We have to talk about smart glasses

With any new category of devices, a multitude of new and sometimes exhausting questions comes. Smartphones, for example, it doesn’t matter how trivial they seem to be right now, always harass us with existential dilemmas. When should we use them? How Should we use them? What is God’s name happens to us When We use them, who, ultimately I checked, is literally all the time?

These are important questions, and most of us, even if we do not spend all day ruminating them, tackling complexity in our own way, establishing (or resetting) social norms for ourselves and others while we spring up. The only thing is that, according to my experience, we tend to ask these questions mainly retrospectively, that is to say that after the cat (or the phone, or the smartwatch, or the upset portal in the online world) is out of the proverbial bag. It is easy to look back and say: “It was the moment when we should have thought about it”, and when I put Meta’s new intelligent glasses with a screen, I knew that the moment, for smart glasses in particular, was now – as, the right F ** King now.

In case you have missed it, Meta finally unveiled the Meta-Ray-Ban screen, which are its first smart glasses with a lens screen. I flew to Meta’s headquarters for her annual Connect conference to try them, and the second when I put them, it was clear: these will be big. He probably seems silly from the outside to make a statement like that. We have screens everywhere all the time – in our hands, on our wrists, and sometimes, unfortunately, in our toaster. Why would intelligent glasses be different? On the one hand, I receive this skepticism, but sometimes the function is not the problem; It is a form. And with regard to smart glasses, there is no other form like it.

Meta’s Ray-Ban display is not just another laptop. The interior screen opens a brand new universe of capacities. With these intelligent glasses and the new “neurons” of Meta, a bracelet that reads the electrical signals of your arm and translates them at entries, you can do a lot of things that you do normally on your phone. You can receive and write messages, watch coils on Instagram, take vocal calls and video calls, save video and take photos, and get a rotating navigation. You can even transcribe conversations that occur in real time. You do this on your face in a way that you have never done it before – discreetly and, according to my experience, quite fluid.

If there were limits between you and a device, Meta’s Ray-Ban display fills them with a gap that only an iPhone Air could slide. It is incredibly exciting in a way, because I can see that Meta’s intelligent glasses are both useful and fun. The ability to slide through a user interface in front of my face by sliding my thumb like a kind of meat computer cursor is wild and sometimes exciting. Although everything has not yet been working transparently, the supremacy door of intelligent glasses gives the impression that it has been widely opened. You will want a pair of these smart glasses, whether you know it or not. These will be popular and, therefore, potentially problematic.

We can have a solid understanding of the place and the moment when we are supposed to use phones, but what happens when this “phone” in question becomes perfectly discreet, and the ability to use it becomes almost imperceptible for those around us? When I use a smartphone, you can see me pick it up – you know there is a device in my hand. However, when I use Meta’s Ray-Ban screen, there is almost no indication. Yes, there is a light of intimacy which indicates outside people that an image or a video is taken, but there is also less than 2% of light leakage through the lens, which means that you cannot say when the screen inside the glasses is lit. I certainly couldn’t say when I looked at others to use them. It is as ambient as any ambient calculation that I have witnessed so far.

I spoke to Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy which covers the portable market, and he says that the confidentiality framework around technology like this is still in flow.

“We are still very in the childhood of smart glasses, portable AI and AR confidentiality and the era of the label,” he said. “I think reality is that having a laptop with a camera on your face will change things, and there will be places where these things will be prohibited explicitly.”

Some of these environments said SAG, are private areas like bathrooms or changing rooms, but that could extend beyond the places you may have a glimpse of someone naked. Driving, for example, is a major question. The Meta Ray-Ban display is integrated into navigation, and although the company tells me that the functionality is designed to walk at the moment, it really does not prevent anyone from using her smart glasses in the car. Instead, he will provide a warning before doing so by detecting the speed at which you move. Other companies like Amazon do not even seem to have thought that navigation on smart glasses during driving could be a danger to safety. The first reports indicate that Amazon Laboure, making smart glasses specially designed to make its delivery drivers can use in a car.

Although regulators and NHTSA have expressed warnings about people using VR headsets by driving (yes, people really did it), it does not have, according to my research or my knowledge, tackled the impact of intelligent glasses, which are much more likely, especially if they are spread – to enter the equation by driving. I contacted the NHTSA to comment, but I have not yet received an answer.

Privacy problems should not come from the form factor either. You must also think of the company that does what you wear on your face and if it has proven to be a good steward of your data and your privacy. In the case of Meta? Well, without entering a fully separate rant, I think it could do much better. And other companies that are also looking for screen -dressed glasses, such as Google? Well, they were not much better.

And the manufacturers of smart glasses should not be surprised if, when these things are found on the face of people, they get shit for that. Google Glass, which was released in 2013, may seem like a different age, and in many ways (people’s expectations in terms of privacy are almost nonexistent now), but we don’t have to face the idea of ​​portable clothes dressed in omnipresent camera for a long time, so that is to say things to have Really changed? Sag says that, although it expects reactions, it may not be like the glass hole days in the past.

“I think there will be backlash, but I don’t think it’s going to be as bad as Google Glass,” he said. “Google Glass had such an invasive appearance. You know, it doesn’t seem really normal, so it really caught the attention of people more. And I think that is really what made these classes more successful, is that they are simply less intrusive in terms of appearance.”

I may not be an industry analyst, but I agree with SAG. I’m not sure there will really be an end of category backlash as we have seen in the Google days, and part of me does not want there to be. As I mentioned, I was lucky to use Meta’s Ray-Ban screens, and the idea almost removed my socks. These are the smart glasses that anyone interested in the shape factor was waiting for. What I really want is to be able to live in a world where we can use them all respectfully and responsible, and where the companies that make them give us the same responsibility and the same respect. But according to my experience, the only way to go to a more respectful and harmonious world is to try everything else, and in this case, the first step could be your next pair of shelves.