For the past two weeks, I've been using a new camera to secretly take pictures and video of strangers in parks, trains, stores, and restaurants. (I promise it was all in the name of journalism.) He wasn't hiding the camera, but he was wearing it and no one noticed.
I was trying the recently released one. Ray-Ban $300 Glasses that Mark Zuckerberg's social media empire made in collaboration with the iconic eyewear manufacturer. The high-tech glasses include a camera for taking photos and videos, and a variety of speakers and microphones for listening to music and talking on the phone.
Glasses, Meta says, can help you “live in the moment” while sharing what you see with the world. You can livestream a concert on Instagram while watching the performance, for example, instead of holding a phone. It's a humble goal, but it's part of a broader ambition in Silicon Valley to move computing from the screens of smartphones and computers to our faces.
Meta, Apple and Magic Leap have been promoting mixed reality headsets that use cameras to allow their software to interact with real-world objects. On Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg posted a video on Instagram demonstrating how smart glasses could use ai to scan a shirt and help you choose a matching pair of pants. Laptops, companies say, could eventually change the way we live and work. For Apple, which is preparing to launch its first high-tech glasses, the $3,500 Vision Pro glasses, next year, the ultimate goal is a pair of smart glasses that look good and perform interesting tasks.
For the past seven years, headphones have remained unpopular, largely because they are bulky and aesthetically unsightly. The minimalist design of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses represents what smart glasses could one day look like if they are successful (although lightweight wearable devices of the past, like the Google Glass of a decade ago and the shows sunglasses launched by Snap in 2016, were a failure). Sleek, lightweight and satisfyingly modern, Meta glasses blend effortlessly into your everyday life. No one (not even my editor, who knew I was writing this column) could tell them apart from regular glasses, and everyone was blissfully unaware that they were being photographed.
After wearing the Ray-Ban Meta glasses practically non-stop this month, I was relieved to take them off. While I was impressed by the comfortable and stylish design of the glasses, I was bothered by the implications for our privacy. I'm also concerned about how smart glasses may generally affect our ability to concentrate. Even when I wasn't using any of the features, I felt distracted while using them. But the main problem is that glasses don't do much that we can't already do with phones.
Meta said in a statement that privacy was a priority when designing the glasses. “We know that if we are going to normalize smart glasses in everyday life, privacy has to come first and be integrated into everything we do,” the company said.
I wore the glasses and took hundreds of photos and videos while doing all kinds of activities in my daily life (working, cooking, hiking, rock climbing, driving a car, and riding a scooter) to evaluate how smart glasses could affect us in the future. . That's how it was.
My first test with the goggles was using them at my bouldering gym, recording how I maneuvered through the routes in real time, and sharing the videos with my climbing partners.
I was surprised to find that my climbing, overall, was worse than normal. While recording a climbing attempt, I failed with my footwork and fell. This was disappointing because I had successfully climbed the same route before. Maybe the pressure of recording and streaming a soft climb made me do it worse. After taking off my glasses, I completed the route.
This feeling of distraction persisted in other aspects of my daily life. I had trouble concentrating while driving a car or riding a scooter. Not only was I constantly preparing for video opportunities, but the reflection from other cars' headlights was emitting a strong blue strobe effect through the goggle lenses. goal Safety manual Ray-Ban advises people to stay focused while driving, but does not mention the glare of headlights.
While working on a computer, glasses seemed unnecessary to me because there was rarely anything worth photographing on my desk, but a part of my mind felt constantly worried about that possibility.
Ben Long, a photography professor in San Francisco, said he was skeptical about the premise that Meta glasses helped people stay present.
“If you have the camera with you, you're immediately not in the moment,” he said. “Now you may be wondering: Is this something I can perform and record?”
Privacy eroded
To inform people that they are being photographed, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses include a small LED light embedded in the right frame to indicate when the device is recording. When a photo is taken, it flashes momentarily. When a video is being recorded, it lights up continuously.
While I took 200 photos and videos with the glasses in public, including on BART trains, hiking trails, and parks, no one looked at the LED light or confronted me about it. And why would they do it? It would be rude to comment on a stranger's glasses, much less stare at them.
The issue of widespread surveillance is not particularly new. The ubiquity of smartphones, doorbell cameras, and dash cams makes it likely that you will be recorded wherever you go. But Chris Gilliard, an independent privacy scholar who has tech.ssrc.org/our-network/chris-gilliard/” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>He studied the effects of surveillance technologies.He said cameras hidden inside smart glasses would likely allow bad actors, like people who take sneaky photos of other people at the gym, to do more damage.
“What these things do is they don't make something possible that was impossible,” he said. “They make something easy that was less easy.”
Meta spokesman Albert Aydin said the company takes privacy seriously and designed security measures, including tamper detection technology, to prevent users from covering the LED light with tape.
In other mundane situations, Ray-Ban Meta glasses affected me in strange ways. As I was about to cross a driveway in my neighborhood, I saw a car start to reverse. My immediate reaction was to hit the record button in case I needed to capture the driver acting irresponsibly. But he relented appropriately and crossed, feeling embarrassed.
Life moments
Although the Ray-Ban Meta glasses didn't make me feel more present or more confident, they were good for capturing a particular type of photography: the moments in life that I wouldn't normally record because my hands would be busy.
Wearing the glasses, I recorded a video of my corgi, Max, barking mightily to go for a walk while tying my shoes, a side of him that his Instagram followers don't normally see. I recorded a video of my dogs and wife while we walked on a trail, which would normally be difficult to do with a smartphone while keeping your hands steady. While I was cutting up some leftover meat to prepare lunch, I recorded my Labrador, Mochi, looking at me with hungry eyes.
The images had a dreamlike quality: the camera seemed to float as I moved. My wife and I agreed that we would lovingly watch videos of our dogs. But while these kinds of moments are indeed precious, that benefit probably won't be enough to convince a large majority of consumers to buy smart glasses and use them regularly, given the potential costs of privacy loss and distraction.
It's easy to imagine, however, some applications that could make smart glasses eventually mainstream. A holographic teleprompter that displays talking points out of the corner of your eye while giving presentations, for example, would be deadly. Whether Meta or even Apple, which hopes to make smart glasses after its Vision Pro headphones, develop that product, that future doesn't seem too far away.
