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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why do I need to pay $800 for this? I already paid a grand to have a phone disrupt my every waking moment!

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.

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?

And also, I hereby ban them in our office. Thou shalt not wear spyware while looking at the screens that contain our company IP.

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.

- 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.

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.

Source: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/05/21/apple-smart-glasses-eve... or some other Mark Gurman leak

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.

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, “GhostDot” stickers are being sold to block the LED indicator light so others won’t 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 “Hey Meta” 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.

I wonder how the etiquette will evolve for people with legitimate needs to use them in polite company.

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.

(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 - https://x.com/ns123abc/status/1968469616545452055

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...

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.

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?

Just imagine the dollars in front of those glasses… if it only darned worked.

I really hope they don’t though because it’s beyond dystopian to own such a billboard company with a sick twist.

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\

https://youtu.be/YJg02ivYzSs?si=nTLQO4G2OIPcMkwX

(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.)

https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=046dc2c9c0fa6748&udm=2...

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.

So that means this is just adding 2 more gadgets, both of which I now need to wear?

Nah. Not happening.

Neat gestures though.

But I realized this is a pretty clever move. Only allowing a fixed, inset screen really hides any issues with display field of view.

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.

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.

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!

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).

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.

Magic Leap.

No? Then no thank you.

(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)

Meta RayBan AR glasses shows Lumus waveguide structures in leaked video - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45266215 - Sept 2025 (124 comments)