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 — 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.

• gdbsjjdn

  09/18/2025

  Bone conduction headphones will give you the same audio experience with better battery life and usb-c charging.

  I think a lot of people don't want to "feed the beast" and reward Meta for their terrible impact on society.

  • freedomben

    09/18/2025

    My wife loves bone conduction, but to me it sounds terrible. Makes me wonder if I'm doing something wrong or if my bones just suck

    • amalcon

      09/18/2025

      Do you have the same musical taste as your wife? I have a bone conduction headset that I use for cycling. Podcasts and ebooks sound fine, and some music is acceptable (a lot of classical, some pop and folk). Anything with bass just sounds like garbage though - don't bother with any hard rock, hip hop, or anything else with bass.

      • freedomben

        09/18/2025

        Ah interesting! Yeah she listens to a lot of podcasts while I mostly use headphones to listen to rock and metal

      • canuckintime

        09/19/2025

        Which bone conduction headset do you have?

        • freedomben

          09/19/2025

          I tried out hers to see if I liked them, and am not sure which make/model it is. I'll ask her when I get a chance. I do remember her saying they cost about $125 so not cheap, but probably not high end either

    • heavyset_go

      09/19/2025

      Get a good pair that actually does bone conduction and isn't just a shitty speaker blasting next to your ear.

      It will never be as good as open ear headphones, some frequencies just don't translate well via conduction, but they're good enough for podcasts, TV and movies. They're great for music if you're exercising or need to be aware of your surroundings, but if you care about sound quality, they are not something you'd want to use to listen to music in a quiet room, for example.

    • HanShotFirst

      09/18/2025

      They are not great for listening to music in high fidelity. The are great for spoken word, and fine for music if you're not super concerned about quality; I liken it to listening to music from the speaker on a small portable FM radio.

    • underdeserver

      09/18/2025

      Your bones so not suck, but positioning makes a huge difference.

      How much did you play around with them?

      Also try them with earplugs.

      • stronglikedan

        09/18/2025

        > Also try them with earplugs.

        At that point, just get TWS buds which will sound magnitudes better.

        • underdeserver

          09/19/2025

          The point is to verify your fit and find the sweet spot so you can later use them without earplugs.

          No one is claiming that bone-conduction headphones are competitive in sound quality.

  • rezmason

    09/18/2025

    I think of bone conducting headphones as the most realistic foundation for augmented reality on the market. Hearing things without plugging your ears up, weighing you down or taking you out of your surroundings is underrated and underutilized. To match the weight of an Oculus Quest 3 on my head, I'd have to wear seventeen pairs of Shockz OpenMove. Compare the dread of a video ad over your eyes to the dread of an audio ad in your ears.

    We really should have a broader conversation about the practical applications of this stuff.

  • stevenhubertron

    09/20/2025

    I deeply disagree here. Bone conduction headphones sound significantly worse then the Ray-Bans. You can hate Meta but its untrue that its the same audio experience.

  • canuckintime

    09/19/2025

    What brands still make bone conduction headphones?

    • jamaicahest

      09/19/2025

      Shokz

      • GrzegorzWidla

        09/24/2025

        Suunto makes them better these days.

• Vinnl

  09/18/2025

  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.

  • jijijijij

    09/19/2025

    Watch Zuckerberg proudly showing how his hand gestures are hardly noticeable. So, so creepy.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if people wearing these would get confronted, denied entry or beaten up regularly. I can even totally see them ray-banned legally. At least in the EU. Much less with external video processing.

    Although I love the idea of AR and the cyberpunk flair, I don’t think these will be a thing because of privacy implications. Nothing has fundamentally changed since Google Glass failure.

    • hipjiveguy

      09/19/2025

      Agree - basically tech that can see what people do, is creepy. and as you suggest - others can engage, but we don't control that.

      Currently, it's somewhat obvious, but what happens when the tech is totally invisible?

      That day is coming very soon, within a decade, max, and you have to imagine every thing you ever do, in any place - even in the dark, is recorded.

      Arthur C Clarke, and Stephen Baxter wrote a book about this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days

      Well worth reading, imho, but it does explicitely ignore the concept of a higher presence, which is noteworthy

      • olyjohn

        09/19/2025

        We know what happens when the tech is invisible. There are thousands of cameras doing facial recognition and license plate tracking and nobody cares. Everything we do is already recorded. Your phone location history, your vehicle location history, all the things you buy and shop for, your search history... But some random wears a pair of glasses and everybody loses their mind.

        • phatskat

          09/21/2025

          There’s a difference though - currently, this kind of tech and breadth of surveillance is largely in the hands of corporations and government. In the near future, when things like these glasses are invisible _and_ mildly affordable (even iPhone-price), it becomes a lot more interesting and invasive. Couple that with LLMs that can be used to quickly catalog and index the people in videos, maybe toss in community-driven repositories of peoples’ recordings, and it will be much much harder for anyone to avoid being spotted unless you just don’t leave your house.

          Reminds me to check in with the current state of cloaking tech.

        • hipjiveguy

          09/19/2025

          for sure - it is inevitable, if you live in modern society. This is a past tense discussion, as it's already happening, even as I type this msg in reddit of course. The only way out is to leave and live in the woods pretty much, but that doesn't stop it, it only delays the engagement.

    • d3rockk

      09/19/2025

      Google Glass was a loud, clunky script, whereas these are a stealthy, AI-powered rootkit hiding in plain sight. The fundamental change isn't the hardware, it's the social engineering masterstroke of weaponizing fashion to make the public willingly install a backdoor to their entire life.

    • 1gn15

      09/20/2025

      > I wouldn’t be surprised if people wearing these would get confronted, denied entry or beaten up regularly. I can even totally see them ray-banned legally.

      I really, really hope you're not advocating for that. That's straight up violence, not in self defence.

      • jijijijij

        09/20/2025

        Depends on the jurisdiction and circumstances. In my country filming someone without their consent is also illegal. In a situation where someone feels violated in their privacy, when words didn’t work, force may be required. Advocating or not, it’s likely going to happen. Pointing a camera at someone‘s face obnoxiously tends to escalate situations. Mix alcohol, testosterone and happenstances and you got yourself broken glasses. Try that with a phone camera today and report back.

  • d3rockk

    09/18/2025

    Exactly. The real danger is how they turn every wearer into a walking surveillance camera, creating a permanent, searchable record of your life without your consent, simply by being near them.

    This fundamentally rewrites the rules of social interaction, creating a panopticon where you have to assume you're always being recorded, forcing self-censorship and destroying the trust essential for any authentic relationship.

    And because our antiquated consent laws and pathetic safeguards like a tiny indicator light are completely unprepared for this, you have no real way to opt out of their surveillance network.

    • SJC_Hacker

      09/18/2025

      Relevant Black Mirror episode

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNYzbHeRLkg

      • jrussino

        09/21/2025

        Ever since I saw that episode I've felt like it's inevitable that something like this will become commonplace. If I had a product like this that actually worked as imagined, and the full data pipeline was under my complete control, I could think of a dozen reasons why I'd want to use it. If we take it for granted that this is coming whether we want it or not (and I'm not saying we necessarily must, but it's worth pondering)... is there a way to design the technology, and cultivate new social norms, such that we end up with something that's a net positive rather than a dystopian panopticon? I haven't been able to answer this for myself, at least not yet.

        (Even setting the social repercussions aside, though, Zuck/Meta being involved is a dealbreaker for me.)

    • bilbo0s

      09/18/2025

      > simply by being near them

      There's a solution to that.

      There's a reason the term "glass-holes" was invented.

      As a general rule, it's probably best to stay away from these kinds of people for a while. Because nowadays it doesn't even have to be you. It could be someone standing in the frame somewhere with you that does something objectionable. Thus awakening the wrath of society. Or even worse - the government.

• qingcharles

  09/18/2025

  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

    09/18/2025

    I put my hands over my ears if I need to use them in a noisy environment. Not perfect but it works

• lurking_swe

  09/18/2025

  > 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 same…music while hearing background noise. In fact airpods are better because of the ANC mode that tunes out noise except conversation and other “important” sounds. I can also wear airpods indoors without looking like a dork, so that’s also plus. I’m 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

    09/18/2025

    I wouldn't want to wear earbuds while doing anything active, the chance of them falling out is too high.

    • SketchySeaBeast

      09/18/2025

      I use shockz for running - stable and your ears are totally unobstructed.

      • bchris4

        09/18/2025

        Yea AirPods transparency is great, but Shockz is another level. It’s even better than the ray bans because other people can’t hear the audio, and way more comfortable than any in-ear ones.

        • SketchySeaBeast

          09/18/2025

          Sadly (or not, depending on your bent, I don't mind it at all), their latest versions feature a back firing driver that pairs with the bone conduction, I assume because that was the only way to get better sound quality. You can, however, still throw it in bone conduction only mode.

        • roelschroeven

          09/18/2025

          Wait, are you saying that audio from the ray bans will be heard by anyone around??

          • aembleton

            09/18/2025

            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.

    • ptmcc

      09/18/2025

      I've run many hundreds of hours with two variations of AirPods and they've never once fallen out

      • paxys

        09/18/2025

        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

          09/18/2025

          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.

        • Mtinie

          09/18/2025

          > MKBHD

          For those like me who weren’t familiar with the moniker, it refers to Marques Keith Brownlee, a YouTuber who reviews technology devices.

        • elondaits

          09/18/2025

          In his review of AirPods Pro 3 he says they now stay on better.

      • rossant

        09/18/2025

        Might depend on the shape of your ear canal. Mines seem to be weirdly shaped so nothing holds.

        • dmoy

          09/18/2025

          If you struggle, there are two escalations you can try:

          1. Foam eartips ($10-$20) might be sufficient.

          2. Custom fit silicone tips ($150-$250). These will work, for basically any ear. But ....... you gotta really want it.

    • anal_reactor

      09/18/2025

      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.

    • GrzegorzWidla

      09/24/2025

      I thought the same until I purchased earbuds that fit perfectly. I won’t share a brand as it’s irrelevant for anyone else’s fit. However, I do running, cycling, rowing, skipping, climbing, powerlifting, bodybuilding, calisthenics in them and I don’t even have to adjust them unless I directly hit them with my hand. There is zero risk of them falling out in regular circumstances.

      That was not the case with several earbuds I’ve owned in the past.

    • lurking_swe

      09/18/2025

      Has not been an issue for me (walking, jogging, basketball practice)

      but i understand the concern! sometimes it’s sketchy haha. Like riding a bicycle.

    • 0_____0

      09/18/2025

      I've only had earbuds fall out as the result of actively crashing a bicycle, and even then they usually stay in.

    • jkubicek

      09/18/2025

      This depends entirely on how well they fit you. My daughter regularly does flips on the trampoline while wearing non-pro Airpods and they don't fall out

    • jjfoooo4

      09/18/2025

      I play pickup basketball and young people play with them in. I wouldn't do that, but they are pretty secure if properly fitted

    • bamboozled

      09/18/2025

      I ski, run, weight lift and do construction work in mine, never had them fall out, ever.

• postexitus

  09/18/2025

  How do your friends feel when you are having a conversation and you are constantly pointing a camera at them?

  • jerojero

    09/18/2025

    A friend of mine got a pair, they get this light when theyre in use but you can't quickly tell what's happening. Are they taking a picture, a video, or just conversing with the AI?

    I find it annoying, ofc, he's my friend so I could tell him not to take "candid pictures" of me (I generally just don't like people taking pictures of me).

    But you would have no control whatsoever on the street and it would be very difficult to know that someone you've passed on the street has or hasn't taken a picture of you.

    • thomassmith65

      09/19/2025

      One just has to wait until the picture goes viral :(

  • aacook

    09/19/2025

    I don't really use them that way. I don't wear them 24/7, just specific situations. Also, there's an LED light on them that clearly indicates when the camera is recording vs. when it isn't.

    • gaoryrt

      09/19/2025

      Could the user tape over the LED light so others won't notice?

      • edgarischatting

        09/19/2025

        No, they're able to detect that the LED light has been covered and will refuse to record. There's users who have taken them apart to try to disable the LED but that's not something most users will do, is likely to break the glasses.

  • baby

    09/18/2025

    Nobody cares, and everyone loves the candid videos I take with it

    • robotnikman

      09/18/2025

      Seems like things have changed since Google Glass was released. When they were first released, I remember there was a huge pushback against them because of the cameras they had. Some businesses would even ban you from entering if you were wearing them

      • sethhochberg

        09/18/2025

        10 years ago, I hated the idea of Google Glass, voice assistants, cloud doorbells, and their ilk. I thought the privacy zealots were reactionary but the general premise still was a bit icky - a little bit for the privacy, but mostly for the "weird nerd stuff" stigma.

        5 years ago, I acquiesced started to let voice assistants into my home, thought the first edition of Meta Ray Bans were cool but not for me, and generally started to feel like these things were everywhere and nothing bad had come of it.

        In the current year, I've gotten rid of all of my voice assistants, carefully blocked internet traffic for my IoT things, got rid of devices without local controllers, and would generally decline to be around someone who was wearing smart-camera glasses of any kind in the same way I'd decline to be around someone who was holding their phone up taking a video of me. The privacy zealots were right, it took some time - but we've learned that tech often isn't our benign anonymous friend. All it took was "tech" (the brand) completing its transition from benevolent cool hip industry to big business just like any other.

    • postexitus

      09/18/2025

      Interesting. I would have hated it.

• dav43

  09/18/2025

  I use them too for similar uses. Brilliant. I also use zero AI. I don’t care. I totally understand ppl not buying them because they are meta. I get it.

• michelb

  09/18/2025

  I think most of the negative comments are about morality and Zuck’s, Meta’s, Meta’s workers and Meta supporters lack thereof.

• dallasrpi

  09/18/2025

  Yeah, I feel similar. As an avid hiker/runner they have been a ton of fun to use. I got the transition lenses. I use them for listening to music/pods while running or wherever really as well as taking videos and pics. Only downside so far is in winter use where the battery dies VERY quickly.

  • boringg

    09/18/2025

    So Canadians and Russians shouldn't buy them is what you are saying?

• ainiriand

  09/18/2025

  Zuckerberg: Our baby.

• JustExAWS

  09/18/2025

  The camera is worse than any phone camera and you have been able to buy headphones with active pass through forever to “hear the world around you” including adaptive ones.

  And being sensitive sweat is kind of a deal breaker when you are working out.

  • aacook

    09/19/2025

    The advantage for me is being able to snap video without holding anything in my hands. Sure, I could do that with a Go Pro but with these I just throw them on. I find the video quality to be good enough... the few moments I've captured have been so outstanding that I don't really care that it's not 4K.

• singleshot_

  09/18/2025

  That sounds like a fun product! I’m glad you like it.

  Please don’t ever come near me.

• asdev

  09/18/2025

  they also don't have an app store and are a closed platform which is a big downside.

  • aacook

    09/18/2025

    Agreed, hopefully that changes as things are more ironed out

• 0_____0

  09/18/2025

  These specific glasses haven't been released yet. Hitting brick and mortar at the end of the month per TFA

• simianparrot

  09/18/2025

  After oculus rift I’m never buying another Meta product either. It doesn’t 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 — although not for a few generations when the price is reasonable.

• chaostheory

  09/18/2025

  Meta’s brand problem won’t be solved until Gen Alpha comes of age. They’re the first generation to accept VR and they won’t remember the Facebook debacle since they won’t be using Facebook, but they will use meta’s AR and VR

• bigshot

  09/18/2025

  Wait… you’re praising the audio? Mine must have something wrong with them. I cannot listen to music or any audio really unless I’m in a silent environment. If I’m outside and there are cars driving by, or wind, or any other ambient noise, the glasses speakers aren’t loud and full enough for me to actually hear anything at a level that I would deem appropriate. And when you max out the volume, the audio breaks down —- any bass gets squished and the whole soundstage sounds like crap.

  Do yours actually sound decent? Maybe I need a new pair. Or maybe I’m just too picky.

  • Kaytaro

    09/18/2025

    I've never had a problem with loudness, in fact I only use them around 50% volume even walking outside next to a busy road. But I agree the audio quality is about the same as a phone speaker.

  • aacook

    09/19/2025

    Mine sound decent for what they are and I'm fairly into audio stuff.

  • coolspot

    09/18/2025

    Same.

• spoiler

  09/19/2025

  I think the recording aspect is cool, since I assume it has that "first person perspective" thing going on that's usually difficult to replicate without a complicated setup. Especially useful for showing or demonstrating stuff with your hands, etc.

  On the other hand, I can't fathom why having a permanent screen on your face is appealing... I don't know if I'm biased because I have a few mild neurological issues, and I'm simply not the target audience

• latexr

  09/18/2025

  > It seems like there are a lot of negative comments about Meta's glasses

  The negative comments are about Meta the company. Many here don’t trust them, and with good reason, let’s not forget Zuckerberg literally called “dumb fucks” to people who trust him.

  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/17/facebook-...

  > 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

  https://shokz.com

  > I haven't enabled any of the AI or smart features on the glasses

  Oh, don’t worry, they’ll do it for you. Whatever they want to get, they will.

  • thomassmith65

    09/19/2025

    They're about Meta the company.

    They're also about the product category, which is poised to obliterate the last shred of privacy a citizen still has.

• maldonad0

  09/18/2025

  I wamt less screens, not more.

  • tempodox

    09/18/2025

    *fewer* screens.

    • DonHopkins

      09/18/2025

      Maybe that's what you wamt, but not them.

• vunderba

  09/18/2025

  > 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

    09/18/2025

    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.

    • AaronAPU

      09/18/2025

      “evolves” is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting there

      • thomassmith65

        09/19/2025

        In fact, we are devo.

    • wkat4242

      09/18/2025

      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.

    • DonHopkins

      09/18/2025

      [dead]

• taco_emoji

  09/18/2025

  Wow yeah, there's no other way to take pictures or listen to music with environmental pass-through

  • makeitdouble

    09/18/2025

    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.

• BatteryMountain

  09/18/2025

  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.

  • Wurdan

    09/18/2025

    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.

    • hn_acc1

      09/18/2025

      Totally depends - both my teenage daughters are VERY gunshy of photographs in general, and social media especially. We stopped posting anything relating to them ~8-10 years ago. If we were avidly sharing, they would hate us for it.

      • Wurdan

        09/19/2025

        It sounds like they don't want you taking and sharing photos of them now, which is very fair. But it's not clear from your description if they judge you or your partner for any baby pics you took of them which ended up in the cloud. That seemed to be the statement of the person I replied to - "One day your children will be your judge when they are grown up, when they realise what you did to them."

      • Yeul

        09/18/2025

        Lol yeah but your average male tech bro doesn't even think about what this means for women. It doesn't even register.

    • BatteryMountain

      09/19/2025

      Until a rogue staffer at said cloud platform leaks content.

    • joewhale

      09/18/2025

      your 11 year old nephew is not grown up

      • Wurdan

        09/19/2025

        Did I ever say that he is?

  • aacook

    09/19/2025

    I don't have the cloud processing features enabled for photos/video on these. As far as I understand, the photos and videos aren't used for training data. I also don't publish these photos anywhere on social media.

  • losvedir

    09/18/2025

    Because kids sure hate putting pictures on instagram...

    • hn_acc1

      09/18/2025

      Some do, some don't. Not all kids are the same.

  • AuryGlenz

    09/18/2025

    Thats such a ridiculously extreme viewpoint. What exactly did the user “do to them?”

• ugh123

  09/18/2025

  What's the sweat issue about? Does the display fog up?

  • aacook

    09/19/2025

    I have the first generation of these, and as far as I know there isn't a screen. The sweat issue is sensitivity to the side controls — the glasses think I'm changing the music, volume or whatever and I'm just wearing them and doing nothing. This was an issue early on but recently I went on a ride for 90 minutes and didn't have this issue.

• SilverElfin

  09/18/2025

  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?

  • ghaff

    09/18/2025

    > 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

      09/18/2025

      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

        09/18/2025

        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.

  • ghostpepper

    09/18/2025

    Most of the people in this thread are agreeing with you. You are not even close to the only one.

  • mcntsh

    09/19/2025

    Grateful to be living in Germany where this will not be allowed due to strict data privacy rules.

  • BatteryMountain

    09/18/2025

    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.

    • wooger

      09/22/2025

      Bluetooth speakers have already ruined the beach in much of the world.

  • hn_acc1

    09/18/2025

    Forget friends - random strangers in public. The slightest hesitation to "praise DJT" and you'll end up on the dox/fire/harass list.

  • polyomino

    09/18/2025

    Perhaps or maybe they will require them?

• Quitschquat

  09/18/2025

  I am curious: does Meta deliver ads to you based on what you’re looking at?

  For example ads for diapers while looking at your baby etc.

  • aacook

    09/19/2025

    No

• alex1138

  09/18/2025

  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"

• epolanski

  09/18/2025

  And yet users here were super bullish at how Apple was reinventing AR/VR with their visor flop 2 years ago.

  • Apfel

    09/18/2025

    Honestly, as someone who is not particularly pro Apple but bought (and returned) the Vision Pro, I cannot stress enough how much you need to try it out.

    The issue with the product is entirely the lack of an ecosystem - the interface is unbelievably polished. The eye tracking & finger touch to click feels absolutely perfect. It really did feel like living in the future.

    I returned it because the security policy at my work didn't allow me to pair it with my macbook, otherwise I would be using it all day every day.

  • latexr

    09/18/2025

    In every popular thread there are tons of people optimistic and pessimistic about the subject. Saying “users here” shared an opinion is always wrong. Just look at the commend thread, there are all kinds of opinions.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36201593

• computerthings

  09/18/2025

  [dead]

• jawilson2

  09/18/2025

  [flagged]

• johnjames87

  09/18/2025

  [flagged]

• IlikeKitties

  09/18/2025

  [flagged]

  • dang

    09/18/2025

    You can't attack another user like this on HN, and if you continue to break the site guidelines and post aggressively, we will ban you. We've already asked you twice:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45141433

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45054986

    I don't want to ban you because you've also posted good things, but we can't have people posting egregiously like this here, so please fix this.

• bamboozled

  09/18/2025

  You record your intimate family encounters using Meta products? Sorry for your family.

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) “Meta AI with camera use is always enabled on your glasses unless you turn off ‘Hey Meta", which basically makes glasses defunct.

2) “voice transcripts and stored audio recordings are otherwise stored for up to one year to help improve Meta’s products.”

[1] https://www.theverge.com/news/658602/meta-ray-ban-privacy-po...

• xandrius

  09/18/2025

  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?

• whimsicalism

  09/18/2025

  i wonder if the CCPA applies here. too bad… I have trouble imagining they wouldn’t get enough data by just being opt-in by default like chatgpt.

  • tedmiston

    09/18/2025

    CCPA/CPRA provide opt out of data sharing for (ad) sales to third-party companies, but those were passed before the gAI boom. I imagine an analogue is already in motion for AI training opt-out in CA, but those two don't address model training.

    But ~782 million ChatGPT users vs a few million pairs of glasses.

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.

• bemmu

  09/18/2025

  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

    09/18/2025

    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

    • evanjrowley

      09/18/2025

      The vision here is much more ambitious than a smart watch, and it probably helps them to introduce it as something that doesn't compete with the Apple Watch / Google Pixel Watch / Samsung Galaxy Watch. The neural wristband is meant to go on the right wrist, so potentially it could complement a more traditional smart watch, or pair with some future Meta smart watch.

      • MangoToupe

        09/18/2025

        I'd buy it if I could use it as a dumb bluetooth keyboard. As it stands he's ambitious for a vision that has no use in my life—I'm generally trying to escape digital interaction, not constantly immerse myself in it.

        • fl7305

          09/18/2025

          It'd be interesting to try it as a regular keyboard too. Probably a bit too imprecise even for skilled users, but who knows.

          And if you really get into them, maybe it's worth spending the time to learn chords instead, like for a court stenographer?

    • refulgentis

      09/18/2025

      I worked at Google on watches some distant time ago, these floated around.

      IMHO the tell on why there's a delay is the original comment expressing wonderment at Zuckerberg demonstrating 30 WPM.

      i.e. it sucks.

      It's nice technology, engineering, glad they had the courage, sure its useful for its purpose.

      However, in practice, humans being humans, the odds I regularly put on a glove, to get 30 WPM, on my glasses computer...very low.

      (also, looking back at the original comment...neural interface? wtf? It's not neural...)

    • swordsmith

      09/18/2025

      One device at a time!

  • spot

    09/18/2025

    yes and even more useful with a phone. or a TV so I don't have to find the remote. lots of possibilities beyond glasses.

• stavros

  09/18/2025

  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

    09/18/2025

    That's not a limitation - it works in the air, on your leg, other hand, etc.

    • stavros

      09/18/2025

      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?

• yakz

  09/18/2025

  Doesn’t that make the wrist accessory the important part? The chunky glasses look like they’re still too early, not enough tech.

  • paxys

    09/18/2025

    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).

    • jeron

      09/18/2025

      I was one of the earliest developers to test Vision Pro after it was announced at Apple Park. My thoughts after using it for a whole day was that the hand gestures really did feel like magic, at the tradeoff of having a huge headset on your head. Costs aside, the Vision Pro is too bulky for use outside of your home.

      I had the idea of wearables to solve this, as many years ago I had the Myo gesture control armband. They were very early with this product too, and from what I had read, most of that team got acquired/absorbed into Magic Leap

  • NitpickLawyer

    09/18/2025

    > 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

    09/18/2025

    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.

  • oever

    09/18/2025

    Meta sells your eyes and ears, not your fingers.

  • zmmmmm

    09/18/2025

    i was disappointed they didn't say you could connect it to other devices too. I would buy it just as a bluetooth keyboard!

    • hn_acc1

      09/18/2025

      Would you have to give Meta a non-exclusive license to every work generated using it as well? HARD PASS.

• _zoltan_

  09/18/2025

  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

    09/18/2025

    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_

      09/18/2025

      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.

      • jemmyw

        09/19/2025

        I think your post is sarcastic and has slightly gone over my head, but I'll answer as if its not:

        Facebook effectively achieved that vision and then blew it up in the name of money. It was a service that showed you the posts of your connected friends. Those days are long gone. They burned peoples trust in them. If you want to connect with far away friends and family then FB is no longer the appropriate tool. It should have been.

        Although I'll say this as someone who has moved far away on more than one occasion: keeping in touch with the people you left behind via digital means is no replacement for being with them and a distraction from making new friends. People do the same stuff for the most part, and one persons new baby looks pretty much the same as another's. You really don't need to keep constant touch, you'll cover 20 years of important things in a 30 minute conversation down the pub when you go home.

        • 542354234235

          09/19/2025

          >It was a service that showed you the posts of your connected friends.

          It really is a shame that such a useful tool for staying connected with the real people in your life warped into the monster it is now. If Google's social media had caught on (and not inevitably went the same way in the name of maximizing attention) it probably would have been close to optimal. I get that they aren't running a charity, but its sad to think about how many benefits social media brought compared to the addiction machine it is now.

        • _zoltan_

          09/23/2025

          My post had zero sarcasm.

      • xandrius

        09/18/2025

        From the EU, I really do not care for mr. Zuck. Fool me once, fool me twice, so to speak.

      • slumberlust

        09/18/2025

        How many times does the dog need to bite you before you stop petting it?

      • hn_acc1

        09/18/2025

        More frequently connected to your friends, so more ads can be sold to you and them, and more data collected to sell to other advertisers / surveillance forces? Doesn't sound all the great to me..

        If it was open source with zero tracking, I might consider it. As it is, HARD PASS.

        • _zoltan_

          09/23/2025

          for you, it's a "hard pass" (shout all you want.)

          I've and many other people have found targeted ads to be good. ;)

• NamlchakKhandro

  09/18/2025

  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.

  • 542354234235

    09/18/2025

    >why have mechanical keyboards become so damn popular and not "keyboards on screens?"

    Both are popular. Literally 100s of millions of people use keyboards on screens, so I'm not even really sure what you think you are trying to say. The desktop computer market isn't likely to move away from mechanical keyboards, but the phone/tablet market did a long time ago. Something with more accuracy, or that can be used for touch typing, without taking up device real estate, could definitely blow up in that market.

  • someuser2345

    09/18/2025

    I disagree; this wristband might be a game changer because your hand does not need to be free to use it (at least in theory, we'll see how it actually plays out). Also, I'm willing to bet that for some people, this wristband might be more accessible than a regular keyboard (i.e. people with limited mobility or missing hands). Compare it to the laser beam keyboard, which is just a flat version of a regular keyboard.

    > why have mechanical keyboards become so damn popular and not "keyboards on screens?"

    Keyboards in general have become more popular, as more and more people get computing devices. I'm willing to bet the increase of keyboards on screens is much greater than the increase of mechanical keyboards; there are far more smartphones than mechanical keyboards.

  • robotnikman

    09/18/2025

    Having a keyboard with tactile feedback is much easier to use than a touch screen keyboard, an you're way less likely to make mistakes. The main reason you don't see them on phone anymore is because having a keyboard on a phone takes up space, makes the phone cost more, and in the case of sliding keyboards adds more points of failure as well. For phone, a touch keyboard is good enough.

  • 0x457

    09/18/2025

    > why have mechanical keyboards become so damn popular

    It's a very similar hobby to collecting post-marks.

    > those laser beam projected keyboards blown up

    Because no serious company never made one and what was nowhere near usable beyond "Checks what another useless thing I got!"

  • jackbrookes

    09/18/2025

    > why have mechanical keyboards become so damn popular and not "keyboards on screens?"

    I mean... have you ever used a phone?

    • dandellion

      09/18/2025

      My phone has so far replaced zero of my keyboards.

      • paxys

        09/18/2025

        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.

        • dandellion

          09/18/2025

          You're kinda missing the point here.

          Yes, mobile phones use touchscreens, and billions of people have smartphones, that is correct. Yes the audience of HN is far removed, not gonna argue that. Because that's not what we're talking about.

          Grandparent very correctly points out that mobile phones haven't replaced traditional keyboards, in fact there's probably more keyboards being sold now than at any point in history before, that's because phone touchscreen haven't replaced keyboards, they're just a new interface for a new device. 15 years later other devices are still using other interfaces, and the actual places where it has been replaced are not that many. Only point of sale machines and cars come to mind having replaced keyboards (and I'm being very generous, honestly I wouldn't even call that keyboards) with touchscreens, and some car brands are even starting to walk it back.

      • 542354234235

        09/18/2025

        You said it wouldn't "blow up". You didn't say it would replace mechanical keyboards. It wouldn't. Noone said people were going to switch from using a mechanical keyboard to that. WE are talking about its usefulness for phones/tablets. Also, a phone's on-screen keyboard replaces a mechanical keyboard in that phones dont have a mechanical keyboard and people dont use a mechanical keyboard as their input device for that phone. If my car doesn't have a mechanical key, it has been replaced by a digital key. It doesn't matter if I make 5 copies of my house key.

      • hombre_fatal

        09/18/2025

        I doubt that.

        It has replaced all of your keyboards every time you ever input text on your phone.

        • dandellion

          09/18/2025

          On the contrary, I have more keyboards now than I had before I had a smartphone or tablet, they have multiplied my keyboards.

• archon810

  09/18/2025

  Turn that neural band into a WHOOP band and then we'll talk. Such an opportunity for those who already use fitness trackers.

• zmmmmm

  09/18/2025

  yep. whatever else you say, Meta's willingness to throw some tech out there is thrilling from a geek / tech perspective.

• encoderer

  09/18/2025

  I can’t find this demo. Am I blind??

  • paxys

    09/18/2025

    https://www.facebook.com/Meta/videos/1927325824791552/

    Skip to around 53:00

    • babelfish

      09/18/2025

      YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80s0chTOsK0

      • layer8

        09/18/2025

        YouTube link with time mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80s0chTOsK0&t=3210

• cflewis

  09/18/2025

  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.

  • dagmx

    09/18/2025

    It’s 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

      09/18/2025

      But I only type with my index fingers!

      You've got to type with your shoulders if you want to avoid RSI!

  • swordsmith

    09/18/2025

    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.

  • jwrallie

    09/18/2025

    It was hard to see, but it looked like handwriting to me.

    • phire

      09/18/2025

      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

        09/18/2025

        Virtual keyboard is completely doable, but too slow.

• fennecbutt

  09/21/2025

  Nah, it'll only be cool once Apple does it, I mean once they invent it.

• saberience

  09/20/2025

  One, Zuck probably practiced for days for this moment and just managed 30 words per minute (which is slow, 1 word per two seconds is really bad).

  Two, just try doing this now, moving your hand around like its writing with a pen and see how it feels (without holding a pen). It's super uncomfortable and feels really weird and also looks really weird.

  People are really sensitive to looking weird and feeling weird and especially being singled out for being weird or looking weird. Also, there is a huge subset of society now who will not buy anything made by Meta. I think this product is doomed to failure honestly. Happy to eat my words when I see the subway filled with people wearing this dystopian specs.

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

  09/18/2025

  It’s 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

  09/18/2025

  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.

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

  09/18/2025

  Fwiw i don’t 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 doesn’t 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 they’re the only option.

  • solid_fuel

    09/18/2025

    > Fwiw i don’t 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

      09/18/2025

      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 https://accountscenter.meta.com/accounts, though I don't know if you can still reach the page.

  • ryukoposting

    09/18/2025

    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.

I believe the wristband came from this acquisition: https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/23/20881032/facebook-ctrl-la...

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.

• jayrhynas

  09/18/2025

  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

    09/18/2025

    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.

  • spot

    09/18/2025

    nope. the technology was invented by CTRL-labs, and at Meta after the acquisition.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09255-w

    yes the Myo was a similar, earlier, and less capable technology also based on EMG sensing.

    • prawn

      09/18/2025

      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).

    • swordsmith

      09/18/2025

      The technology was "invented" by CTRL-Labs like how OpenAI "invented" transformer-based language models.

      • spot

        09/18/2025

        Do you have any evidence or are you just going to go with repeating a bald-face lie?

        • swordsmith

          09/19/2025

          lol you can go ask Thomas Rearden himself if Ctrl-labs "invented" gesture recognition from sEMG.

  • teleforce

    09/18/2025

    > measured electromyography, or EEG

    Should be EMG, but is it normal EMG or sEMG?

    • spot

      09/18/2025

      surface!

      • teleforce

        09/18/2025

        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:

        https://fb-ctrl-oss.s3.amazonaws.com/generic-neuromotor-inte...

        [2] Code for exploring surface electromyography (sEMG) data and training models associated with Reality Labs' paper:

        https://github.com/facebookresearch/generic-neuromotor-inter...

• jorvi

  09/18/2025

  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: https://youtu.be/E4tYpXVTjxA?t=2m8s

  • sva_

    09/18/2025

    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

    09/18/2025

    not the same tech at all.

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: https://youtu.be/5cVGKvl7Oek

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.

• askvictor

  09/18/2025

  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

    09/18/2025

    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.

    • hn_acc1

      09/18/2025

      This. I want LESS Meta in my life, not more.

  • jonbiggums22

    09/19/2025

    The other day I was doing a task I wished to record my view from in case I needed to review later and searched for webcam glasses or something. There are tons of $50 fairly unobtrusive spy glasses on Amazon already.

    Actually, this reminds me I might buy a pair after all. In my case I was reviewing an important document package and wanted a way to quickly confirm later what I put in. But I've also recorded unboxings (when worried about a potential return) and disassembly of appliances for repairs that I only make every year or two.

  • fennecbutt

    09/21/2025

    Yeah, the backlash against Google glass was dumb and nonsensical purely because that same tech will eventually become fully accepted by society.

    But we are often a disappointing species.

> you can accomplish everyday tasks—like checking messages, previewing photos, and collaborating with visual Meta AI prompts — 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!

• gumby271

  09/18/2025

  Sorry, is "collaborating with visual Meta AI prompts" just a casual everyday task we're all doing? I must be missing out!

• ww520

  09/18/2025

  A Ray Ban sunglasses can run up to $500 already.

  • bix6

    09/18/2025

    Love me some luxottica monopoly pricing!

    • paxys

      09/18/2025

      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

        09/18/2025

        > 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

          09/18/2025

          It’s usually the build quality which is usually noticeable by other people looking at it and how they’ll break in a week from light wear

          • efskap

            09/18/2025

            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

              09/18/2025

              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

                09/18/2025

                All that is true except almost no sunglasses made with the glass lenses. It’s almost all plastic with UV shielding layer.

      • bix6

        09/18/2025

        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.

        • SoftTalker

          09/18/2025

          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.

        • lotsofpulp

          09/18/2025

          >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

          09/18/2025

          > 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

            09/18/2025

            No I’m 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 aren’t moving the market the way Luxottica can. Sure Ferrari has luxury pricing but it’s not boxing you out at Sephora.

  • elicash

    09/18/2025

    They go up to $4,500 (solid gold), but they start at $81 on their website.

• imachine1980_

  09/18/2025

  this include the band which is also pushing the envelope of HCI mark writing clip https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxfmPX0hba7ulSVL2MyVaS60I0IPm-CQU...

• 09/18/2025

• jayd16

  09/18/2025

  Now you can wear clothes without pockets.

• swaptr

  09/18/2025

  "We appreciate your honesty! While our data shows a few unoptimized pauses, those afternoon naps, we’re happy to confirm your six-hour rest cycle remains respected. This isn’t just a device; it’s your partner in reclaiming every waking moment with seamless efficiency."

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?

• paxys

  09/18/2025

  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.

  • walls

    09/18/2025

    There are several videos showing you can easily cover or disable the LED with no loss in functionality.

  • hollow-moe

    09/18/2025

    What a relief, they really thought about it, exactly like the AirTags with the warning buzzer.

• anal_reactor

  09/18/2025

  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

    09/18/2025

    So, your point is: "things are already bad now, no harm in making it worse"?

• pesus

  09/18/2025

  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.

• Yeul

  09/18/2025

  This is HN. People would call it free speech- until it happens to their daughter.

• jayd16

  09/18/2025

  They've had the camera glasses part for a few years now.

  • neilv

    09/18/2025

    But currently not very popular.

    • zmmmmm

      09/18/2025

      there are millions in the wild ... so maybe not super popular but it's above penetration of anything you would call a niche product

      • asadotzler

        09/18/2025

        That's a pretty small fraction of the population.

        There are about 50M foldables in use, probably 30X as many in use as the Meta Ray-Bans, and I see one of those every couple of years and the only pair of Meta Ray-Bans I've seen in the wild has been a blind friend who got the first generation early because of its accessibility capabilities.

      • saberience

        09/20/2025

        I got given them for free and I've never once turned them on. There's no way in this world I would ever wear a Meta produced personal life tracking device on my face (or anywhere else for that matter)

      • jsheard

        09/18/2025

        Millions in the wild, but mostly sitting in a drawer.

        https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/metas-ray-ban-smart-g...

        • zmmmmm

          09/18/2025

          That's about gen 1, gen 2 is vastly more successful

          • postexitus

            09/18/2025

            Is it? I've seen zero people wearing them in central london.

            • neilv

              09/18/2025

              I haven't noticed anyone wearing them in real-life, despite walking every day in a concentration of university/college campuses (Harvard Square, USA, and surrounding neighborhoods, sometimes including MIT).

              I've only noticed some influencers wearing them in Web videos, where they look prominent, like I should also be able to recognize them in-person.

              Maybe people are only wearing them at home or in the office? Maybe it's mostly a California techbro regional thing?

              Maybe I'm not paying enough attention. I will start consciously looking for them.

              • pesus

                09/18/2025

                I've ever seen them in the California Bay Area either. I don't go into the office for my current job, though, so maybe there are some tech bros out there wearing them?

• jonbiggums22

  09/19/2025

  Amazon has a ton of spy glasses for like $50 that are no more obtrusive than this new Meta product so I think we've been living in this world for awhile. I suppose if the Meta product becomes popular it might raise awareness of them.

The live demo of this is brutal. https://x.com/ns123abc/status/1968469616545452055

• llmthrow0827

  09/18/2025

  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?

  • hdjrudni

    09/18/2025

    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.

    • vasco

      09/18/2025

      I touch my phone with messy hands all the time. They are water resistant now, just wash it after

      • mewpmewp2

        09/18/2025

        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

          09/18/2025

          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

            09/18/2025

            Yeah, I care less myself, and I'd probably believe I was training my immune system, but my partner would kill me though.

    • hattmall

      09/18/2025

      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

    • aembleton

      09/18/2025

      I suppose thats a bit easier than reading it out to ChatGPT.

    • croes

      09/18/2025

      But your $800 glasses are exposed to the cooking area with steam, grease fumes, heat etc.

      • jayd16

        09/18/2025

        So wipe it. It's not like it's got an air intake.

        • croes

          09/18/2025

          But microphones and speakers. And what about the cooling of the chips?

  • jackbrookes

    09/18/2025

    This reads a bit like like a pre-PC take: "Why use a computer when a cookbook works fine?"

    Imagine it’s 1992:

    Cookbook: Open book, follow steps.

    PC: Turn on tower, wait for DOS, fiddle with floppies, pray the printer works, hope the shareware recipe isn’t weird.

    Not saying you're wrong but its easy to miss the big picture

    • aembleton

      09/18/2025

      > "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

        09/18/2025

        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

          09/18/2025

          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.

    • pavel_lishin

      09/18/2025

      Right, but we're in the 1992 of these glasses. Maybe they'll be good eventually. They aren't now.

      And frankly, even the online recipe experience leaves much to be desired. Skip past the blog post. Skip past the list of ingredients. Skip past another blog post. Find the single statblock on the bottom that lists ingredients & amounts, & instructions - hoping that it exists.

      Like other commenters, I've also started going back to paper cookbooks.

    • rs186

      09/18/2025

      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.

      • aylmao

        09/18/2025

        I mean, depends on how you describe it. One could easily say:

        Phone method:

        * Find phone

        * Search for the right app, before finding the right recipe

        * Leave my phone on counter, constantly having to move it as I move plates, pans etc.

        * Wash and dry hands after each step, before unlocking phone

        * Clean it every time gunk gets to it

        Meta glasses:

        * They're already on, just ask for recipe

        * No need to ever wash/dry hands, move a device around, or clean it since one can easily unlock it without touching it

        Right? Similarly with cookbooks, the best case is great and the worst case is terrible. There's a reason there's a market for recipe websites, cookbooks, etc.

    • 48terry

      09/19/2025

      Okay. Now: Imagine it's 2025:

      Cookbook: Open book, follow steps.

      New gadget from mult-billion dollar company: showcases on a live demonstration that it's a broken piece of crap that doesn't work.

      Like, are we forgetting that it didn't work? It sucked at the job! Let's not what-if or have some imaginary "okay, but pretend it's actually good," deal here. It was bad!

    • 0x457

      09/19/2025

      No? Because traditional cookbook (paper or digital) is deterministic and LLMs are not.

    • endymion-light

      09/18/2025

      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

      • rhetocj23

        09/18/2025

        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

          09/18/2025

          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

            09/18/2025

            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.

      • makeitdouble

        09/18/2025

        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.

  • twalichiewicz

    09/18/2025

    Watching the announcement, every feature felt like something my phone already does—better.

    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 Meta’s demo, the presenter had to look back down at the counter because the AI couldn’t see the ingredients.

    It feels like the same dead end we saw with Rabbit and the Humane pin—clever hardware that solves nothing the phone doesn’t already do. Maybe there’s a niche if you already wear glasses every day, but beyond that it’s hard to see the case.

    • Gareth321

      09/18/2025

      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

      09/18/2025

      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.

  • 09/18/2025

  • hombre_fatal

    09/18/2025

    On the other hand, having to constantly consult a recipe on my phone while I cook is the main quality of life aspect of home cooking that could be improved.

    You're missing the part where I'm reminded that my phone autolocks so I have to go into the settings in the middle of cooking to make it never autolock (or be lazy and unlock it every time I need it). And then I have to find a clean knuckle to scroll the ingredient list and the recipe steps every time I'm trying to remember what step I'm at.

    You could do some killer recipe UX with a HUD on some glasses.

  • SchemaLoad

    09/18/2025

    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.

    • bayarearefugee

      09/18/2025

      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

        09/18/2025

        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.

        • SchemaLoad

          09/18/2025

          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.

        • tsimionescu

          09/18/2025

          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

            09/18/2025

            > 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

            09/18/2025

            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.

            • dontlaugh

              09/18/2025

              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

                09/18/2025

                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.

              • xdfgh1112

                09/18/2025

                Yeah I appreciate that. There are things like vignetting that can help and newer games do them. But some people will never be able to play them.

            • DonHopkins

              09/18/2025

              They adapt to the taste of their own vomit? Or mitigate it by drinking lots of chocolate milk before playing?

              • swalsh

                09/18/2025

                Your brain just learns to understand it's in VR, and then it feels normal.

                • DonHopkins

                  09/20/2025

                  It's the part about getting my brain to learn to enjoy the taste of puke that I'm having trouble with.

    • thepryz

      09/18/2025

      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.

    • bee_rider

      09/18/2025

      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

        09/18/2025

        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

          09/18/2025

          > 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

          09/18/2025

          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.

          • xdfgh1112

            09/18/2025

            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

              09/18/2025

              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

            09/18/2025

            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

              09/18/2025

              > 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

              09/18/2025

              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

                09/18/2025

                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.

          • bee_rider

            09/18/2025

            Maybe a really high budget VR shooter game could be successful, I don’t 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).

        • Aeolun

          09/18/2025

          We should re-watch Dennou Coil every few years to be reminded of what we’re working towards :)

    • jayd16

      09/18/2025

      Well it's clearly a first gen product. They could ship Snake and Tetris on it, probably, but I'm certain they're thinking about how to get apps and games on it.

    • intrasight

      09/18/2025

      > the only ones VR actually works well for

      I had really expected a different "only one"

    • numpad0

      09/18/2025

      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: https://steamdb.info/charts/?tagid=21978

      • croes

        09/18/2025

        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

          09/18/2025

          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

      09/18/2025

      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.

  • jayd16

    09/18/2025

    Voice input is just too annoying but with the display and wristband I think the dream is there. Your hands are deep in messy food prep, you have a recipe up, you can still pause your music or take a call with the wristband and without stopping to wash up or getting oil or batter on everything.

  • dyauspitr

    09/18/2025

    I wear my glasses all the time. If I could just talk to the void and get help with things I’m directly seeing reliably that would be a game changer. I’ve used Gemini’s video mode and we’re not all that far away.

  • rhetocj23

    09/18/2025

    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.

• zmmmmm

  09/18/2025

  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.

  • daemonologist

    09/18/2025

    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

      09/18/2025

      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.

  • exitb

    09/18/2025

    The way he clung to „what do I do first” 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

      09/18/2025

      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.

    • klabb3

      09/18/2025

      I distrust meta (and hate these voice assistants) as much as the next guy but to me it’s obvious that you would prepare the prompt and use pretty much the exact phrasing. Also, repeating yourself is normal if there’s no response at all. If it was truly all fake why not just cheat outright and just prerecord all of it?

  • mrandish

    09/18/2025

    > 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.

    • bauruine

      09/18/2025

      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.

      • mrandish

        09/18/2025

        The link in this thread to the live glasses live demo is of Zuckerberg at FB Connect. The "fail" is when someone repeatedly tries to call the glasses he is wearing on stage. The person calling apparently has no trouble making the in-bound calls but the glasses Zuckerberg is wearing on stage fail in successfully answering the call. And the streamed video clearly shows the interface of Zuckerberg's glasses full-screen, as well as showing that the interface is being sent to the stage screen so the live audience can see it.

        So, the failure was apparently with the glasses Zuckerberg's wearing on stage not establishing a two-way video call while simultaneously streaming it's own interface for the live stream and big-screen. He said it worked dozens of times in rehearsal and one notable difference was that for the real demo hundreds of other wifi devices present in the room.

        I have quite a bit of experience producing live keynote demos at large tech events, so I don't think I've confused about this. As an aside, when we're being shown "Zuckerberg's POV" through the glasses I believe that's actually something custom put together for demos because the normal glasses don't even have a mode which shows the wearer's POV. Creating that view requires sending both the internal output of the glasses, which is the corner inset overlay AND the full screen output of the glasses live camera - which are then being composited together backstage to create the combined image we see representing what Zuckerberg sees. Sending all of that while establishing a two-way video call is a lot for a resource constrained mobile device.

    • hattmall

      09/18/2025

      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.

  • 09/18/2025

• explorigin

  09/18/2025

  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

    09/18/2025

    It looks like true 0-temperature (i.e. determinism) will happen. Here's some good context: https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeating-nondeterminism-in...

    • ayewo

      09/18/2025

      HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45200925

    • FergusArgyll

      09/18/2025

      But 0 temp is much less "Creative" and may not be conducive to showing off the AI's latest tricks

      • explorigin

        09/18/2025

        True. It depends on the feature you're demoing...but determinism is a VERY DESIRABLE feature for giving demos.

  • hdjrudni

    09/18/2025

    > (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

      09/18/2025

      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

        09/18/2025

        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

          09/18/2025

          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).

        • danpalmer

          09/18/2025

          Not necessarily. This is a good blog post from a few days about it: https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeating-nondeterminism-in...

          • riffraff

            09/19/2025

            Fantastic article, thanks!

        • bschwindHN

          09/18/2025

          Previous discussion:

          https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19567011

          And a quora link (sorry):

          https://www.quora.com/If-floating-point-addition-isnt-associ...

        • HDThoreaun

          09/18/2025

          Associative property of multiplication breaks down with floating point math because of the error. If the engine is multithreaded then its pretty easy to see how ordering of multiplication can change which can change the output.

• santiagobasulto

  09/18/2025

  This one was also pretty bad: https://x.com/jason/status/1968496622884495847?s=46&t=9d1Ha4...

  I think there’s some respect to give cause they’re doing it live and non-scripted.

  • jansan

    09/18/2025

    Non-scripted? You must be kidding.

    • _1

      09/18/2025

      I take it they meant pre-recorded. It was definitely scripted and practiced.

  • whywhywhywhy

    09/18/2025

    Respect for trying it live now Apple just does pre-recorded with a ton of VFX.

• TIPSIO

  09/18/2025

  If you’ve 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

    09/18/2025

    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

      09/18/2025

      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

      09/18/2025

      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

        09/18/2025

        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?

        • dmbche

          09/18/2025

          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

            09/18/2025

            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

              09/18/2025

              Oh could very well be the case I've only listened once!

          • stavros

            09/18/2025

            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

              09/18/2025

              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

                09/18/2025

                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

                  09/18/2025

                  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?

        • zmmmmm

          09/18/2025

          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

            09/18/2025

            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

  • m3kw9

    09/18/2025

    next time they need 1 public and 1 private router and shut the public off right before the demo.

  • krustyburger

    09/18/2025

    Even if it’s small/cheap, if the item is scanned multiple times this will prevent any electrical infetterence.

    • chatmasta

      09/18/2025

      I don’t even think that’s a word!

• 303uru

  09/18/2025

  It’s the WiFi, ya sure.

  • klabb3

    09/18/2025

    Yeah I was also cringing at that cop out. It doesn’t appear connectivity related. Plus even if it was, it beautifully highlights the connectivity requirement which sucks for so many reasons.

• losvedir

  09/18/2025

  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.

• HaZeust

  09/18/2025

  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

    09/18/2025

    Obviously scripted, just the LLM didn't follow its part of the script.

• anal_reactor

  09/18/2025

  Hearing this AI-generated voice awakens some primal aggression in me.

• klik99

  09/18/2025

  This is why Jobs spent months prepping for each presentation.

  But hey, at least it's not all faked

  • gretch

    09/18/2025

    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

      09/18/2025

      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

      09/18/2025

      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

      • com2kid

        09/18/2025

        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.

      • bee_rider

        09/18/2025

        If it was pre-recorded we’d know it was staged and that assume they didn’t have a working product.

        Their actual result was pretty bad, but, ya know, work in progress I guess.

      • whywhywhywhy

        09/18/2025

        Watch their big "Metaverse" presentation where its all vaporware and faked, presumably this is a cultural shift from that era.

      • stonogo

        09/18/2025

        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"

  • SoftTalker

    09/18/2025

    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 “oops” and talked around it until the system came back up.

  • postalcoder

    09/18/2025

    i love jobs but i do remember the “everybody please turn off your laptops” presentation.

    live demonstrations are tough - i wish apple would go back to them.

    • paxys

      09/18/2025

      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.

      • 09/18/2025

  • neilv

    09/18/2025

    "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!")

  • garbawarb

    09/18/2025

    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

      09/18/2025

      Considering there's no camera pointing to your face they can't be all that interesting.

• jjfoooo4

  09/18/2025

  It was painful even before it started malfunctioning

• baby

  09/18/2025

  The demo gods were not present that day

• 09/18/2025

• anonu

  09/18/2025

  It was the WiFi though

• herval

  09/18/2025

  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

    09/18/2025

    The portal was like their best product and they just abandoned it.

• m3kw9

  09/18/2025

  so when I talk but not to it, it may response like i accidentally say siri? Except is every time?

• joshdavham

  09/18/2025

  For those who didn't pick up on it, they were being sarcastic about the issue being wifi related haha

  • bigtones

    09/18/2025

    That was not sarcasm. They were being serious.

  • dxxmxnd

    09/18/2025

    I’m surprised everyone is saying they weren’t sarcastic. They were even being MORE sarcastic about it being the Wi-Fi after the failed WhatsApp call.

  • stavros

    09/18/2025

    It didn't sound like sarcasm at all to me?

>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 tasks—like 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.

• zmmmmm

  09/18/2025

  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.

  • Youden

    09/18/2025

    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

      09/18/2025

      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

        09/18/2025

        Next time adjust steering wheel position so it doesn’t obstruct

        • stetrain

          09/18/2025

          That is sometimes hard to achieve depending on the car and your height.

          • gpderetta

            09/18/2025

            To be fair, I didn't even try.

      • NamlchakKhandro

        09/18/2025

        Steering Wheel?

        wahhhh? is this real life.

        Here in the future we use our thoughts.

    • numpad0

      09/18/2025

      Not necessarily disagreeing, but I'm not sure automotive HUD technically qualifies as one.

      Airplane HUDs occupy center of the vision, literally showing where you're going. Car HUDs don't, and instead stay out of sight, as it's illegal to do in cars what they do in planes. That makes car HUDs just heads down display that happens to be transparent.

      • hatsunearu

        09/18/2025

        Well for cars, you do need to be on the active lookout for pedestrians, other cars, etc, but for planes generally you are mostly looking at instruments. You only really look outside if you expect something is coming, and the HUD isn't really a distraction there.

      • 09/18/2025

  • ryukoposting

    09/18/2025

    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.

    • armadsen

      09/18/2025

      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. It’s nice for night time as well as when the rear window is blocked by rear seat passengers’ heads, or cargo or whatever.

      But it’s uncomfortable for me because it requires my eyes to refocus from distant to close and back when I glance at it, which isn’t needed with an actual mirror. So I don’t use the feature.

      • aikinai

        09/18/2025

        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

          09/18/2025

          Should have just taped a mirror over it. What a ridiculous use of technology!

      • m463

        09/18/2025

        Wonder why they don't optically refocus the display at a distance?

        There are ways to do stuff like this.

        • Kirth

          09/18/2025

          The people working on these things likely don't use the end product.

          • m463

            09/18/2025

            lol, probably the bane of every industry.

        • imp0cat

          09/18/2025

          Since we are talking about car companies, it's cost-cutting, probably.

        • murderfs

          09/18/2025

          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

          09/18/2025

          Like a light field display? ...

    • Krssst

      09/18/2025

      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.

    • everdrive

      09/18/2025

      If you have a nice old-fashioned speedometer you don't need to read it, you can just glance at the angle which will work well for poor focus.

  • drdaeman

    09/18/2025

    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

      09/18/2025

      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.

    • tsimionescu

      09/18/2025

      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.

    • spike021

      09/18/2025

      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.

  • FuriouslyAdrift

    09/18/2025

    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. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00304...

  • ludicrousdispla

    09/18/2025

    "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.

    http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/#CBdemos

  • thefz

    09/18/2025

    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

      09/18/2025

      Can't you let your phone know that the USB-C is not connected to headphones?

  • Someone

    09/18/2025

    I think there’s plenty of evidence that they’re better in jet fighters (where users are well-trained), possible also in automotive (where they have been sold for decades; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_head-up_display), 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 you’re driving a car. I have my doubts as to whether Meta will make the right choices here.

  • nirav72

    09/18/2025

    Not sure HUDs in cars will cause same issues. There aren't a lot of things to read on car HUDs that require direct concentrated focus. Every HUD I've seen have displayed the most minimal information. Usually the speed, map directions and media currently playing. Even the map directions usually only indicate the next step in route. So a quick glance is all that is required. Regular dashboard gauges require far more concertation. Especially if you're new to that specific vehicle.

  • cbsmith

    09/18/2025

    What's amusing is the original use case for HUD displays was to reduce attention problems. ;-)

  • croes

    09/18/2025

    There is a difference between status information like speed and directions and messages from other people.

    Your attention reacts differently

    • nirav72

      09/20/2025

      I don’t think I’ve ever seen a windshield projected HUD showing notifications. Let’s hope that never gets added.

  • immibis

    09/18/2025

    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.

  • fraboniface

    09/18/2025

    "The World Beyond Your Head" from Matthew Crawford is exactly about this. Definitely recommend reading!

    • teepo

      09/18/2025

      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.

  • creaghpatr

    09/18/2025

    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.

  • kevin_thibedeau

    09/18/2025

    Is this an aftermarket device that doesn't project to infinity or a purpose designed feature from the manufacturer? The former is not a real HUD for the reasons you cite.

• drdaeman

  09/18/2025

  > 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.

  • brandon272

    09/18/2025

    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

      09/18/2025

      The visual equivalent of the etiquette breaches when Bluetooth earpieces became a thing.

  • everdrive

    09/18/2025

    >I don't think this technology introduces anything new to this issue.

    This belief shows up time and time and again and is nearly always false. We had the written word before the internet, and before the printing press, so blogs are just like a hand-written letter. Gossip has always existed, so twitter does nothing new. There have always been things which eat at our impulse control, such as sports gambling and casinos, so smart phones are nothing new. etc.

    What this view really fails to understand is that the constant here is human nature. Human nature is built more or less the same way as it has been for thousands of years. What changes is how technology allows human nature to play out, whether or not any given technology interacts poorly with human nature. New problems can exist purely based on scope, scale, reach, ease-of-use, lack of friction, etc.

    • drdaeman

      09/18/2025

      Very fair point, thank you! I'm not sure I entirely agree with everything, but I was definitely missing the change in the accessibility of the disruptions. You're probably right that the more immediate the notification is, the higher are the chances that it'll interfere with our attention in a way that's could introduce some undesirable effects. Definitely there's a difference between a mail arriving, phone or watch buzzing, and something instantly appearing in the visual field.

      • everdrive

        09/18/2025

        Thanks for the response, and I apologize if I came off too sharply!

  • heavyset_go

    09/18/2025

    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

      09/18/2025

      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.

  • Vinnl

    09/18/2025

    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.

    • kqr

      09/19/2025

      I try to put on a friendly tone and say "I'll continue once you're done with whatever you need to do on your phone". Sometimes it really was something important (the last few seconds of an auction is the common, time-sensitive case) but most of the time they realise the faux pas they committed and are apologetic about it.

  • j4coh

    09/18/2025

    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.

  • inerte

    09/18/2025

    I disagree because the apps are designed to be addictive, so the conversation might actually be more important, the person might agree and say the conversation is more important, but they can't control themselves. It's hard to muster the willpower to fight "social" media.

  • jajko

    09/18/2025

    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.

    • drdaeman

      09/18/2025

      Are we talking about momentarily checking if there's an important interruption and continuing with the conversation? If so, I'm confused as to why you possibly think it's unacceptable and rude.

      I can see how this could be considered rude in a very formal setting, or when matters of high importance are discussed and uninterruptible focus is a must. But for most casual situations, I perceive glancing at incoming notification as normal. Assuming this happens reasonably infrequently, of course - that is, a glance in a while, not constant checking every other minute.

• ATechGuy

  09/18/2025

  > 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%

• xg15

  09/18/2025

  Yeah, I was amazed at the brazenness of doublespeak present in that press release.

  > It’s 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...

• _ink_

  09/18/2025

  > 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

  09/18/2025

  In my culture it’s considered extremely casual — and therefore quite rude in social situations other than the most private and familiar — 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 I’d blame on rudeness rather than Meta. We already live in a world where people order coffee while reading E! news on their phones.

  • pjmlp

    09/18/2025

    That is indeed pretty much culture dependent, in Southern Europe sunglasses only go out during Winter, when indoors or when bumping into a friend.

    • throwaway2037

      09/18/2025

      Totally agree. Italians are normally wearing sunglasses on sunny days about 75% of the year. You see old and young on the street meeting friends and chatting casually, all while wearing sunglasses.

  • throwaway2037

    09/18/2025

        > In my culture it’s considered extremely casual — and therefore quite rude
    

    What culture?

• xdfgh1112

  09/18/2025

  They made quest 2 and 3. Despite their recent pushing of shitty horizon worlds, the hardware is extremely solid and affordable for VR.

  • rhetocj23

    09/18/2025

    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.

• seydor

  09/18/2025

  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

    09/18/2025

    There's plenty of people who don't mind using their phone in a socially disrespectful way. Maybe they got it right.

    • Eggpants

      09/18/2025

      People don’t walk around pointing a live phone camera and microphone at people. Facebook got it wrong.

      It’s takes special kind of dbag that thinks it’s ok to wear a Facebook recording device on their face.

• rhetocj23

  09/18/2025

  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.

• dlandis

  09/18/2025

  > 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)

• stetrain

  09/18/2025

  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.

• bluecheese452

  09/18/2025

  That is the pretty close to the world we already live in. They call it then genz stare.

  • devin

    09/18/2025

    the millennials I know are worse than their children

    • bluecheese452

      09/18/2025

      For sure. Maybe it should be renamed the tik tok stare or something.

• moolcool

  09/18/2025

  All while sending the entire interaction to one of the most harmful companies in the world, no less. What a uniquely awful product.

• BatteryMountain

  09/18/2025

  Now imagine people driving at 130km/h with a 4 ton SUV with these things...

• milkshakes

  09/18/2025

  I disagree.

  Among Meta's many technical contributions: React PyTorch osquery GraphQL Presto/Trino RocksDB Jest OCP Llama

  • dakiol

    09/18/2025

    We don’t need any of those. So many brilliant people working at facebook and wasting their talent.

    • milkshakes

      09/18/2025

      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

      09/18/2025

      I mean, if people working on PyTorch, GraphQL and React are "wasting their talent", then bloody hell that is a high bar.

    • 09/18/2025

  • Arainach

    09/18/2025

    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

      09/18/2025

      > 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

        09/18/2025

        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

          09/18/2025

          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.

• elAhmo

  09/18/2025

  This might be good for public transport zombies, at least they wont be using their speakers to watch TikTok

• dennis_jeeves2

  09/18/2025

  >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.

  • BrawnyBadger53

    09/18/2025

    Banks and government as your first two examples of useless institutions is definitely interesting

  • cal85

    09/18/2025

    Billions of people willingly use banks, fast food chains etc. all the time.

  • ToucanLoucan

    09/18/2025

    Mmm you're making me want to read Bullshit Jobs again.

  • evilfred

    09/18/2025

    banks protect your money so you don't have to keep it under your mattress and get easily stolen. governments build roads and give you clean water. what are you on about? you know Walden was a total lie right?

• neya

  09/18/2025

  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!

• stronglikedan

  09/18/2025

  Removing Meta from the equation will not remove general rudeness. Those same people aren't paying attention to you now either, it's just not so obvious.

  There are other, valid use cases for this. I'm looking forward to it. More specifically, I'm looking forward to the secondhand market that will surely spring up moments after release as people realize that it's not a product for them in particular.

• artursapek

  09/18/2025

  And you know that Faceberg’s plan with these is to sell advertising spots directly on your eyeballs haahaha

• metabagel

  09/18/2025

  Ideally, the glasses would stop displaying content when you are physically present with someone and conversing with them. Or you turn the glasses off for a bit to avoid being distracted. Not really a deal breaker, in my opinion.

• jayd16

  09/18/2025

  Probably about what you get now except their neck isn't craned down to a phone.

• pj_mukh

  09/18/2025

  Honestly, I’m an avid user of Ray-Ban metas and I agree that if Zuck doesn’t 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. I’m hoping whatever answer Apple comes up with here has this behavior as default because they don’t have an active user axe to grind.

  The glasses shine bright when you’re alone, on a walk.

  Also while you’re at it, kill the Facebook and Instagram feeds to save humanity. Too much to ask?

  • 1shooner

    09/18/2025

    >if Zuck doesn’t 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.

    • pj_mukh

      09/18/2025

      I mean they’re not cartoon villains.

      This message is just not getting through to leadership from the bubble and all these hardware sales is an opening for alternative business plans, especially if Apple offers a decent alternative.

      • 1shooner

        09/20/2025

        >I mean they’re not cartoon villains.

        Sure. I'm not assuming the worst from them, but in lieu of a reason, I am expecting the same.

  • evilfred

    09/18/2025

    If Zuck wasn't Zuck he wouldn't be Zuck

• anal_reactor

  09/18/2025

  I think this is going to be very funny to observe as a third person.

• numpad0

  09/18/2025

  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

    09/18/2025

    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

      09/18/2025

      Fucking pedestrians even more and destroying cities is a big reason self driving cars should never happen.

      • reissbaker

        09/18/2025

        Self-driving cars are massively safer for pedestrians and passengers, as per Waymo's safety reports.

        • rhetocj23

          09/18/2025

          Hows your startup going? The sin/cos wave on the homepage was rather pleasurable to encounter.

          • reissbaker

            09/18/2025

            It's going well! Generally up-and-to-the-right MRR growth. Thank you :)

  • AaronAPU

    09/18/2025

    I have never once in my life felt a moment of wanting that.

• baby

  09/18/2025

  Can you imagine trying to talk to someone face to face, eventhough you're not speaking the same language

  • sva_

    09/18/2025

    Yeah I've been getting into such situations quite frequently recently here in Germany.

  • bookofjoe

    09/18/2025

    Try AirPods Pro 3 translation mode

    • baby

      09/21/2025

      airpods don't work well with android

• maxwellito

  09/18/2025

  > 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

• SoftTalker

  09/18/2025

  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

    09/18/2025

    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.

• kypro

  09/18/2025

  If you have kids this happens today, except they don't look up from their smart phone.

  This isn't a new problem.

  • AaronAPU

    09/18/2025

    That is true, it’s an old problem being amplified.

• makeitdouble

  09/18/2025

  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.

  • incone123

    09/18/2025

    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.

  • izacus

    09/18/2025

    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.

  • Vinnl

    09/18/2025

    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

    09/18/2025

    Obviously, they don't have the gesture bracelet for the TVs yet.

• bko

  09/18/2025

  Billions of people voluntarily Meta products every month. They invented React, React Native, PyTorch, GraphQL, Cassandra, Presto, and RocksDB just to name a few.

  HN reader: the world would be a better place if they didn't exist

  Peak Hacker News hubris.

  • evilfred

    09/18/2025

    All of those would keep on existing if Meta died today, so who cares? Are you saying we have to keep permitting Meta to help governments oppress people and enable teen suicides just in case we get another React? that is silly

    • bko

      09/18/2025

      > All of those would keep on existing if Meta died today, so who cares

      Try second order thinking or thinking into the future. This company that built much of the modern web and created trillions in value. It's like the communists that just nationalize companies and institutions after they come into power thinking that wealth is just something that spontaneously comes into existence and can be captured with no ill effects.

      > permitting Meta to help governments oppress people

      Oppressive governments often ban Meta and other social media. But somehow Meta helps these governments.

      Try and create a consistent world view that doesn't devolve to [company] bad

      • asadotzler

        09/18/2025

        Or, Meta disappears and all the talent goes to other places where it does other neat things that we all benefit from. We aren't going to accept that Meta has some magic that makes bright kids do better work.

• rayiner

  09/18/2025

  Also it makes you look like a dork.

• Findecanor

  09/18/2025

  That's already happening with cell phones and wireless earbuds, just without video.

  ... and I personally find that horrible.

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

  09/18/2025

  Do you also ban cellphones in your office? And email? Text messaging?

  If an employee wants to steal your IP, they will.

  • kstrauser

    09/18/2025

    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

      09/18/2025

      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.

  • AvAn12

    09/18/2025

    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

      09/18/2025

      Fortunately this is no longer true in most US government roles.

      • AvAn12

        09/18/2025

        RU kidding? You don't think a monitoring for loyalty is happening right now?

  • dylan604

    09/18/2025

    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.

  • oldfuture

    09/18/2025

    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.

• moralestapia

  09/18/2025

  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.

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

  09/18/2025

  they demoed a spotify widget; will there be an sdk?

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

  09/18/2025

  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

    09/18/2025

    https://developers.meta.com/horizon/blog/unlocking-oculus-go...

  • 09/18/2025

  • laweijfmvo

    09/18/2025

    ending sales is not the same as ending support; use the correct dates!

    • grumbel

      09/18/2025

      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

      09/18/2025

      I used the correct dates, at least the text is copied/pasted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oculus_Go

      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!

      • laweijfmvo

        09/18/2025

        John Carmack was the driving force behind this!

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.

• whywhywhywhy

  09/18/2025

  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

    09/18/2025

    A lot of big companies make this mistake and dont see how it hurts them.

    I’m 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

      09/18/2025

      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.

  • newman8r

    09/18/2025

    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.

  • illusive4080

    09/18/2025

    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 didn’t have to make a Facebook account.

    • mbreese

      09/18/2025

      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.

      • illusive4080

        09/21/2025

        I dislike being forced into any Meta account whatsoever, and I would’ve purchased a Valve Index, but I did get the headset for free in a giveaway.

• whatsupdog

  09/18/2025

  Agree. And the constant spying doesn't help either. Who wants an always online meta controlled camera/microphone in their bedroom all the time?

  • ryandrake

    09/18/2025

    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

      09/18/2025

      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.

      • perihelions

        09/18/2025

        > "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] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33863625#33864440

        • martin_a

          09/18/2025

          Hetzner (in Germany) never did things like these to me. What were you trying to do with them?

          • immibis

            09/18/2025

            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.

      • sunnybeetroot

        09/18/2025

        It’s likely your face in multiple angles already exists online whether from photos or videos, simply because you were in the background of someone else taking a photo or video. Whilst I align with you in being restrictive in the data we share online, corporations and government with infinite resources likely have everything they need to construct “3D models of your face for even better facial recognition”.

      • dahrkael

        09/18/2025

        people scan their retina in exchange of coupons amd shitcoins in mall booths

        • bilekas

          09/18/2025

          Some people also eat rocks, it doesn't mean it's common or even a good thing to do.

        • 1oooqooq

          09/18/2025

          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

            09/18/2025

            I've seen them in Chile, which wasn't in crisis. Always had a queue waiting to be scanned.

      • benterix

        09/18/2025

        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.

    • mikae1

      09/18/2025

      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

        09/18/2025

        Interesting. Did you swap your face on a computer, and pointed the smartphone camera on the monitor?

        • mikae1

          09/20/2025

          Desktop browser & https://github.com/hacksider/Deep-Live-Cam

  • anal_reactor

    09/18/2025

    Lots of people, actually. This website is an echo chamber of those privacy-conscious.

    • bigyabai

      09/18/2025

      HN is typically slow to admit it, but Facebook and TikTok wouldn't be popular if you were wrong. Consumers don't care.

      • piltdownman

        09/18/2025

        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.

        • 09/18/2025

      • Yeul

        09/18/2025

        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.

      • fruitworks

        09/18/2025

        Google glass

        • t-3

          09/18/2025

          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.

    • tonkinai

      09/18/2025

      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

        09/18/2025

        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.

  • epolanski

    09/18/2025

    You already have one, regardless of some companies repeating the privacy claim 24/7 to make you believe so.

  • immibis

    09/18/2025

    Objectively speaking, most people do. That's why Meta has so much money.

• liendolucas

  09/18/2025

  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.

• strogonoff

  09/18/2025

  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.

  • afandian

    09/18/2025

    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'.

    https://www.luanti.org/

    • strogonoff

      09/18/2025

      I am looking at Vintage Story, to be honest. Inspired by TerraFirmaCraft mod, it is indie and seems determined to stay that way.

  • ToucanLoucan

    09/18/2025

    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.

    • strogonoff

      09/18/2025

      True, though whether you play on any servers or not does not seem to be relevant to Microsoft’s process. Also, it works the other way too, in that Microsoft would be collecting information of children who are presumably the majority of players.

  • __turbobrew__

    09/18/2025

    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.

  • ramon156

    09/18/2025

    iirc there's a YouTuber that wants to sue Microsoft for this weird rugpull, although I doubt it will happen

  • FergusArgyll

    09/18/2025

    At least on nintendo switch that's not true

  • lupusreal

    09/18/2025

    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.

• damnesian

  09/18/2025

  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.

• metabagel

  09/18/2025

  Yeah, looks like a cool product, but I would never buy anything from Facebook, because it's primarily an advertising company.

• bitcurious

  09/20/2025

  > Neither of these games are online, neither allow me to interact with other users in any way.

  Beatsaber has a multiplayer mode, so if your opinion is contingent on online play you should reconsider.

• benterix

  09/18/2025

  > 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.

• zeroq

  09/18/2025

  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

  09/18/2025

  How does that work? The Quest doesn't even require a Facebook account. They were decoupled in 2022.

  • kotaKat

    09/18/2025

    You can’t tell me a Meta account isn’t just a Facebook account with extra steps.

    It’s still Facebook and will always be Facebook.

  • makeitdouble

    09/18/2025

    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

• 09/18/2025

• sneak

  09/18/2025

  The above post didn’t even load for me because I have all of their domain names DNS blocked at my router and in NextDNS on mobile.

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 (https://balanarayan.com/2024/12/31/ray-ban-meta-long-term-re...). 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.

• divan

  09/18/2025

  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.

  • chupchap

    09/22/2025

    I use the voice guidance of Google Maps for it and in that context, Rayban is just a bluetooth piece.

  • wpm

    09/18/2025

    A smart watch or bike computer fixes this problem already.

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.

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

  09/18/2025

  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.

Not surprised at this point at the negativity here anymore, but this looks like really cool technology - especially the wristband. The speed at which people are typing in the demos… I think it is awesome to see a proliferation in new ways of talking to computers.

also: looking for a good discussion forum where people are interested in technological advancement

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.

• grigy

  09/19/2025

  It's actually the 2rd generation now, or even 3rd for the Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2). First generation was Ray-Ban Stories.

  • victorbjorklund

    09/19/2025

    I know. Meant 1st gen with display.

As many others have said, I also have no interest in buying a Meta device, but I’m glad that they’re 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.

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.

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.

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.

• paxys

  09/18/2025

  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

    09/18/2025

    I can end up buying from a non-evil company?

• SequoiaHope

  09/18/2025

  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.

• zmmmmm

  09/18/2025

  > 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?

They have a brand problem. Absolutely no way I buy anything from Meta.

• al_borland

  09/18/2025

  This is my #1 issue. I simply don’t trust them and I don’t know that there is a realistic path to build that trust at this point. They’ve been violating my trust for decades.

  I’m 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.

  • throwoutway

    09/18/2025

    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

    • vasco

      09/18/2025

      All babies look the same, out of anything private you could film by mistake, a baby seems pretty harmless.

      • dweekly

        09/18/2025

        Face recognition is uninuitively good. Google Photos was able to pick out faces from my baby photos pretty easily.

        • SchemaLoad

          09/18/2025

          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

          09/18/2025

          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.

        • ramraj07

          09/18/2025

          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

            09/18/2025

            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.

        • koolala

          09/18/2025

          Custom ads based on your baby facial expressions 15 years later?

        • jrrv

          09/18/2025

          Really? Mine lumps together completely unrelated people whilst failing to group together the same person.

      • SXX

        09/18/2025

        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.

      • lynndotpy

        09/18/2025

        I disagree with your assumption, but you also need to consider that the baby is going to be a person for decades.

      • latexr

        09/18/2025

        https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...

      • jahsome

        09/18/2025

        Yeah and stupid babies are too stupid to consent anyway

      • JKCalhoun

        09/18/2025

        Note: user has baby.

        • kevin_thibedeau

          09/18/2025

          Now hammer them with ads designed to guilt trip parents. +1 surveillance capitalism.

    • frosting1337

      09/18/2025

      Yes, it does, the link to Data & Privacy is at the bottom.

  • JKCalhoun

    09/18/2025

    > I don’t know that there is a realistic path to build that trust at this point…

    I suspect it's impossible as long as Zuckerberg is involved in the company.

• paxys

  09/18/2025

  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.

  • motorest

    09/18/2025

    > 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?"

    • YetAnotherNick

      09/18/2025

      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.

    • paxys

      09/18/2025

      So you are saying people won't buy these glasses because Meta is evil, but they also don't know what Meta is?

      • 1oooqooq

        09/18/2025

        the glasses require a FACEBOOK account. they got away on whatsbook by not mentioning Facebook anywhere. including NOT requiring a Facebook account.

        • paxys

          09/18/2025

          > the glasses require a FACEBOOK account

          They do not

          • 1oooqooq

            09/20/2025

            do you have one?

            all oculos needed one, so

    • 09/18/2025

    • mrheosuper

      09/18/2025

      and do you think they will stop using Whatsapp if they know Meta is the parent ?

      • leokennis

        09/18/2025

        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.

        • aembleton

          09/18/2025

          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

          09/18/2025

          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

            09/18/2025

            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

              09/18/2025

              I find that list out of date. It shows friends that deleted the app months ago so don't receive the message.

          • mrheosuper

            09/18/2025

            Well, your plan could work if all your future friends also agree to this.

        • pjmlp

          09/18/2025

          I bet there are more people knowing what Meta is than Signal or Telegram.

        • Aurornis

          09/18/2025

          > 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, they’d 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 doesn’t understand product management for common people. Average users do not care. They just want a product that works.

  • pier25

    09/18/2025

    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

      09/18/2025

      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

        09/18/2025

        Yeah it has replaced SMS everywhere but the US and China.

    • lotsofpulp

      09/18/2025

      You might not be buying anything from Meta with cash, but you are with information about yourself and your network.

      • pier25

        09/18/2025

        Yes, but that's besides the point.

        My comment was in the context of "Meta has a brand issue" which is absolutely true.

  • bitmasher9

    09/18/2025

    Instagram or WhatsApp are absolutely critical for daily functioning in certain circles of humanity.

    • crossroadsguy

      09/18/2025

      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

        09/18/2025

        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

          09/18/2025

          It’s 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 aren’t familiar with this platforms is interesting.

      • SchemaLoad

        09/18/2025

        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

          09/18/2025

          Well, what you are pointing out sounds like a role “Influencers needed”. So that’s obvious.

    • jachee

      09/18/2025

      Yeah, but facebook^WMeta didn’t develop those… they bought them to stifle competition.

    • splatter9859

      09/18/2025

      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

        09/18/2025

        I kind of agree but a lot of modern american small businesses run completely on facebook. At least in the 4wheeling community they do

  • leokennis

    09/18/2025

    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.

  • rmonvfer

    09/18/2025

    In my (totally limited) experience, most non-tech people don’t 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.

    • 09/18/2025

  • taco_emoji

    09/18/2025

    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.

  • mgh2

    09/18/2025

    Mark was right: https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/

  • Karrot_Kream

    09/18/2025

    [dead]

• splatter9859

  09/18/2025

  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

    09/18/2025

    You’re 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 you’re with, what you’re 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

      09/18/2025

      You are expecting meta to succeed and that's won't be happening.

• notpushkin

  09/18/2025

  I would probably buy a pair once there’s 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

    09/18/2025

    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".

• paul7986

  09/18/2025

  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 I’m 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 / doesn’t last. Even a Ray ban customer service rep said these things break I get so many calls.

• jlarocco

  09/18/2025

  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.

• mgh2

  09/18/2025

  Why do you think they rebranded? They are chasing after Gen Z, brainwashing that clean slate.

  • AvAn12

    09/18/2025

    "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

      09/18/2025

      You'd be amazed how many <25s have no idea Meta owns Instagram and WhatsApp.

      • dymk

        09/18/2025

        The big “From Meta” at the bottom of the splash screen doesn’t tip people off?

        • mcintyre1994

          09/18/2025

          I suspect it’s more that they don’t know who Meta is and because it’s meaningless they don’t link the “From Meta” between the two apps, if they even use both of them.

          • ethbr1

            09/18/2025

            The inability of most people to notice 11 fingers should have adjusted our estimate of the average person's attention to detail.

      • pchristensen

        09/18/2025

        > 25s have no idea either!

    • xnx

      09/18/2025

      > FB launched with great positive repetitional aura

      As a site that ranked how hot girls were?

      • mortenjorck

        09/18/2025

        The vast majority of users knew nothing about Facebook‘s 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

          09/18/2025

          > The vast majority of users knew nothing about Facebook‘s origins

          They are all <checks notes>

          "dumb fucks." -- Mark Zuckerberg, 2004 personal correspondence documented in https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/

          • fkyoureadthedoc

            09/18/2025

            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.

      • brandall10

        09/18/2025

        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.

      • vasco

        09/18/2025

        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

      • AvAn12

        09/18/2025

        Ok, I was trying to give as much benefit of the doubt as possible. You are 100% correct of course...

  • metabagel

    09/18/2025

    They rebranded because Facebook is a limiting name for branching out into new markets. Clean slate is a bonus.

• mrweasel

  09/18/2025

  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.

  • mft_

    09/18/2025

    I doubt it is to any measurable extent.

    The (literally) billions of people around the world using Facebook and Instagram don't care.

  • wickedsight

    09/18/2025

    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

      09/18/2025

      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

      09/18/2025

      Mark made the choice to go with RB (MIB inspired).

  • incone123

    09/18/2025

    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

      09/18/2025

      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

        09/18/2025

        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

    09/18/2025

    Huh. I genuinely thought they were already acquired.

  • ml-anon

    09/18/2025

    Luxxotica is already terrible, predatory brand that makes shitty products.

• Aurornis

  09/18/2025

  This is why HN comments about personal preferences for Meta products aren’t informative. Meta really does have billions of users who don’t care in the slightest about boycotting the company. They just want to use their products because that’s where other people are.

• zmmmmm

  09/18/2025

  The brand on display here is Ray Ban. That's why they spent billions to lock in the partnership.

  • ghostpepper

    09/18/2025

    Facebook changed its name to Meta. Meta is the company with the brand problem, not Ray Ban.

• MengerSponge

  09/18/2025

  It's deeper than a brand problem.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People

  Meta delenda est.

• dhjilop

  09/18/2025

  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 I’d want to do that without being distracted all day by texts, etc., I wouldn’t wear them. I have to wear glasses, so they’d have to be clear, prescription glasses with reasonable small and stylish frames. This product isn’t for me, and I don’t 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.

• mft_

  09/18/2025

  This. The tech would have to absolutely world-alteringly amazingly unmissable for me to even consider using anything tied to the Meta ecosystem.

• bigyabai

  09/18/2025

  Well, your loss. My Oculus Quest remains the best $400 I ever spent on consumer tech.

  • jodrellblank

    09/18/2025

    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?

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45188372

    • AuryGlenz

      09/18/2025

      One man’s gimmick is another’s useful device.

      I don’t use my iPad much…or didn’t, until I had a toddler and long car rides. I either used my phone or my PC, or a projector for movies. The iPad didn’t really fit in there.

      I use my Quest 3 often. I can see why someone would have his opinion.

    • bigyabai

      09/18/2025

      I already have an Android phone. What does the iPad do that my Android phone can't? Seriously, I have $300, I'll go buy one right now if you make a solid argument.

      There are plenty of things my Quest does that an iPad and phone both can't do. Yes it's a toy, but it's a toy I get great mileage out of flying the F/A-18 in Microsoft Flight Simulator on a world tour. For $400, that's a steal. I've got telemetry disabled and it all runs great on my Linux box.

      I'm not going to go buy a tablet to play HD Plants Versus Zombies for the 400th time. Sorry.

  • cosmic_cheese

    09/18/2025

    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

    09/18/2025

    Almost everyone I know who got a quest stopped using it after a week.

    It's a fun toy, but gets boring pretty quickly.

    • bigyabai

      09/18/2025

      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

        09/18/2025

        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

        09/18/2025

        For me too, I use mine for hours every week

    • samplatt

      09/18/2025

      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 :-)

    • xenobeb

      09/18/2025

      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

      09/18/2025

      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.

• 09/18/2025

• unsupp0rted

  09/18/2025

  Only on HN do they have a brand problem.

  The vast majority of the world doesn’t care. Half don’t know that Meta and Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp are the same thing.

  And even if they know it’s 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.

• jryle70

  09/18/2025

  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.

  • bitwize

    09/18/2025

    One of these options (Meta vs. Chinese brands) is in bed with a dangerous totalitarian regime.

    The other is the Chinese brands.

  • JustExAWS

    09/18/2025

    The Chinese government can’t do anything to affect my daily life. I would much rather the Chinese government know everything about me.

    • signatoremo

      09/18/2025

      So you wouldn’t have problems with Meta if they weren’t American? Do you think Chinese people should use Meta’s products, if they were available there?

      • JustExAWS

        09/18/2025

        That kind of seems logically to me if Meta isn’t sharing data with the Chinese government.

• JSR_FDED

  09/18/2025

  Meta has a Musk/Tesla problem

  • Handy-Man

    09/18/2025

    Not even close to that level lol

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

  09/18/2025

  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.

• lm28469

  09/18/2025

  > everybody wearing this in europe

  The whole 17 nerds who will buy this toy will have to do that yes

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

• solid_fuel

  09/18/2025

  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

  09/18/2025

  We all love to say this, but everyone forgets: Apple has never beaten competitors by being the first – they’ve beaten them by being the best.

  Personal computers? Apple wasn’t first. Smartphones with screens? Apple wasn’t first. Tablets? Not first by a mile. True Wireless Earbuds? Nope, not at all first. Smartwatches? Hell no, not first.

  And yet, Apple’s a category leader in every single one of these areas.

  I don’t think it matters if Meta releases something first; Apple wins by doing it way better. Arguably, Vision Pro was way too early, even though it’s an incredible experience.

  • cflewis

    09/18/2025

    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.

    • JSR_FDED

      09/18/2025

      They also don’t own a search engine, yet google pays them $20B annually

    • wpm

      09/18/2025

      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.

  • wklauss

    09/18/2025

    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.

  • jayd16

    09/18/2025

    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.

  • jhatemyjob

    09/18/2025

    Wat. Vision Pro was a complete flop, Airpods aren't the best on the market, Apple Watch isn't the best on the market

    • SchemaLoad

      09/18/2025

      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

        09/18/2025

        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.

        • SchemaLoad

          09/18/2025

          "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

            09/18/2025

            You are absolutely right. The average consumer is super smart. Has great taste. Definitely knows what's best.

            • 09/18/2025

        • xandrius

          09/18/2025

          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.

    • apwell23

      09/18/2025

      i love love my airpods pro. curious what is better than those?

      • jhatemyjob

        09/18/2025

        https://amazon.com/Sennheiser-600-Ear-Audiophile-Headphones/...

        Not for everyone obviously. But there are many, many, many, options at this level of quality.

        I am not claiming these Sennheisers are the best. The parent claimed the Airpods are the best. Which is not true. That's all I'm saying.

  • paxys

    09/18/2025

    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).

    • stavros

      09/18/2025

      I don't remember about the rest, but we definitely had smartphones long before the iPhone.

    • blackoil

      09/18/2025

      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.

    • postexitus

      09/18/2025

      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.

    • DonsDiscountGas

      09/18/2025

      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

        09/18/2025

        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

          09/18/2025

          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.

    • Philpax

      09/18/2025

      ...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.

  • t0lo

    09/18/2025

    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.

> Today at Connect, Mark Zuckerberg debuted the next exciting evolution of AI glasses..

Why this wasn't written as: "Meta debuted the next.."? You know what?! I have always felt that Meta is owned, managed, and totally controlled by Zuck alone! No board members and no investors.

I have been following Zuck in his Metaverse journey and more specifically, in his interviews like the one with The Verge and he is always speaking with this tone: "This is how I see it", "My vision is..", "I plan to make it this way..", like he is the only employee in his company.

If it was Apple that released this product, we would read something like: "Cupertino: Apple debuted the next exciting.." which reflects the vision, strategy, and innovation made by the company as whole and not a single person. I don't recall that Steve Jobs had behaved like this even in his prime time.

• foodevl

  09/18/2025

  Zuck owns 13% of Meta shares and 61% of the voting power

  Jensen Huang owns 3.8% of Nvidia and 3.8% of the voting power

  Tim Cook owns 0.021% of Apple and 0.021% of the voting power

  Previously, Steve Jobs owned 0.6% of Apple and 0.6% of the voting power

  So yeah, there's a structural difference here and Meta is much closer to being owned, managed, and controlled by Zuck alone

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

  09/18/2025

  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.

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.

I won’t 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 don’t want any of that. Will most likely be replacing it with the Valve Deckard/Frame device as soon as possible.

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 don’t know if they’re filming you, reading notifications or actually conversing with you.

I heard an article on NPR, which the interviewed one said the world was now ready for this technology. He said he thinks the "glasshole" opinion of most people has most likely passed. I freely admit, the price and the attitude was what stopped me from getting a pair back then.

Now I won't hesitate, although the in-lens display is fantastically intriguing, I'm wondering about safety concerns like: walking down the sidewalk or crossing a street, at the wheel of a car(!), work related issues, etc. Gee, I guess I am hesitating! It will be interesting to see a study on how these glasses change our brains as it deals with this new paradigm.

• yalogin

  09/18/2025

  The glass hole term came up because of the price of the device. The conversation should shift to privacy and security now that it has become accessible to everyone, and it’s a really important and urgent conversation

  • bloomingeek

    09/19/2025

    This is what Google said and was my understanding: glasshole (plural glassholes)

        (derogatory, slang) A person who wears spectacle frames equipped with PDAs (especially with cameras) that display into the user's eyes, and who acts like a jerk or films inappropriately. [from 2013]

• boogieknite

  09/18/2025

  id be surprised if my opinion is a common one, but one thing i prefer in ar glasses over phones is that i can take it off

  put glasses on, do what i want to do, then take them off. more like a laptop or tablet (or my ps4 jfc) where there is just enough friction to keep it from being overly compulsive

  i wonder if any major ar product will embrace that people want to only wear glasses for tasks and want to take them off, or if theyre all going to push toward something one always wears like meta seems to. most successful tech products arent for constant use

  • asadotzler

    09/18/2025

    AR glasses, at their best in the medium term, will be closer to your smartwatch than your phone, and probably closer to your car's HUD than your smartwatch.

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

  09/18/2025

  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.

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

  09/18/2025

  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

  09/18/2025

  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

    09/18/2025

    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 “fixation".

    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.

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.

Not a big fan of Meta but got to admit the tech is interesting. Can't wait to see the competition on this market.

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.

What implications does this have to recording conversation you have with others? I for example live in a state where both parties need to give consent.

• staplers

  09/18/2025

    live in a state where both parties need to give consent
  

  Meta donated a lot of money to the current administration. Confer what you will.

Seems a bit "privacy eroding." Like Google Glass, but chonkeyer.

https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-promotes-stickers-for-sec...

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.

• zmmmmm

  09/18/2025

  > 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

  09/18/2025

  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

  09/18/2025

  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

    09/18/2025

    > 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

      09/18/2025

      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

        09/18/2025

        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.

The Neural Band has the potential to be an amazing musical instrument. Would be interesting to see API support for the device.

The very first thing I though was: "yeah, they're gonna shovel advertising directly into my retina"

I feel like this and this (https://www.visor.com/) 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.

• herval

  09/18/2025

  Visor is largely vaporware (to put it mildly). It’s the form factor Apple is aiming with version 2 or 3 of Vision Pro

  It’s a very different experience to passthrough, no matter how small you make the glasses, so I’m not sure there’s a clear path to convergence

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?

How does anybody see anything if they ban rays?

Tested has a hands on plus interview with Boz (their CTO) https://youtu.be/1jDorDsi9JM?si=O1_g9Z-rgGjyVER3

I don’t see how this is any more socially acceptable than walking around with your camera on filming everyone all the time.

The fact that it’s FB that can see through your eyes doesn’t make this any better.

• 1gn15

  09/20/2025

  It'll become as socially acceptable as installing a dashcam on your car. Or having a camera on your motorcycle helmet.

  • jonplackett

    09/20/2025

    I don’t think so. You’re just passing by people with your dash cam. And your dash cam does not send data to Facebook

> 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.

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.

• 946789987649

  09/18/2025

  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

  • 09/18/2025

• mcdonje

  09/18/2025

  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

  09/18/2025

  Bet you GG though actually treated your PII with respect

  For all my numerous complaints about Google

• Kwpolska

  09/18/2025

  Google Glass launched too early, when people cared more about privacy.

> …based on data from nearly 200,000 consenting research participants…

They had to clarify it was “consenting” since it’s the opposite of their normal default.

(You also have to wonder how consensual it really was.)

• fl7305

  09/18/2025

  It made me want to go back and check their other press releases to see where they did not include the "consenting" part.

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.

Is there a way to just use this as a computer monitor? That’s what the Viture glasses are and it’s great to have a portable monitor that focuses at a longer distance.

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.

AI Glasses With an EMG Wristband available Sept 30 for $799

I think it's sort of important to remember scifi student films like this [1]. Just to remember that, it seems that this is where we're going towards to.

And it freaks me out a little.

Note, not the end though. That's more Neuralink.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK_cdkpazjI&ab_channel=TheCG...

• aeturnum

  09/18/2025

  There's also Hyper-Reality from a few years back: http://hyper-reality.co/

Privacy and vendor lock-in concerns aside, these glasses are ugly. They look like generic nerd stereotype glasses from an 80's movie.

My thoughts as I reconcile my conflicting feelings on this. I think it should be objectively cool that Meta has finally managed to come out with a pair of smart glasses that come incredibly close to being a practical wearable.

The thing is, it's honestly hard to imagine doing anything cool with them. I think this has less to do with hardware limitations and more to do with vendor restrictions.

I think Meta is fundamentally incapable of making anything cool. Hence why they had to partner with Ray-Ban to make these glasses rather than making their own. I think Meta's failure to realize their version of the metaverse had to do with their inability to recognize coolness and taste as much as anything else. I think any and all apps Meta ships with these glasses are cursed to be a mediocre experience.

I think Apple could do a better job but at the end of the day I think the most interesting (not necessarily best) would be ones with the most developer freedom.

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.

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.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCDWKdmwhUI

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\

Whether you like Meta or not, the success of their glasses line means Apple and other companies will respond.

Really excited about these types of products. Would never trust anything with Meta, but I appreciate them trying to contribute a product. Unfortunately, it’s a dead end. Mark’s always regretted missing mobile - and thus being the app rather than the platform - and here it’s no different.

Is it weird I went through the complete landing page and still did not get what actually the features are

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.

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

• manco

  09/18/2025

  > 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

  09/18/2025

  Dont worry. The market decides what we want and we just wont go for it

The camera access is limited to Meta, no 3rd party developers. For privacy reasons. Meta ♥ privacy

Just a thought experiment, if I interview at Meta can I use these glasses ?

"I ABSOLUTELY love your mission, and I envision everyone wearing these! It's cool if I use them during the interview, I feel this will help me understand the end user experience."

• unsupp0rted

  09/18/2025

  There's decorum. You can wear the glasses, but it doesn't mean you should be recording confidential meetings, anymore than you should be recording your partner during an argument.

  Just because your iPhone has a video function doesn't mean it has to be on all the time.

  • 999900000999

    09/18/2025

    Correct, but isn't the entire point of these glasses to make life easier.

    Of course I would ask for permission, and I'm 99% sure they would say no, but what if I'm actually interviewing for the AR team ?

    What better way to embrace the product than to use it ?

    • unsupp0rted

      09/19/2025

      > What better way to embrace the product than to use it ?

      The manufacturer of a blender doesn't want you blending your tv remote or your hamster.

      Just because you're using the product doesn't mean it's desired usage.

      • 999900000999

        09/19/2025

        The tech demo is literally a guy trying to cook with these.

        Presumably a chief could use AR in the future to cook better.

        Why wouldn't a programer? And by extension, an interview should show how you'd behave at work.

        Your right by the way, but what if the future is AR all the time ?

  • 1gn15

    09/20/2025

    And just to add on, if someone replies "but you can see if someone is video recording": not audio recording. That one is completely invisible.

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...

• culopatin

  09/18/2025

  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

    09/18/2025

    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

      09/18/2025

      At the surface they seem like I’m recording for my parents (we live very far from each other). Deep down I would like to get YouTube income eventually.

      • AvAn12

        09/21/2025

        Just use your phone or a vid camera normally so that your subjects can understand that you are making a video of them. Sneakiness sucks.

• gmueckl

  09/18/2025

  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)

  • AvAn12

    09/21/2025

    My phone and noise cancelling earbuds allow for both of these already. My issue is with an always-on hidden camera and mic — just creepy surveillance junk

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?

I just decided I’m buying this just for the live AI. Assuming they fix the issues.

I’d 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.

Pretty cool hardware. Count me in if and when it supports interesting software.

• tootie

  09/18/2025

  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.

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.

There's a lot of hate for Meta in here. They are actually innovating unique new products here. I don't know if they will be commercially successful, but they at least look interesting.

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.

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.

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!

• 09/18/2025

• Tepix

  09/18/2025

  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?

  • losvedir

    09/18/2025

    How so, specifically?

    • frm88

      09/19/2025

      Voice recordings (or video - this device seems to be capable of both) has to be justifiable and with clear and unambiguous consent [0]. The person(s) recorded have the right to access and/or delete the recordings at any time. The retention period is "only for as long as needed... for purpose" which suggests there has to be a purpose.

      All of the above can be found here:

      [0] https://recordinglaw.com/eu-recording-laws/

    • Tepix

      09/19/2025

      I'm just going to point to Perplexity here since this is rather basic: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-does-wearing-ai-powered...

• rashidae

  09/18/2025

  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.

How long does the recording last and is there a developers SDK?

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.

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)

What are the privacy guarantees for passerbys (non-wearers).

• numpad0

  09/18/2025

  You can sue the wearers for reparations and to work with Meta to delete your data, perhaps

• mdhb

  09/18/2025

  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 wouldn’t hesitate to break a pair when I get the opportunity personally.

Can’t wait to see Apple’s response. Only reason I’m not buying one of these September 30th is I know apple will release something better.

Well that and it being a meta product.

Google Glass again ...

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.)

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.

• dylan604

  09/18/2025

  >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

    09/18/2025

    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

      09/18/2025

      I use Kagi so I don’t 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, I’m used to it now but it is definitely a step backwards imo.

      • dylan604

        09/18/2025

        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

These would be great for outdoor running to keep tabs on your pace, HR, time etc. Paired with the new airpods 3, you could be phone free and watch free.

CapitalOne Meta Ray-Ban Display, brought to you by Costco.

Im sold, but it appears there isn’t a single place in my major metro of 7 million that will offer in store demo and purchase? Do they not want my money?!

>The only wave guide device out there with > 42 pixels per degree (ppd) is a giant headset that isn’t sold commercially anymore.

Magic Leap.

• dylan604

  09/18/2025

  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

    09/18/2025

    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.

• blululu

  09/18/2025

  The Magic Leap was around 30 pixels per degree when it was still sold. https://kguttag.com/2022/01/31/magic-leap-2-at-spie-ar-vr-mr...

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

  09/18/2025

  They are (only within +/- 4 though)

  • wkat4242

    09/18/2025

    Oh that wouldn't be a problem but I would need astigmatism correction. They might not have that.

    • pb060

      09/18/2025

      And progressive lenses. There’s still a long way to go.

I don't believe I've ever seen a Hacker News thread astroturfed this hard behaviour. Interesting stuff.

My neighbour is gonna buy this one as well and I bet it’s going to end up in the same junk drawer as the last one.

• jsheard

  09/18/2025

  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.

  https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/3/23818462/meta-ray-ban-stor...

  • aerostable_slug

    09/18/2025

    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 — like Ace — only really keep a smaller community engaged (I don't think most users need translation services on a regular basis).

  • dylan604

    09/18/2025

    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.

I can’t believe they believe this is what people want. Why isn’t Zuckerberg doing the demo in the metaverse? Ha

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.

• kstrauser

  09/18/2025

  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

    09/18/2025

    Ray-Buns.

• jaccola

  09/18/2025

  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.

• yakz

  09/18/2025

  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.

I wonder if they plan to use the glasses as some rudimentary EEG device to read intent or emotions

Wouldn't these be illegal to wear while driving/riding in most of the world?

The specs indicate 6 hours of battery life. Not really something you can use all day.

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.

This is getting closer to the ideal product, but I’m gonna wait for the one from Apple that I know it will be well-tested and integrate with my device. I’m sure it’s 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.

Can I hack it? Can I load whatever OS and software I wish to run on it?

No? Then no thank you.

Seems like Apple should get the wristband tech so people can type on their watches.

Already banned (no pun intended) in many places because of the intrusive camera.

nobody is gonna use this, it's the Humane device except on a glasses.

Still no way to replace battery, so in 3 years tops this thing is e-waste.

• Philpax

  09/18/2025

  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

    09/18/2025

    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.