TL;DR: you now need to pay a $20/month “meta premium” subscription to use a 100% offline feature that runs on your own malware-ridden smartglasses.
If you don’t subscribe, you can use the feature that is already included in the hardware that you already paid for 3 hours each month
The now-paywalled feature boosts the voice of the speaker in front of you, something that even low-end ANC earphones are doing now. 5 minutes of free usage per day is basically nothing.
This is the kind of enshitification thats good for society.
Fuck these privacy invading creep goggles. I hope they continue to make them worse to use and posses
Good. Enshittification of the panopticon goggles.
I’m actually OK with this enshittification, and hope it continues into oblivion on the Facebook spyglasses. Personally
def hope it reduces the glass-pervs out there.
Im sure the pervs will gladly pay extra
depressingly plausible;
Meta’s finances must be in the shitter to be enshittifying a premium product.
beginning of the end for yet another set of AR glasses
And thank god for that. Right now they’re just going to be secretley-always-on Zuckerberg surveillance tools in ways that phones struggle to replicate.
I’d say this is more like the middle of the end, with the beginning of the end being the Meta logo on them.
@Wispy2891, the ‘offline feature that runs on your own hardware’ framing is the part that stings most here — Meta’s basically renting you back functionality baked into silicon you already bought. The ANC earphone comparison is dead-on; my $40 Ankers do ambient boost passively, no subscription, no timer. What’s wild is 3 hours/month math: that’s 6 minutes a day. Barely a commute.
Garbage in - garbage out
Lol.
I don’t mind if the people who wear these get ripped off
This should be in “leopards at my face.” They didn’t care about the impact of their carless decisions, and now they are getting screwed.
their carless decisions,
Idk if they was a tacit reference or accidental, but…
I bout the bool and.couldn’t get far in it. It made me sick.
good! hopefully this will discourage everyone who bought them from using them, so they just sit in a drawer somewhere or get recycled instead of spying on unwitting people, and meta will fail to make back the huge amounts of money they’ve invested in tech that most people don’t want 😌
It’s funny, I would love to some have the novel tech they developed (HUD / display built into glasses since I’m wearing them anyways). The problem, as usual, is corps taking the piss with prices and profit then spying on you and everyone around you non-stop anyways…
I would 100% be open to some HUD glasses delivered with a FOSS OS that works completely offline and/or via your phone (but still offline). But that’s seriously wishful thinking given our corporate and political overlords
Yah, like videos or guides on screen whilst I have my hands full soldering or something seems like a great application.
I’m a huge nerd, so I’d love a HUD like the B movie Sight Extended, gamifying my life to motivate me to mow the lawn and clean and wear pants. Sadly it seems the corps and gov will just use all this stuff to track and harvest the data from our every word/thought/blink and monetize every bit of it they can. Will likely end up more like the ad dreams from Ready Player One where ads are 90% of your vision, and they will only be used by creepy creepers for creeping.
If done right, this would be super useful for the visually impaired and other people with other disabilities. But the tech bros would rather have creepy filming spy glasses instead.
I always thought it would be cool if you could just leave AR notes lying around. Like put a digital note reminder on the fridge. Or a cute meme or joke somewhere your partner would find it. Or an IRL message forum that only exists at a specific location, you can’t access it remotely. I dunno how you could implement that, but it would be interesting.
I think it’s fairly easy to imagine what that would be like, given the limited examples you can see with a VR headset with pass-through. It could be pretty sweet for people to have the option of a digital overlay on reality that’s under their own control.
What’s missing are the extremely powerful but also extremely miniaturized and efficient hardware (imagine just constant inside-out tracking of some kind with the storage to remember the 3D layout of basically everywhere you go, but also with 12-24 hour battery life and not generating a noticeable amount of heat with a tiny surface area), and the open technologies and/or lack of enshittification. Who is going to sell such a device but won’t stuff it with ads, surveillance, and paywalls?
The closest we’ve seen is Apple’s headset that was still just a high end VR headset with passthrough and was thousands of dollars while still being locked down.
I can’t think of anything I would want to have pop up in my view. I have a phone to hand all day, and the notifies me of important things.
Can you think of anything that you actually want so see constantly or so immediately you can’t pull a phone out of your pocket?
As someone with auditory processing disorder, the only thing i want is real-time closed captions of whoever is talking to me.
Oh that would be nice.
IRL subtitles is a great idea
This, this is a really good answer. Thanks for bringing it up.
Yeah that and where sounds are coming from
I have raging tinnitus, If a model could properly filter out background noise and give me CC I would be super stoked.
I think directions while walking would be better than carrying and looking down at a phone.
How fast do you walk that you need to constantly check? You can also have you phone all out instructions for the next turn.
I’d rather just have that overlay like Google already has for walking instead of pulling out my phone every few intersections or having it loudly announce that I’m a tourist to everyone in earshot.
Dude, you asked for examples of what people might find useful and now you’re just shitting on all of them.
Yeah, and the dork glasses will most definitely won’t give any weird vibes.
Anyway, on an entirely different topic, have you ever heard the term glasshole?
Unless you’re actively looking for them, the raybans aren’t going to stand out as smart glasses.
Christ, I’m not here to defend meta or the assholes walking around harassing women, I’m saying there is a potential use for AR glasses.
For me, this doesn’t solve anything. This is looking for something to fit tech in.
You can already do this with your phone, and it isn’t like checking your phone whilst walking is going to kill you or someone else (unlike using your phone whilst driving).
You can also use the sign posts around you, my city has more than enough for people walking to get where the need, or at least the rough area.
You can also use headphones for the verbal call outs.
Another alternative would be a smart watch. Loads have maps or bread crumb style maps.
The real answers have been for more disability or accessibility not seeing Google maps constantly while walking.
Cycling navigation might be a useful feature. I don’t have a phone mount for my bike and worry about the risks of damage if I did mount one.
As someone who has used their phone and had a major accident on it with the phone mounted. I will never go with smart glasses, they were the first thing that I noticed was smashed up. My phone survived(mostly) despite the bike being a complete write off, that will happen when getting hit by a kayak at 50kmh.
I had a Quadlock mount and just their sticker mount on the phone, you can get cases for popular phones though. I now use a Garmin computer for my riding.
Is noone questioning getting hit with a 50kmh kayak while biking? Just me?
Hahaha, in brief. cycling out from my old seaside village, getting to the crest of a very steep hill(just shy of 20%) and get over taken by a pickup on a blind corner, thankfully no traffic coming the other way, but hit the downhill part and it is fast 80kmh speed limit down a country lane with 2 lanes of traffic. I hit about 70kmh, and the pickup is pulling away slowly.
Then the kayak shaped missile launches out of the bed as it hadnt been secured properly. Hits the road in front of me, I try to dodge, but it slides across like it is homing in on me. On the brakes as much as I can be in the small window I had to react and drop some speed before it clobbers the front of my bike. The rest I am sure you can imagine as a bike comes to a sudden stop and I dont.
The thing that keeps me from mounting my phone to my bike is, I’ve read, that the vibration from the bike can damage the camera in the phone.
Also, how do you get hit with a kayak on a bike?
I never had any issues with the vibrations causing damage. Would definitely be something to consider, as I can see the reasoning about it damaging something like the zoom functionality. Mine was on a out front mount so maybe that helped reduce it?
As for the kayak incident, I posted it in replay to someone else, but here is the story:
Hahaha, in brief. cycling out from my old seaside village, getting to the crest of a very steep hill(just shy of 20%) and get over taken by a pickup on a blind corner, thankfully no traffic coming the other way, but hit the downhill part and it is fast 80kmh speed limit down a country lane with 2 lanes of traffic. I hit about 70kmh, and the pickup is pulling away slowly.
Then the kayak shaped missile launches out of the bed as it hadnt been secured properly. Hits the road in front of me, I try to dodge, but it slides across like it is homing in on me. On the brakes as much as I can be in the small window I had to react and drop some speed before it clobbers the front of my bike. The rest I am sure you can imagine as a bike comes to a sudden stop and I dont.
You might not notice your OIS is borked until you go on vacation and suddenly can’t get certain pictures to focus anymore. Excessive vibration and drops can definitely damage it. Though I imagine just a basic rubberized mount would help mitigate that a lot.
I have a phone to hand all day
I’d like to not have a phone in my hand all day.
I already wear glasses, I have a smartwatch. reading shit on the smartwatch is a PITA.
Give me a monocular monochrome screen, directional audio pointed at my ear. I’d be happy.
Give me a high rez screen so I could watch a youtube video on cooking for fixing my car while i’m doing either and I’d be ecstatic.
I’d pay good money for glasses that displayed a grey rectangle over real life ads.
Possibly the only reason I could see to invest in them, but I live in a country that isn’t completely plastered in ads(yet).
Following recipes. These days I print them out because it’s a pain constantly washing your hands to check the next step on the phone. But I’m not buying smart glasses just that. My normal glasses are expensive enough already.
This has actually been the one thing I have been using AI for. I tell Gemini I’m going to cook some recipe and walk me through it and then ask questions as I’m going. Most of the time it does a decent job.
For following a recipe, could you not just increase lock timer on your phone? I am also a terrible cook, and a male, so I constantly wash my hands when handling food(I am that meme).
Invariably it’s having to scroll that’s the issue and you don’t want to be cross contaminating via your shiny black mirror.
I think the number of comments below you show the uses of glasses like that. I really think they would a lot of people who are disabled etc. For me they would really help me with some of my memory issues, especially since i’m looking to have a career in a genre of music where’s it’s frowned upon to have sheet notes
And I asked because I am ignorant about some of them. I also think a lot of what has been posted has been looking for a problem, not solving something.
Needing Google maps when walking? Is honestly a terrible reason. Phones, sign posts, smart watches all already solve this.
Someone just posted about closed captions when people are talking to them due to a disability, that’s a really good reason to have some kind of smart glasses.
For your situation, I don’t think smart glasses are really the answer, and are more of a band-aid. The real answer in my mind is using the sheet notes and getting the stigma changed(but I understand that is a lot, lot, lot harder than just getting smart glasses).
Yeah, I also try a lot to break the stigma. But I think a lot of people are ingrained in their ways and tradition and it takes more time or effort to see past it. It would also help to get a type of Shazam for the tune that’s playing to know what sheets to play too.
In any case, fair play to you for recognising there are some uses that could enable people.
Yea breaking stigmas is always the most uphill battle. I know it is not the same, but you see a lot of resistance to better tech in cycling. Things like disc brakes which are just better(outside of the tiny minority of cases) having so much fight against them.
I will say i am pretty opposed to the tech in many normal cases. Especially as it just seems like such a massive privacy nightmare at best. Or just shoe horning in tech for no real reason. I do think that everyone is already so in grossed in tech(I know I am a lot of the time) that they forget to just look around them and take in the world, and I think that smart glasses are that tipping point of going to far for most people.
I am happy to see that some really good use cases have been brought up, I am not all knowing I would in fact call me ignorant about a lot of things as I can only know what I know. But almost every good(even great) reason I have read has been based around improving life and interactions for people with disabilities which I can honestly get behind.
Real time translation of speech or text, AR such as a guide overlay or wikipedia info box when looking at art, name tags and relationship data on people you interact with, especially if you are face blind or got like 20 different people in a treatment and support team
Yeah, the art example and real time translation are already done with your phone. Having that in your face doesn’t sound appealing or necessary.
For the face blind I can understand and be sympathetic, but for me I wouldn’t want to have cameras on people constantly, or keep a database of people’s information that could be leaked/lost.
Managing a phone while using a wheelchair or other mobility assistance is not the easiest, so the HUD version would be an improvement. AR glasses or HUD glasses are imho some of the most promising hardware for accessability we got now so I really hope they (the glasses) will find a niche outside tech bro or stalking spaces
That’s going to be a tough battle. The tech bro douchebags have a pretty tight grip on it at the moment.
Yeah that’s a good reason. How do you interact with them them though? Cause if it is hands or voice commands I don’t think I see much benefit over having a phone mounted(things are already expensive and only getting more so).
If it is eye tracking for people who have issues interacting with a phone in other ways then, that would certainly be a huge leap forward for accessibility.
Most of the uses for a HUD-IRL do not require personal ownership of the device. Like, the Louvre rented 3DSs to visitors for AR and guided visits for years. Guides and pop up info are appropriate on industrial settings, for personal hobbies it is overkill. Now, name tags and relationship data on people you interact with? weird and creepy. You mean like, for use by healthcare professionals? maybe, still no need to personally own one, and there are gigantic ethical issues to solve by having cameras constantly on during people’s most vulnerable moments. For disability support, IDK, it might have uses, but it is still weird creepy and invasive, due to constant camera on and facial recognition active. You would have to trust 100% on the tech company behind it, and Meta is not exactly the most trustworthy corporation, by far.
They’d still have the issue if non consensual “filming” though, unless it was a camera free hud.
I cant wait till they are discontinued.
I could get requiring a subscription for server based AI features, but they say they tested it in airplane mode and it worked because it’s on device, that’s seriously fucked. That should never have a limit.
The fun part is that even if you pay the $20/month subscription you can only use the feature that runs locally on your device up to 30 minutes a day
My mom just caught one of her kids using these to cheat on a final. He had them Bluetoothed to his laptop and it disconnected at some point and she heard “the answer to number 7 is…” But she said he barely got a C on it even while cheating. So since she didn’t know about the glasses until after that student left and another student told her it was the glasses, she just kinda let it go saying “it’s honestly going to be his problem in the future.”
Edit: she couldn’t pin point the kid at the moment, and wasn’t informed who it was until after the kid was gone and the other student told her.
I’m not a teacher, but I dunno if that’s the right response to someone cheating. It is going to be his problem in the future, but as a teacher, isn’t it her job to teach the kid that that’s not OK? Sorta depends on the age, I suppose, but I’d definitely give the kid a 0% instead of a C.
You know, if the kid is using state of the art tech to cheat and he still only got a C, then maybe let this one go.
Maybe this kid needs all the help he can get.Teaching someone that cheating is a way to get a pass vs a fail isn’t helping anyone, in my opinion, but it could be situational.
She couldn’t really have done anything considering she didn’t know which kid it was until after they were gone and the other student informed her.
Ahh, that makes a bit more sense I suppose. Innocent until proved guilty and whatnot. I feel like I’d still want to bring them in to confront them about it, to let them know that they didn’t really get away with it. Also, obviously, I’d be banning smart glasses from tests.
She’s visiting for a funeral and I commented something on the commercial for them, and she told me that sorry and about how she has to watch out for them now. Another loose relation is visiting and a teacher as well and I asked them about ai and got two totally different experiences. My mom’s class doesn’t require a lot of literature as it’s a low level bio class, but the loose family is teaching English to troubled youth and sees it absolutely everywhere. She started having them write one paper first day in class to get a feel for their actual writing aptitude.
Interesting insight of course. I can’t imagine being a teacher right now, having to keep up with these things. You’re basically forced to become a techie in some ways, when before, many teachers really had no reason or need to learn tech stuff. I guess they had other cheating methods to keep up with, but man, these cheating tools are just evolving so fast these days.
Morality and such isn’t really a teacher’s job.
Besides that, “between no kid left behind” and government testing standards that are tied into funding, teaching a turned into a generic lump of shit, and everyone gets to pass.
Excuse me, with how shitty parents are, someone has to step up, or we are all screwed.
Let’s put aside who’s job is what, these kids are going to be building our future too.
The parents will raise hell and admin will pressure you to look the other way since the last thing they want is their stats looking bad. There’s a reason teachers are quitting in droves. You couldn’t pay me enough to be one.
I mean, they really won’t, since the old people are the ones who always vote. I’ll be dead by the time any of today’s school kids are in charge of anything and the teacher lesson plans, or no kids left behind are going away any time soon. if you can’t teach your own children a sense of morality, you don’t even deserve to have a say in this discussion.
It isn’t really an issue of morality imo, it’s a teacher’s job to give grades that reflect the student’s skill level.
yeah, i tutored a fair amount of pre-med students who had to take economics as a general education class. dullards to the last one (these were the ones who needed a tutor for introductory economics) and every single one tried to pay me to do their homework. i kept their names and about half are now working in medicine, because “that’ll be their problem” turns into “that’ll be the patient’s problem”.
please remind your mother that if y’all keep failing them through, look what happens
I mean, it was a bio 2xxx class so likely a gen ed req. She would’ve failed him if she knew who it was at the time. She told me she was “seeing red”. But like I said, the student was one of the first to finish and leave so it would’ve been difficult to make a case.
Eh, I cheated off my apple watch in highschool, didn’t make me stupider, I didn’t cheat in college becaue I was too scared to get caught lol.
College was the only time I tried. It was during a lab practical for a higher level immunology. But I looked at another answer of theirs that I knew, and it was not the right answer. So I didn’t use the first.
What, were they too popular before? lol
Subscriptions for offline features should be completely illegal. In fact Meta is probably already technically illegal.
If we lived in functional democracies most large multinationals would’ve been split up a long time ago, including Meta.
Instead we live in a grey area of plutocratic corporate dictatorship.
