this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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I understand the gripes about Meta, but I don't understand how everyone clowns on this like the core concept is stupid or unwanted.
Easy $1000 sell: cycling / escooter accessory. People already regularly buy expensive sport glasses just for sun and wind protection. With a smart version of them like this, you add open ear headphone, and you add the potential for navigation directions, or even a Bluetooth rear view camera on the back of your helmet to get a virtual mirror.
The core technology is impressive, and has legitimate use cases.
But that doesn’t outweigh the enormous privacy concerns these devices raise. They aren’t being angled as an accessory for specific activities, but as everyday wearables. If smart glasses like these became common they would be unavoidable, creating leave of intrusion that’s concerning even without Meta being involved.
"Hi, just wearing my glasses in the changing room..."
As a cyclist, this is a terrible sell. I already have tech which does all this, and probably does it better, for less.
I don't need a HUD constantly in my face obscuring the beautiful views. I have sun glasses which fit well with a helmet and wrap around my face to keep the wind out.
I have a cycling computer, which offers GPS turn by turn, and pairs to power meters, heart rate and radar light. It is mounted on the handlebars in an easy to view place.
I have bone conducting headphones for music.
All of this is significantly less than $1000, and if something breaks, I can replace it all individually. I also don't have to wear ridiculous looking sunglasses to listen to my bone conducting headphones.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but this reads a bit like some of the comments on those old Slashdot threads clowning on the first smartphones.
‘these things will fail, I already have a camera, a cellphone, and an mp3 player, why would anyone want them all in one device?’
Heh...these days I kinda long for devices for for specific purposes again 😅 and I'm a software engineer.
Exactly my first thought.
Hope it doesn’t turn out the same way this time around
You'd rather have a camera cell phone and mp3 player than a smartphone?
No.
Doesn’t make me any less apprehensive about meta putting cameras and microphones on everybody’s face.
We're at the point now that we "need" 6 gadgets that do the same thing.
Literally everything you said is just dumb hater bullshit. You added nothing to the discussion.
I agree that head mounted displays can be useful, I'm contemplating getting something like it, but just no cameras, please. not in the frame, not backwards, not anywhere.
To me it seems like a thing that sounds kinda cool on paper, but is not actually that useful in practice. We already have the ability to do real time translations or point the camera at something to get more information via AI with our smartphones, but who actually uses that on the regular? It's just not useful or accurate enough in its current state and having it always available as a HUD isn't going to change that imo. Being able to point a camera at something and have AI tell me "that's a red bicycle" is a cool novelty the first few times, but I already knew that information just by looking at it. And if I'm trying to communicate with someone in a foreign language using my phone to translate for me, I'll just feel like a dork.
Anybody living in a foreign country with a different language.
Being able to read signs and storefronts from a motorbike in real time would be life-changing.
Visual search is already useful. People go through the effort of posting requests to social media or forums asking "what is this thing" or "help me ID these shoes and where I can buy them" or "what kind of spider is this" all the time. They're not searching for red bicycles, they're taking pictures of a specific Bianchi model and asking what year it was manufactured. Automating the process and improving the reliability/accuracy of that search will improve day to day life.
And I have strong reservations about the fundamental issues of inference engines being used to generate things (LLMs and diffusers and things like that), but image recognition, speech to text, and translation are areas where these tools excel today.
And the answer they get will probably be wrong, or at least wrong often enough that you can't trust it without looking it up yourself. And even if these things do get good enough people will still won't be using it frequently enough to want to wear a device on their face to do it, when they can already do it better on their phone.
Sell your bike to afford them. Easy. It's another pointless gimmick, like 3D TV or the Metaverse and virtual shopping. Zuckerberg had one idea and got lucky, it's been wasting money since.