Seriously, who needs to record someone without the knowledge of the person being recorded? That’s a big red flag, a perverted character, there’s no other explanation. Creepy Mark Zuckerberg allowed other creepy characters to share personal moments with him.
In the future, when there are no more meta glasses and flock cameras, people will hide behind streetlamp posts and parked cars just to secretly stare at you from afar. /s
Going back a couple generations of this tech, I was a little excited about Google glass back in the day.
And to be clear, I don’t have, want, or like meta glasses or any of the other products out there right now. I don’t trust the companies behind them, I don’t like the people who have them, there’s enormous privacy issues with them, and they’re pretty much totally tied to AI at this point and I don’t think I need to get up on a soap box to explain why that’s a problem on Lemmy.
But if all of those issues were somehow solved, I could see them being pretty damn useful.
Part of what I liked about them was that they were obviously not just regular glasses. Not that every passerby is scrutinizing what the people around them are wearing on their face, but they weren’t pretending to be anything they weren’t.
I think they could be useful for capturing pictures and video of things in the moment. I recently went on a trip to Iceland and saw some geysers. I wanted to get a picture of them erupting but that meant I had to stand around holding up my phone for like 5 minutes because you don’t know exactly when it’s going to erupt, and that did take me out of the moment a bit. Would’ve been kind of nice to just set my glasses to record as I stood there watching and waiting.
When I can, I try to get around on foot. Having some sort of HUD to display directions and such would be pretty nice for that instead of constantly having to pull out my phone. Having directions in your earbuds works pretty well in most cases, but does somewhat impair your ability to hear what’s going on around you. Also, in cases like when I was in Iceland, my ears aren’t exactly used to hearing icelandic words, and it kind of seemed like Google’s text to speech isn’t quite up to it either, because it seemed to skip a lot of street names and just said “turn left” making me have to look at my phone to see which specific road I was supposed to be turning at. But even when it did attempt to pronounce the names, most of them sound like gobbledegook to me, and I wouldn’t necessarily be able to match what I heard up to a street sign.
Similarly, I had to pull out my phone to translate more than a few signs, menus, etc. while I was there. Being able to just look at the sign and have a translation pop up in the corner of my vision or overlaid on top of the icelandic words would have been nice.
There is no way to do this in a way that wouldn’t be horrifyingly invasive and disrespectful of other people’s privacy, but if there were, I’m pretty terrible with names, and being able to have a pop-up with name tags or something would be nice in a lot of social situations.
I have a pretty small house where storage and workspace is at a premium, and I can be a bit scatterbrained and disorganized. I often find myself working on my hobbies at a small, cluttered workbench with several in-progress projects scattered about. Having the camera rolling while I do that might be useful for me, so I can rewind and see where the hell I put that screwdriver down, I just had it 2 minutes ago and now it’s vanished into thin air.
Similarly, I like to cook, and I tend to wing it a lot, I’m not following recipes too closely, I taste, adjust and improvise as I go, and I’m certainly not writing my recipes down while I’m doing it. And not to toot my own horn, but I’m a pretty good cook, people tend to really like what I make and often ask me for recipes. Being able to go back and review the video of what I did would be pretty handy for when I actually do want to write one of those recipes down, and I could share some of the video to show exactly what I did for some more complicated steps.
And in cases where I am referencing a recipe or tutorial or whatever while I’m working on something, again, workspace is a valuable commodity in my house. I would rather not have some of it taken up by my phone if I can avoid it. If I’m moving between different areas, like from the counter to the stove, or from the bathroom where I’m working on something to the basement where the water shut off and circuit breaker is, or maybe I have my hands full, or I’m up on a ladder, or maybe my hands are dirty and I don’t want to touch my phone, or maybe I don’t want to be touching my phone while I’m cooking because phones are pretty gross, etc. it could be nice to just have the instructions or or video right there in my glasses.
If the cameras are good enough, they might also be able to take the place of the head mounted magnifier I sometimes use while working on small things, I could just zoom in with the camera.
I used to work in a warehouse, we had rows and rows of racks full of pallets with boxes on them. When we were filling orders, we sometimes only needed one or two things out of a box, and so every time we pulled something out we’d have to print out a new label so we could tell at a glance how many things were in a box. With some sort of smart glasses we could have just had maybe a unique QR code on each box, and the inventory count just got updated. It may have saved us a bit of time and definitely would have saved a ton of labels, and we wouldn’t have needed the portable label printers we had which would have saved a bit of money as well.
To specifically your point about geysers… I mean I do get it, kind of. We only feel like we need a recording of it because it’s now. If you’d gone 70 years ago you could literally just see it, know you saw it, know it was awesome and cherish the memory. But now we’ve been conditioned to require proof. For ourselves or social media, the outcome is the same. I travel a moderate amount and have seen amazing things. I have a small number of pictures from each trip because I just want to experience the feeling of it. That being said, it is nice to get a photos notie of a past trip and take the memory lane journey. But it never ruins my day when they don’t show up. Ya know?
Last year at this event organized by a friend we were sat at the table along some radio and tv personalities, not famous, but clearly managing a step up in income than the rest.
Right from the start one of them started to show off his new Ray-Bans that recorded video. Common among rich people to brag about something expensive…
My wife asked, what are you recording? he answered without shame… “I’ve been recording everyone and nobody knew” with a grin on his face.
If they have AR screen (no idea tbh), then I’d love to have one to see if an IRL adblock is possible. It shouldn’t be hard, OCR is already there, and just overlaying a rectangle over adds shouldn’t be that difficult.
Unfortunatel, it would need an always on camera, and people are dickheads who just have to start misusing that.
The surveillance society has already been normalized to a new generation of young people. This is simply the next step. The answer to “who uses Meta glasses?” is everyone, because it’s now normal to record and upload everything you do so you might as well have a camera conveniently placed in your stylish and trendy new glasses.
In the same way that it is weird or suspicious to not have a Facebook or Instagram plastered with your face, your friends faces, your cat, and enviable deeds and exploits, it will become weird to complain about being recorded by someone’s glasses - “Why, what are you hiding? What don’t you want us to see? What are you so afraid of?” The biggest sacrifice we’ve made is not the right to privacy, but to even value and understand what it is and why it is important; the very idea of privacy is eroded.
The campaign to label this phenomena a perversion has the right idea, but the wrong scope. Tech does not push these devices to enable sexual perverts, they push them to sell us the means of our own surveillance and to expand their data gathering capabilities by perverting what is viewed as normal when it comes to privacy. Being surreptitiously recorded in private spaces is just the beginning - imagine a society in which it is common and normal to have a camera in every other pair of glasses, and for it to be impossible to know when and where you may be recorded.
They did this with cell phones, now they’re doing it with glasses, TVs, cars, and anything else they can cram a camera, a microphone, a modem, and a computer in.
