[paxys]

I don't understand why Meta is so insistent on making the camera and creepy video recording the primary feature of these glasses. They do have a ton of other uses. The speakers are genuinely great. It's useful to be able to hear notifications while walking. Having a decent AI for asking random questions is nice as well. It supports live translation. And unlike Airpods it doesn't tune out the rest of the world, which I like. And the new models have a display, which could be useful for stuff like maps.

Release a model without a camera and people might actually give it a chance.

[PurelyApplied]

I do all* of that with my phone and a Bluetooth bone conduction headphones. It kinda seems like the glasses part only make sense if it's for loading it up with a camera. You know, for looking at things, with your glasses.

I agree it would be nice to have a non-skeezy offering, but I think that would be an entirely different product line.

[Edit: oh, well, I didn't realize some but not all of the meta glasses do actually have a tiny display built in. That would be the other use case, for the looking at things, through your glasses.]

* Okay, the sound quality is just alright, but if Meta wanted to pivot to headphones, I'm all ears, as it were.

[Yizahi]

The whole VR shtick they were hyping up for a decade now and even rebranded whole corporation for, only really works if everyone is wearing these cameras 24/7. They failed at advertising the experience itself, so while that is shelved they are exploring other paths. These glasses are intended to normalize widespread pervasive recording as a primary objective, and to collect vast amounts of data for the LLM "training" as a secondary.

PS: two of my friends found no issues with these, bought a pair each and excitedly recorded with many other people present. Like, the issue didn't even register. I foresee that a lot of people will follow, if the price will be accessible, and one day it will be.

[sbrother]

In theory I could see really enjoying them in an action sports (backcountry skiing, mountain biking, rock climbing) setting. I'd want 1) true AR that could annotate terrain with stuff like slope angle, aspect etc, 2) all the GPS and monitoring functionality of a Garmin watch, and 3) a high quality action camera that could replace a gopro with less faff.

From what I can tell we aren't particularly close to putting this all together in a consumer usable package.

[georgemcbay]

> Release a model without a camera and people might actually give it a chance

They also have to look radically different, because anyone who sees someone wearing the current design will always just assume the person using them is a creeper recording creepy videos whether or not the glasses are even capable of doing that. The association is already made from the current model.

[paxys]

Without the camera they are literally just Ray Bans

[georgemcbay]

Yeah, so now any thicker than usual or obviously powered/electronic Ray Bans are now creeper glasses, whether or not they record video. People will assume they do.

[akomtu]

The financial motive must be capturing video data for AI training. Moreover, this data won't be entirely passive: the glasses can tell the user to do something and then observe how the video feed changes.

The more nefarious motive is to inject a layer of AI between humans and nature.

[roryirvine]

My father uses them to record and share videos of some of his craft work, and they're actually pretty good for that.

But that can only be a niche use-case - the sort of thing you'd expect to work better as a minor product from Logitech or GoPro, rather than as a celebrity-endorsed consumer flagship from a tech behemoth.

[zombot]

> I don't understand why

A self-definition as an intrusive peeping Tom is not easily overcome.

[ffsm8]

Eh, realistically speaking the camera is it's main selling point. If you want just audio, why not get eg an aftershockz headset. They've been around for over 10 yrs and work very well for that exact usecase (speaker that doesn't block your ears whatsoever)

The translation feature is also available on your phone which you'll need to pull out when using it anyway, because otherwise the other party won't understand what you're saying either...

[com2kid]

Having my main pair of prescription glasses, covered by insurance, also be my Bluetooth headset is super useful.

The camera feature is also really nice for a lot of non-creepy use cases. From translating signs and plaques in front of me w/o pulling out my phone, to taking 1st person videos on amusement park rides, to photos of my son without having to view the world through my phone waiting for just the right shot.

Heck video calls with Grandma where I can chase my son around the house and let Grandma see everything, or when we read books together over video chat.

Meta glasses are great for parents, kids do all sorts of wacky things and I don't want to be one of those parents always waiting with my phone out so I can capture the perfect picture.

[Someone]

> The translation feature is also available on your phone which you'll need to pull out when using it anyway, because otherwise the other party won't understand what you're saying either...

I think a major use case for live translation is one where the other party is standing opposite to you.

[eloisius]

There’s no way this would work, or work more reliably, than the translator apps we have on phones. In order for this Babelfish sci-fi interface to work, the other party has to be aware and pause their speech for the translation. If they can’t hear their translated message they’ll speak over it. Either that or you have some kind of deafening that passes-thru the translated voice in realtime, and then you lose their emotion, emphasis, and tons of other information that doesn’t fit neatly into the standard monolingual worldview of tech.

Even the “conversation mode” built into Google translate or the iPhone app is useless. I can only imagine it working in the sterile environment it was probably designed in: a conference room with two people trying there hardest to make it work.

I live abroad and travel a lot for photography. Whenever I’m using a translator app, it’s typically a chaotic situation like haggling with a taxi driver, a meal with a group of strangers who invited me to eat with them, lots of background noise. The mode that everyone defaults to, without fail, is to use their own phone to speak or type a message and then hold it up in front of their interlocutor’s face. Sometimes they mix in some fragments of English or I know some fragments of their language. It’s lossy but it works.

I can’t imagine a wearable that would perform better. A notepad that can magically translate little messages is about as far as I would want it to go. Tech is pretty awful at intermediating human relations.