferrari has luxury pricing but itâs
not boxing you out at Sephora.
SoftTalker wrote 12 hours 32 min ago:
True for the $10 ones. But you can get very nice sunglasses
with coating and polarizing lenses for way less than RayBan.
RayBans are nice glasses too but you are mostly paying for
the name.
jhatemyjob wrote 14 hours 24 min ago:
I'm getting Macworld 2007 vibes
enos_feedler wrote 13 hours 54 min ago:
I am getting Phillips CDI vibes. It takes me back to a mid 90s
infomercial where products will built by marketing departments and
companies with cash to splash. There is just no bottom up cool
factor. At all.
reference:
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhZdWvnF3do
stavros wrote 7 hours 16 min ago:
What's this 30 minute ad?! Who was the intended audience!
bigyabai wrote 13 hours 49 min ago:
> There is just no bottom up cool factor. At all.
That's just like, your opinion, man.
bix6 wrote 13 hours 40 min ago:
The wrist thing is kind of cool but he has to set his arm down to
type 30wpm so maybe in a few iterations itâll be more
compelling.
The glasses seem pointless to me for now. Iâm surprised he
didnât add a booty zoom in view. We thought of that idea way
back in middle school. Seems like something heâd vibe with.
enos_feedler wrote 13 hours 47 min ago:
Did you watch the video link and compare? Curious what you think?
Or are you just trolling? I bring substance and you bring negging
bigyabai wrote 12 hours 36 min ago:
I grew up on the internet, I know what the CD-i is. Smart
glasses are cool. For $800, I'd get one tomorrow if someone had
a reproducible jailbreak. I own an Oculus Quest that was worth
every dime.
Too often HN threads devolve into the same tired comparisons
about laserdisks and Palm Pilots. The only precedent we have
for a product like this failing is Vision Pro, and this is
nothing like that. Your comment was jumping to a conclusion
that I think many would disagree with.
jhatemyjob wrote 11 hours 1 min ago:
Even if it doesn't get a jailbreak it will still be a
gamechanger. It's far more of an open platform than iOS ever
was. Sideloading Android apps on the Meta Quest doesn't
require any hax, I imagine it will be the same on the Meta
Display. An SSH client on this thing will be a huge boost in
productivity for me. Can just randomly sit on a park bench
and write some code w/ my pocket bluetooth keyboard. This
will reduce 90% of my need to bring my laptop out of the
house.
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