Counterpoint: I am looking forward to the opportunity to get fully open source, open hardware AR glasses. I anticipate that it will happen as first Meta and Google and big Chinese firms spend the R&D to create the hardware to make it possible, then Chinese knock-offs and discount brands appear, and then someone will start selling a pair through CrowdSupply which are truly open source.
At that point I will be able to have the fun of AR (gaming with paper toys or other papercrafts, displaying characters on a table for my tabletop RPG group, getting directions in a foreign city, identifying plants and insects just by looking at them, seeing where my cats are located through walls via their airtag collars) without any ads, without any data harvesting nor privacy concerns, and even being able to write my own custom apps or firmware mods. It will still be a toy rather than a necessary part of life like a smartphone has become but a fun toy nonetheless.
The big hurdle for widely available AR/VR is microdisplay availability. They require displays that are massively denser than regular glass-based LCDs and OLEDs but the ones made like silicon chips. Further, they require specialized drivers for generating correct voltages and waveforms, and they have to be coupled to exotic optics, either the "pancake" concentric reflexive lenses or stacks of Fresnel lenses for VR, or with off-axis optical surfaces or even sliced stacks of PVD coated surfaces or worse yet literal nanoscale or holographic metasurfaces for AR/smart glasses. Those can't be turned on a lathe, barely potentially 3D printable with transparent resin.
That makes smart glasses as a business to only make sense as a massive project with tons of stakeholders involving technical consultants and actual manufacturing companies that can still make those things. That can't be for cheap knockoffs, and that's the problem that needs to be solved for cheap smartglasses.
I agree the FOSS parts are fine. The problem is that there are reasons you have to carry a cell phone, and there are not FOSS alternatives for those things.
Patching binaries of such mandatory garbage is a nice idea though!
This could solve the main problem I had with graphene in the past, which is that some applications I had to use (like for parking or charging a car or whatever) crashed on startup with a Null Pointer Exception, and the set of broken apps changed from week to week.
I imagine binary patching could be used to bypass hardware attestation checks too (you'd need to extract the key from the enclave, but that's usually pretty trivial, depending on the phone model). None of the apps I used required that.
GrapheneOS and iPhones are generally more secure and therefore private than desktop OSes. The idea that phones are inherently worse for privacy is wrong. You can use them in airplane mode to avoid sharing your location with carriers.
The apps you use, sure, those are also optional, but using those same apps on a desktop would give them even more information about you and more power over your system.
Your phone also still collects a record of your GPS data, and that history gets transmitted back the moment you have a connection. Your phone can also still be tracked via bluetooth while in airplane mode. That's also how "find my device" works when your phone in airplane mode. WiFi data can also be collected while in airplane mode.
Airplane mode is basically a lie. It's prevents the transmission of certain specific signals from your device, but that's about it.
My desktop computer does not follow me around everywhere. I can be assured I am not being tracked by it by not being in the same location. If I have to leave my phone behind in order to ensure I am not being surveilled, then it begs the question: why do i need a phone in the first place?
>> The idea that phones are inherently worse for privacy is wrong.
Phones will always be worse for privacy. They are festooned with microphones, cameras and a variety of radios. The PC I am using to type this doesn't have any of those things.
Countercounterpoint: by participating in this ecosystem which is ad-subsidized, you legitimize it via network effects, contributing to a shittier world for all, even if you yourself block the ads. I don't want the be the target of someone else's AR glasses, and I shouldn't have to give up being in public to accomplish that.
The research and industrial pipeline would be ad-subsidized, in Schlagbohrer's account, because it starts with Meta/Alphabet/etc proving the market and establishing demand for microdisplays (and other components). This gives the knock-off market a target to optimize until the components are cheap enough that some small business sets up an open hardware glasses kit on crowdsupply for Schlagbohrer to buy.
For myself, my smart glasses use case involves darkening headlights of oncoming traffic as I drive at night. The road curves a bit in parts of the city I live in, and the headlights shine in my eyes. It's not worth 5,000$ but car insurance also feels expensive until I need it.
Why stop there? Stream the camera to a CNN and black out all the ads in real time you'd other wise be forced to see walking down the street or in the subway.
What I want (what I really, really want) is a set of quality frames with bluetooth that I can drop prescription lenses into, that have good bone conduction audio for playback, with a mic suitable for using for phone calls. Absolute bonus for a simple heads up display of some sort. Even a simple one or two lines of scrolling text would be wonderful.
Specifically do not want it tied to some company ecosystem (looking at Meta glasses here) or using AR overlays. Also do not want a camera in it.
I did have a pair of Vocalskull frames with the bluetooth audio that were reasonably good for a while (I was living the dream!) But after a while the rubber layer over the bone conduction pads wore away and the metal was causing skin irritation so I sadly had to give them up.
My favorite purchase of 2026 was my pair of Xreal One Pro glasses, which I use as an external display while traveling or on the couch at home. These are not AR glasses; the category doesn’t yet have a well known, accurate, catchy name (Screen-in glasses? Facially mounted display? Spatial glasses?)
I agree with the article that AR glasses are not a great future, but I think [ e-display eyewear / screen spectacles / whatever we call them ] that are dumb and just display what you feed them, are great!
I second this. I have the same glasses, and it does exactly what I need: a portable traditional screen.
AR is a step too far. I don't actually need anything augmented. It's useful enough to just have a surface that I can put some status windows on while I walk around the house.
>> Various system health graphs, alerts. Prices of things. You can shrink the virtual screen so that it only takes up a corner.
So you want a HUD like in Oblivion or Skyrim? On you head? Telling you how healthy you are and when you need to eat? Will it play boss music when the police pull you over for speeding?
Display glasses are the term I hear most frequently; as evidence you're the only one using that term but display glasses has already been used by others in this thread.
Displays in a helmet aren't "display glasses" because they're not glasses.
Display glasses are a subset of HMD's, a more specific term. The "display" part of it implies that they're monitor replacements -- both in their interface (DisplayPort alt-mode) and an FOV suitable for monitor replacement.
Finally, being a monitor replacement implies a mostly-2D view, in contrast to XR/VR/AR which implies 3D.
I paid $600; it's a little steep but I use them plenty to justify it (probably wear them 3-4 hours a week on average).
Yes, there are prescription inserts that you get with the glasses.
I only use one setting, and it isn't ultra-wide screen or anything.
Visually the text is worse than looking at text on a laptop screen (or any other screen); the advantage is in the neck. It's so much better not having to look down.
They are good for gaming and movies. Not too great to read text though. You can use them to work (read/write code), but it’s not a great experience imho. The resolution isn’t good enough to feel that I want to work with them.
Best steam deck experience I’ve ever had though. Sekiro and Elden Ring with a giant virtual display is fantastic
I find them awesome for reading text, but I generally plug them into my phone, It's usually displaying much larger fonts than you'd use on a computer.
As a rule of thumb, you probably want a font size similar to what you'd use on a 12 or 14 inch screen. People code quite well on 12 - 14 inch displays but it's not the advertised "57 inch screen equivalent" if you're displaying text.
I have an earlier device from this category ("Viture Pro XR") and find them very handy.
These little wearable dumb displays can be a great alternative to lugging around a laptop. The only problem right now is that the software ecosystem on smartphones is decidedly half baked. Desktop mode on the Pixel series is OK, but it's still janky and a lot of apps don't scale correctly.
definitely I'm looking forward to Meta VR glasses because they will let me do what I'm doing right now on A Vision Pro. Typing this using a VM running Debian 13. I'm running a Picobot agent and chatting with it about Neuromancer. I can do this because I run Anjin Virtual Computer. There are two software issues in VR, breadth and depth. Running Linux at least gives a lot more software. In time people will fill in the deep experiences that full 3D UX needs but for now its been helpful to run mobile apps and other OS's. On Quest and GXR I can run Windows XP.
All I want from smart glasses is the possibility to get notifications above my field-of-vision instead of below. Not having to constantly look down at my phone would do wonders for my posture. No camera, no microphone, no XR - just a line or two of text.
I bought a pair of Xreal XBX a01+, and they are unbearably bad. It is impossible for me to see the virtual screen fully sharp at any given time. I can see part of the screen sharp with an eye closed.
I do not wear prescription glasses, I have used VR glasses and do FPV drone on regular basis. So it is not just me.
I would strongly advice against buying such a product without trying them first! Because at this moment it clearly does not seem to be suitable for everyone.
I have the Viture Pro which is similar, but the trouble I've always had with display glasses like that is that having the display fixed to the center of your field of view feels very unnatural. They have all the sensors to support 3DoF tracking, but you need some (usually proprietary) software on the host device to enable that.
Still, if support for that becomes more standardized and the FoV gets better, I do think this category of displays is pretty exciting. I've found them useful despite those drawbacks!
That's one big advantage of the XReal's. They can pin to an external point without external software, and they have a "follow" mode which is pinned to a specific location on your field of view (which may or may not be the center) but with damping so that it's much more fluid. It works very well.
I got a pair of original Nreal's back in the day. They're just bordering on being usable to replace my laptop screen. Some of the newer models might already be there, but I'm waiting for 4k models.
- do you use these in 'ultrawide' mode (3840x1080)?
- if so, do you find the head tracking works well (i.e. it just works)?
- do you notice the lack of vertical resolution?
(I don't own a pair of these or similar, and like the idea. But a portable monitor gives me a second screen in addition to my MBP. AIUI the glasses would mean I would no longer be able to see my MBP screen, so the glasses would be a substitute, not a complement.)
I guess it depends on your view of what portable is. Lugging around a tablet size thing seems a bit odd when glasses solve both in one device. My aim is one pair of glasses that have enough grunt to run Linux on the device. Most likely candidate is Meta VR glasses right now but perhaps Apple might do something late in 2027 (I hope)
I've got the Viture Luma pros and the quality is great apart from blurriness in the corners, but the perception is more like holding a tablet inches from your face rather than sitting in a cinema
Well you hold a micro tablet an inch from your retina, don't you.
There is something about distance which we can't fool our brains about (yet), I can watch something on 42" screen 1m from me or on 75" screen 4m from me, that big screen, despite visibly smaller makes somehow more 'wholesome' experience.
I have the xbx a01+. It's still OLED but the color to me feels more like a traditional LCD panel, not as vibrant as a typical TV with cranked up saturation etc. I won't say it's "washed out" but the dynamic range is not as high. It's perfectly usable and sharp enough for regular work though IMO. With mine being 1080p I can see the individual pixels though.
No, they're always in focus, more or less. The edges aren't comfortable to look at, which is uncomfortable when you're on Slack or chat apps, where lots of the action is on the edge, but they're fantastic for games, movies, webpages, etc.
The Xreal one pro indeed seems to be AR glasses (their marketing page says "AR for all"), compared to something like the Xreal air which is more of a screen-in glasses.
My fear is that as usual if they become popular, they’ll just be yet another device used for more invasion of privacy and spying. They won’t stay dumb for long. There will be mandatory apps, phoning home, the works. Look what happened with TVs lol
Do I really need to explain what I meant? I feel like it’s pretty clear, everyone responding to you seems to get it.
I really hate how prescriptive comments have to be on HN sometimes.
Here: at present they are dumb and are generally not being used for spying or paired with invasive apps. However, if they become more popular, that is likely to change, which is something I am not looking forward to. It would mean you’d have to use older, inferior hardware, which is fine for basic laptops and Linux and such but displays get noticeably better every few years. I’d rather not have to use dated hardware for something my eyes have to stare at for long periods just because companies are greedy about data. Or I have to learn how to disable all that stuff, and I spend a lot of time as it is modding/breaking/getting around these things. I am not looking forward to yet another domain of tech/hardware where I have to constantly worry about what is going on under the hood because it’s exhausting and I just want to buy a product and be done with the interaction.
TVs didn't use to have anything smart in them either. That's why 'Forgeties79' said:
My fear is that as usual if they become popular, they’ll just be yet another device used for more invasion of privacy and spying. They won’t stay dumb for long. ... Look what happened with TVs lol
This is the result of a stupid Windows feature that automatically installs software without prompting, which has nothing to do with hardware beyond a mechanism for the OS to identify it (in this case, through EDID).
The solution here is to not use Windows, or to disable this auto-install feature if you do, not to avoid all external hardware the OS is capable of identifying (read: every device connected through any modern bus or I/O interface).
They are 3d glasses though? They're perfectly capable of doing 3d. The specific model mentioned even supports 6DoF with a camera attachment, it also has onboard processing to convert 2d video streams into 3d.
The 6DOF tracking is to be able to accurately position the 2D screen in 3D space. This works very well. The camera attachment is an optional thing that just passes the video through to your phone or PC; it's used for recording not for XR. The 3D conversion is a gimmick that doesn't work well.
This strikes me as a distinct negative about tech that only bothers with the display and needs and external processor. I guess the MetaVRGlasses must be sending that down the optical channel too.
I wouldn't buy AR glasses, but also feel powerless to prevent myself from being in the reticule of those who do. When you think about what LLMs and facial recognition allow, we're entering a new conception of the public sphere and personal space/human dignity. I think it goes beyond the traditional notion of "privacy" or "public spaces" and closer to questions about moral rights over your likeness and aggregated personal information.
For instance, what if they invented "X-Ray Spex" like there used to be advertised in the back of comic books, that let you see through people's clothes. Do you have an "expectation of privacy" on a subway train against someone seeing you nude, if the technology exists to do it? I feel like similar cultural standards should apply when it comes to triangulating details about your identity from surreptitious recording devices.
Social norms around public space can change over long periods of time. But, to me, AR glasses appear to be a bridge too far. They're so baldly voyeuristic, even if you don't understand the technical details.
> we're entering a new conception of the public sphere and personal space/human dignity
I think the Bay Area is entering a new conception of yada yada yada. I think some folks who live here don't realize the sheer strength and scale of the reality distortion field. That which is cool in the Bay is frequently very, very uncool elsewhere.
AR glasses, both in purpose and aesthetics, are inextricable from the attitudes and politics of SV. Public opinion of SV has tanked since 2023 in a way I've never seen before.
I guess what I'm saying is this: Remember the jabra headset dorks from the 2000s? We made fun of them for being dorks. We're going to make fun of AR glasses people for being voyeurs, fascists and ICE accomplices. The social pressure against these things will be immense.
> I guess what I'm saying is this: Remember the jabra headset dorks from the 2000s? We made fun of them for being dorks.
Yeah and now people walk around with Bluetooth headsets on everywhere, 24/7. I don't live in SV (thank God) but I'm afraid that mere fashion won't be enough to shut this trend down. Some people don't care about looking like dorks, and when they wait long enough, the stigma dies down.
My point in the parent comment was that it isn't just fashion this time.
But, to my point, fashion alone was enough to stretch out the normalization of bluetooth headsets by a decade. As of 2020 or so, we were still memeing on "airpods everywhere" people, not that they could hear us.
Nowhere is it written in stone that a technology must be accepted by the masses at all, let alone in the most exploitative form SV can think up.
I feel like you could retroactively apply this line of argumentation to smartphones: "don't buy a smartphone"
But the truth is, there's too much utility in technology. If AR can do useful things that smartphones cannot, we're going to end up with mass proliferation of AR, regardless of what parasitic technologies accompany it.
Smartphones started in a very different time. Our point of reference were PCs and laptops, where we were the owner and could do pretty much anything we want. They took a lot of that away with smartphones, but because smartphones started in the in-between times, they (at least Android) still have side-loading, the possibility of installing browsers with ad blockers, heck even the source code in the form of AOSP, etc.
You can be sure that almost twenty years later, they will use a new device type as an excuse to lock things further down. Remote attestation, no side-loading, no or little browser competition, etc. This has kind of already happened with smart watches, where there is no AOSP-equivalent, virtually no models with unlockable bootloaders, etc.
AR glasses will be the next venue to further trample on your rights. The difference compared to smart watches is that they could potentially replace smartphones.
All this is without taking into account the grave privacy violation AR glasses are to other people. Yes, phones can also make photos and film, but it is much more visible.
Luckily, at least where I live, most people find AR glasses creepy and there is a majority of parliament that wants to ban them (though the government is kinda weak as usual).
The main problem with smartphones is not that they started at an "in-between" time, but that they started in an "in-between" place as a hybrid of a PDA and a traditional cell phone. Cell phones tended to be very closed in large part due to the influence of traditional phone companies, which wanted control over every device plugged into the phone network, and smartphones inherited some of that.
Unfortunately, new devices tend to inherit from smartphones instead of desktop computers; even VR devices like the Steam Frame are clearly based on smartphone hardware, even though it doesn't have (for now) a cell phone modem.
Some of us still do the majority of computing on traditional PCs, a market which remains healthy despite the growth of alternatives, and use "dumb" doorbells, lightbulbs, and freezers.
And given the recent flood of security and privacy problems with smart devices, it's not inconceivable that the tide will turn against locked-down, always-connected devices in the not-so-distant future.
Currently AR headsets are all just mobile platforms with exotic UX. If they could lock down AR glasses why wouldn't they do it with smartphones?
If anything the current set of HMDs are more capable and open than the average phone. What's special about the headsets that make them easier to lock down?
> You're right, we should stop innovating entirely, because bad people and slippery slope fallacies exist in the world.
There are plenty of areas where innovating would help people tremendously, with much fewer slippery slopes. Just because people ask you to be mindful of the areas where abuse is already the default use case doesn't mean there's nothing you can do.
It sounds like you already understand what technological innovation is, and that failure of a country to govern its own people effectively has nothing to do with that... so I'm not sure where the misunderstanding is.
We need not stop innovation entirely, of course. But tech should not be in the driver's seat. Tech for tech's sake, and the maximised profits. To ensure that technology is better aligned to the interests of people a helluva lot more and better regulation is in order imho. There are obvious useful aspects to many new technologies, but it is also in a balance to all the negative externalities. Unfortunately the latter are more long-term consequences and the former are more on the short-term gains. There are obvious dystopian tendencies to all the stuff we are inventing now, and somewhere we should call a halt to that, before there is no easy return.
I think there’s good reason to wind back smartphones too. Finding some way to keep the good utility and stripping out the evil attention sucking parts.
I recommend it. I have been what I call "phone-lite" for a few years now. It lives in my sock drawer, and I only take it out if I know I'll need it for GPS when traveling. For the most part, my mobile computing is entirely done through my Daylight Computer tablet, which as a wifi-only e-paper device, I find to be minimally attention sucking.
And often times if they gimp the site to force the app, I just don't use the service. There are unfortunate necessary exceptions, but by and large I'm extremely stingy about what I install on my phone.
Maybe it is time to reconsider buying a smartphone. Just speaking for myself, I'm tired of how easy it is to get distracted by technology nowadays (I wrote a bit about this on my blog[1]). Plus, we're seeing various (albeit small) movements towards dumb phones and phone bricking. Hyper-mobile, general-purpose tech like smartphones/AR is a recipe for distraction. The value of it is real, but at a certain point it just becomes a way to avoid having any moment of quiet contemplation.
Well, where are those useful things? Google Glass was 13 years ago, today's devices don't do much different, and neither has convinced anyone outside of enthusiasts to walk around with one strapped to their face all day.
To be ancedotal, I have never in my life seen anyone anywhere using these devices even one time. By no means does this feel like a technology that is "coming"
Smartphones seem like critical infrastructure to people that spend a lot of time on their phone. This is less an indication of utility than how inured someone has become to the ridiculous bullshit that smartphones have become.
Am I really the only one who opened the website saw the video first before reading anything and ended up wanting that those glasses exist as shown in that video?
Same. I watched the video years ago and it's always stuck with me as something I would want. Not the ads of course, but an enhanced "UI" for the real world. The video is exceptionally well done.
To an extent, you are right. It looks like a cyberpunk game screen, which, upon inspection, is part of the draw here. I would like to assume that all of this can be changed, customized and whatnot the way I customize just about everything else.
You might see ads everywhere, but see my little meme gallery project plastered instead of every single of those ads, I see real time translation as a tourist, I see an advisor whispering in my ear the proper way to say thank you to this merchant.
You assume those will degrade the same way cellphones did. I am saying: lets make sure it doesn't happen by doing some work now since we absolutely do know what to expect from corporates.
Being able to see your heart rate, length/set counts, head pitch, and a whole bunch of other metrics in real-time is really helping me improve my swimming. Not affiliated, just a happy customer.
Personally, mass adoption of AR is where I squirrel away deep into the mountains and start my Ted years (in spirit, not practice). There's something about having a 'layer' over reality that's just unappealing and spooky. To each their own though.
there's a chance that going into the mountains will make you extend your own layer over reality... see experiments with people isolated or in remote conditions like Antarctica
The only reason I think people shouldn't go for AR glasses is unlike VR, they're still only 1080p-ish in resolution. The resolution of the ar displays is somehow around the 1080p mark with different aspect ratios.
I think this was the same situation last year too.
This is a silly rant I typed out on a whim so don't take it too seriously. And to clarify, the (inevitable) invasive, abusive implementation of AR glasses is what bothers me, not the tech itself, which is pretty cool.
I recently bought something that might qualify as AR glasses: a new old stock Google Glass XE-C.
All the original services for it are long-dead so it's immune from the nightmare scenarios in the article. It's pretty decent for heads-up biking directions after vibecoding an app for that (https://github.com/zakwilson/OsmGlass/).
> Pop-up windows were a plague in the 90s and early 2000s, and remained that way until browsers started blocking them by default.
And they've come roaring back, on the wake of the well intended but arguably misguided GDPR specification about cookie notifications. It's now common to see popups on many sites in the exact same style.
Popups are such terrible UX that it forced websites to mostly abandon them, but once people were used to them for another reason, ads were quick to follow. They are usually an ad from the site itself rather than a 3rd party, but that hardly matters.
Even the cookie notifications are rife with dark patterns, making it difficult to get to the option with minimal necessary cookies.
C'mon man. AR glasses and phones can be used the exact same way.
I'd rather read articles on an AR display than a little 6.6 inch screen.
If you don't want ads, the solution is running open source OS's on these things (which is the most likely outcome for people here anyway), not avoiding the hardware entirely.
Im waiting for prices to come down but having experienced AR glasses before, they're a great compromise between VR (too sweaty) and having to use either a larger laptop/ipad.
The only effective defence I can think of is regulation. Not in the USA, I can't see that happening, but the EU could and likely will put up some kind of fight.
I'm not exactly the EUs biggest fan, but at times like this I'm so glad it exists.
I forgot to label a test tube the other day and found myself surreptitiously trying to smell the contents so I could tell the solvents apart. AR goggles would've been pretty nice about then. They'd remember which of these are dangerous.
Or when you're putting something back together and you end up with two screws left over.
Or if you want to see your friends' annotations in the book you're reading.
We gave control over the web to third parties. We can have nice things again if we just stop doing that.
>All this leads me to ask, what actual incentive (aside from short term conveniences) would I have to buy an AR device?
There was a time, at least for myself and a lot of people in the AR wave, where we were trying to make computing integrated into everyday life such that they kind of disappear.
The idea was that genuinely we could have “spatial” computing where there really was very little difference between the digital and the physical because we could build a digital twin of the real world
The only way you can do this reliably is to have a constant stream of data from fixed and egocentric sensors which have context about the world around you to give you more information to make your life easier and more integrated.
This was in a time where we were the surveillance web was just starting to really ramp up around the 2010s
Of course, the massive government corporate surveillance state dashed any hopes of being able to do any of this with human dignity.
We did used to dream of a better world, not naiively I and others have been writing about the risks and dangers of all these things while still pushing them forward.
Short of an overhaul of human society, I don’t see the kind of technological future that we all wanted happening
I still use my xreal glasses from time to time but the social ecosystem doesn’t exist to actually make progress. Maybe in another half century
How many wearing those will be unwittingly participating in yet another (Niantic) Pokemon Go mapping experiment?
Niantic Spatial mapped over 30 billion real-world images and street scans from millions of players visiting public parks, sidewalks, murals, statues, and general urban landmarks featuring over 1 million distinct mapped locations including many government and military installations.
Or might this become a case of some AI app on the phone summarizing everything the user is looking at and doing?
Tue Nov 10 15:18:58 UTC 2026: User is staring intently into the eyes of a sheep.
Tue Nov 10 15:20:07 UTC 2026: >smart-watch< User heart rate increasing.
"I disagree with this" is not an identifier of clickbait, anymore than your whinge about "pointless rants" (as if this is the first blog you've ever encountered in your life) notwithstanding.
But hey, at least you got that sweet X-clapback in without saying a single insightful or vaguely responsive thing. So there's that to be proud of.
Also, if you're walking down the street in headgear capable of always-on video capture and face recognition, don't be surprised if people knock (it) off your head.
This author understands neither AR technology, nor consumer electronics.
The idea of always on 6 dof tracked advertisements that show up all the time is a bad product that consumers would not buy. The battery would not last long, it would be annoying to use compared to other devices, and it would struggle to deliver value.
The author writes as if web browsers, Windows, Android, and iOS have ads built into them popping them up randomly when that is nowhere near the case.
The law of ad entropy in technology states that over time, ad coverage always increases. First in the applications hosted on the platform, and then eventually the platform itself will just start serving ads. At the heat death of technology, all platforms will be completely covered in ads, leaving no more more energy for useful work.
See: the web itself, search engines, app stores, desktop search, operating systems from desktop to mobile to TV... the list is endless and the trend is relentless. It already started with AI, now injecting ads directly into chats.
So I think it's not a stretch to predict AR platforms will be the same and the ads will be in your eyeballs. It doesn't really matter that these anti-features will cause the product to be worse for users if it makes the platform more profitable for owners.
I can also guarantee with complete certainty that any sort of "neural implant" technology will one day be serving ads directly into your brain.
This ignores capitalism, which in the limit trends toward mon/duopoloies, regulatory capture, cartels, and cronyism. In the long term, the firms that survive are the ones that capture their customer base and abuse them the most, not the ones who offer the best products.
That video is a piece of art. I actually love the "Clear the area" animation on the street, the red arrow plowing through before the traffic and the virtual fences on the sidewalk. But we will probably get the ads and the shittification before that.
I was seriously considering the Xreal Aura after having gotten the 1s ~6 months ago, but I figured that between the uncertainties of Google's support and likely rapid progress in the hardware if the software support materializes, they'd be obsoleted too quickly to be worth it.
I don't find the claim that people will be expected to wear them constantly as having any credibility. The post overall reads as absurd hyperbole to me, on par with AI-bros fawning over how their machine god can exterminate humanity.
I’d go for this type of eyewear solely for the convenience of adjusting my Rx without the annoying annual visits. But there is no chatter about this, everyone concerned about cameras and some sort of contextual reality. Which is fine, just saying…
How would this... work? The shape of the glass lens is what focuses the light onto your retina correctly. I don't think you could adjust your prescription via software, but I would love to learn otherwise.
Scrolled down to find the Bluesky/Mastodon links, found them both.
Do these people think that you can stop a technology be telling people to not use it?
"Do not buy books from Amazon, go to a library". "Do not use Google Maps, paper maps are perfectly fine". "Do not have Slack on your phone, your boss does not need to be able to message you off-hours".
"Do not use LLMs, they are just bad".
Is this just plain virtue signaling? Can't imagine anyone thinks telling people to not use AR/AI will actually work.
You can just disagree with their opinion. I don't think you really believe that we should mock people for fighting against something inevitable, unless you disagree that the thing is bad, in which case the inevitability is not the salient part of your opinion.
This is such a pedestrian take. If you don't want HYPER-REALITY to predicted the future you don't have to.
The same people who say don't buy AR glasses because they will turn your whole world into the internet, are the same people MAKING that happen.
You don't want your phone to be out all the time? Build the infostructure for labeling priority notifications, and allowing them permanent access to your field of vision also allows you to hide the phone and low priority communications almost all the time.
Email used to be really disruptive to my focus, everyone expected fast response. Slack didn't just add to our disruptions, for many of us it allowed us to drastically scale back the time spent on lower priority communication like email.
Counterpoint: I am looking forward to the opportunity to get fully open source, open hardware AR glasses. I anticipate that it will happen as first Meta and Google and big Chinese firms spend the R&D to create the hardware to make it possible, then Chinese knock-offs and discount brands appear, and then someone will start selling a pair through CrowdSupply which are truly open source.
At that point I will be able to have the fun of AR (gaming with paper toys or other papercrafts, displaying characters on a table for my tabletop RPG group, getting directions in a foreign city, identifying plants and insects just by looking at them, seeing where my cats are located through walls via their airtag collars) without any ads, without any data harvesting nor privacy concerns, and even being able to write my own custom apps or firmware mods. It will still be a toy rather than a necessary part of life like a smartphone has become but a fun toy nonetheless.
The big hurdle for widely available AR/VR is microdisplay availability. They require displays that are massively denser than regular glass-based LCDs and OLEDs but the ones made like silicon chips. Further, they require specialized drivers for generating correct voltages and waveforms, and they have to be coupled to exotic optics, either the "pancake" concentric reflexive lenses or stacks of Fresnel lenses for VR, or with off-axis optical surfaces or even sliced stacks of PVD coated surfaces or worse yet literal nanoscale or holographic metasurfaces for AR/smart glasses. Those can't be turned on a lathe, barely potentially 3D printable with transparent resin.
That makes smart glasses as a business to only make sense as a massive project with tons of stakeholders involving technical consultants and actual manufacturing companies that can still make those things. That can't be for cheap knockoffs, and that's the problem that needs to be solved for cheap smartglasses.
The software is there already, apparently https://github.com/Mentra-Community/MentraOS
Counterpoint, people will install content overlays and all of the same problems will exist with open source because "content isn't free".
Why wait?
Meta Ray-Ban - already hacked by p0pcycle
Rokid Glasses - rooted firmware https://github.com/jaskier-os/client-glasses
Google Glass Explorer Edition - officially supported root access
Unless you can build the OS from source, you don't really control it.
Even then, look at Android. Graphene and similar are pretty good base operating systems, but almost the entire app ecosystem is corporate spyware.
> but almost the entire app ecosystem is corporate spyware
this is very true, but it also has a huge FOSS app ecosystem and highly polished FOSS apps.
I've recently been having Codex patch closed source apps making them work offline and greatly reducing their permissions and it works really well.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.getatoms.a...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hybridcali...
I agree the FOSS parts are fine. The problem is that there are reasons you have to carry a cell phone, and there are not FOSS alternatives for those things.
Patching binaries of such mandatory garbage is a nice idea though!
This could solve the main problem I had with graphene in the past, which is that some applications I had to use (like for parking or charging a car or whatever) crashed on startup with a Null Pointer Exception, and the set of broken apps changed from week to week.
I imagine binary patching could be used to bypass hardware attestation checks too (you'd need to extract the key from the enclave, but that's usually pretty trivial, depending on the phone model). None of the apps I used required that.
The phones themselves are part of the surveillance state, u/privacyishuman
GrapheneOS and iPhones are generally more secure and therefore private than desktop OSes. The idea that phones are inherently worse for privacy is wrong. You can use them in airplane mode to avoid sharing your location with carriers.
The apps you use, sure, those are also optional, but using those same apps on a desktop would give them even more information about you and more power over your system.
> You can use them in airplane mode to avoid sharing your location with carriers.
You can't. "Airplane mode" doesn't actually shut down everything. Carriers can still track your phone. https://undercodetesting.com/how-your-phone-tracks-you-even-...
Your phone also still collects a record of your GPS data, and that history gets transmitted back the moment you have a connection. Your phone can also still be tracked via bluetooth while in airplane mode. That's also how "find my device" works when your phone in airplane mode. WiFi data can also be collected while in airplane mode.
Airplane mode is basically a lie. It's prevents the transmission of certain specific signals from your device, but that's about it.
My desktop computer does not follow me around everywhere. I can be assured I am not being tracked by it by not being in the same location. If I have to leave my phone behind in order to ensure I am not being surveilled, then it begs the question: why do i need a phone in the first place?
>> The idea that phones are inherently worse for privacy is wrong.
Phones will always be worse for privacy. They are festooned with microphones, cameras and a variety of radios. The PC I am using to type this doesn't have any of those things.
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So how many people run jailbroken smartphones? Society adapts to technology if it gets popular enough, and using it becomes basically mandatory.
Even Realities G2 can now run custom firmware too
Interesting
Countercounterpoint: by participating in this ecosystem which is ad-subsidized, you legitimize it via network effects, contributing to a shittier world for all, even if you yourself block the ads. I don't want the be the target of someone else's AR glasses, and I shouldn't have to give up being in public to accomplish that.
The open source, open hardware glasses the OP wants wouldn't be ad-subsidized.
The research and industrial pipeline would be ad-subsidized, in Schlagbohrer's account, because it starts with Meta/Alphabet/etc proving the market and establishing demand for microdisplays (and other components). This gives the knock-off market a target to optimize until the components are cheap enough that some small business sets up an open hardware glasses kit on crowdsupply for Schlagbohrer to buy.
For myself, my smart glasses use case involves darkening headlights of oncoming traffic as I drive at night. The road curves a bit in parts of the city I live in, and the headlights shine in my eyes. It's not worth 5,000$ but car insurance also feels expensive until I need it.
And the surveillance state part?
Yes, that too. Open source / open hardware can be an effective counter-measure against the surveillance state.
Sousveillance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
No, because it will eventually have people-identifying apps.
> without any ads
Why stop there? Stream the camera to a CNN and black out all the ads in real time you'd other wise be forced to see walking down the street or in the subway.
I feel like that's something Steve Mann[0] talked about doing in his AR work. I don't have time to go look for it but it's probably out there.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann_(inventor)
Letting a piece of technology mess with my perception 24/7 is the last thing I'm going to do, thank you.
> nor privacy concerns
Except for those of everyone else around you
Every Founder: Freedom for me; externalities for thee!
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If you don't watch the ads on your AR glasses after all the free subsidies provided by the big tech companies you are part of the problem.
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What I want (what I really, really want) is a set of quality frames with bluetooth that I can drop prescription lenses into, that have good bone conduction audio for playback, with a mic suitable for using for phone calls. Absolute bonus for a simple heads up display of some sort. Even a simple one or two lines of scrolling text would be wonderful.
Specifically do not want it tied to some company ecosystem (looking at Meta glasses here) or using AR overlays. Also do not want a camera in it.
I did have a pair of Vocalskull frames with the bluetooth audio that were reasonably good for a while (I was living the dream!) But after a while the rubber layer over the bone conduction pads wore away and the metal was causing skin irritation so I sadly had to give them up.
My favorite purchase of 2026 was my pair of Xreal One Pro glasses, which I use as an external display while traveling or on the couch at home. These are not AR glasses; the category doesn’t yet have a well known, accurate, catchy name (Screen-in glasses? Facially mounted display? Spatial glasses?)
I agree with the article that AR glasses are not a great future, but I think [ e-display eyewear / screen spectacles / whatever we call them ] that are dumb and just display what you feed them, are great!
I second this. I have the same glasses, and it does exactly what I need: a portable traditional screen.
AR is a step too far. I don't actually need anything augmented. It's useful enough to just have a surface that I can put some status windows on while I walk around the house.
What statuses do you need persistent real time updates for around the house?
Various system health graphs, alerts. Prices of things. You can shrink the virtual screen so that it only takes up a corner.
Then you can go about your day and only zoom it in if something happens.
You can even exercise with them on.
A phone, watch, or ring with vibration isn't sufficient?
Particularly for exercise, a pair of glasses feels like too much, until baked in to prescription frames with no added weight
Those are all pretty small screens. You can get the Xreal with prescription if you want.
"ring with vibration"
I don't want to learn morse code to know what price my ring has found for me. Glasses displaying a price, please.
>> Various system health graphs, alerts. Prices of things. You can shrink the virtual screen so that it only takes up a corner.
So you want a HUD like in Oblivion or Skyrim? On you head? Telling you how healthy you are and when you need to eat? Will it play boss music when the police pull you over for speeding?
How do you know how many HP left you have before you need to drink your health potion?
I think the term you're looking for is HMD (Head Mounted Display).
Display glasses are the term I hear most frequently; as evidence you're the only one using that term but display glasses has already been used by others in this thread.
Talk to a fighter pilot.
Displays in a helmet aren't "display glasses" because they're not glasses.
Display glasses are a subset of HMD's, a more specific term. The "display" part of it implies that they're monitor replacements -- both in their interface (DisplayPort alt-mode) and an FOV suitable for monitor replacement.
Finally, being a monitor replacement implies a mostly-2D view, in contrast to XR/VR/AR which implies 3D.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-mounted_display
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=display+glass&ti...
I guess more like EyeMD, considering it's just glasses rather than whole helmet that fighter pilots have
Curious about your experience - been mulling it over for a while. A few questions to anyone who has these:
How much did you pay - what do you think about the price?
Do you use prescription glasses?
Uses - HDR high res video (4k/8k big screen equivalent)?
Design? Color accuracy?
Programming/writing and reading - precieved dpi and contrast? (Print, eink, retina, OLED, 1080p lcd?
I don't need all of the best from the above - but would like to know...
I paid $600; it's a little steep but I use them plenty to justify it (probably wear them 3-4 hours a week on average).
Yes, there are prescription inserts that you get with the glasses.
I only use one setting, and it isn't ultra-wide screen or anything.
Visually the text is worse than looking at text on a laptop screen (or any other screen); the advantage is in the neck. It's so much better not having to look down.
They are good for gaming and movies. Not too great to read text though. You can use them to work (read/write code), but it’s not a great experience imho. The resolution isn’t good enough to feel that I want to work with them.
Best steam deck experience I’ve ever had though. Sekiro and Elden Ring with a giant virtual display is fantastic
I find them awesome for reading text, but I generally plug them into my phone, It's usually displaying much larger fonts than you'd use on a computer.
As a rule of thumb, you probably want a font size similar to what you'd use on a 12 or 14 inch screen. People code quite well on 12 - 14 inch displays but it's not the advertised "57 inch screen equivalent" if you're displaying text.
I have an earlier device from this category ("Viture Pro XR") and find them very handy.
These little wearable dumb displays can be a great alternative to lugging around a laptop. The only problem right now is that the software ecosystem on smartphones is decidedly half baked. Desktop mode on the Pixel series is OK, but it's still janky and a lot of apps don't scale correctly.
definitely I'm looking forward to Meta VR glasses because they will let me do what I'm doing right now on A Vision Pro. Typing this using a VM running Debian 13. I'm running a Picobot agent and chatting with it about Neuromancer. I can do this because I run Anjin Virtual Computer. There are two software issues in VR, breadth and depth. Running Linux at least gives a lot more software. In time people will fill in the deep experiences that full 3D UX needs but for now its been helpful to run mobile apps and other OS's. On Quest and GXR I can run Windows XP.
All I want from smart glasses is the possibility to get notifications above my field-of-vision instead of below. Not having to constantly look down at my phone would do wonders for my posture. No camera, no microphone, no XR - just a line or two of text.
I bought a pair of Xreal XBX a01+, and they are unbearably bad. It is impossible for me to see the virtual screen fully sharp at any given time. I can see part of the screen sharp with an eye closed.
I do not wear prescription glasses, I have used VR glasses and do FPV drone on regular basis. So it is not just me.
I would strongly advice against buying such a product without trying them first! Because at this moment it clearly does not seem to be suitable for everyone.
they have bad vertical FOV too. Meta VR Glasses will be much better for this.
Oh and the AR aspect, Claude told me this construction with a prism only lets 20% of exterior light reaching the eye.
I have the Viture Pro which is similar, but the trouble I've always had with display glasses like that is that having the display fixed to the center of your field of view feels very unnatural. They have all the sensors to support 3DoF tracking, but you need some (usually proprietary) software on the host device to enable that.
Still, if support for that becomes more standardized and the FoV gets better, I do think this category of displays is pretty exciting. I've found them useful despite those drawbacks!
That's one big advantage of the XReal's. They can pin to an external point without external software, and they have a "follow" mode which is pinned to a specific location on your field of view (which may or may not be the center) but with damping so that it's much more fluid. It works very well.
I got a pair of original Nreal's back in the day. They're just bordering on being usable to replace my laptop screen. Some of the newer models might already be there, but I'm waiting for 4k models.
I'm curious:
- do you use these in 'ultrawide' mode (3840x1080)?
- if so, do you find the head tracking works well (i.e. it just works)?
- do you notice the lack of vertical resolution?
(I don't own a pair of these or similar, and like the idea. But a portable monitor gives me a second screen in addition to my MBP. AIUI the glasses would mean I would no longer be able to see my MBP screen, so the glasses would be a substitute, not a complement.)
I guess it depends on your view of what portable is. Lugging around a tablet size thing seems a bit odd when glasses solve both in one device. My aim is one pair of glasses that have enough grunt to run Linux on the device. Most likely candidate is Meta VR glasses right now but perhaps Apple might do something late in 2027 (I hope)
how's the screen quality, on a scale from 1 to my 42" oled display that's sitting in front of me
I've got the Viture Luma pros and the quality is great apart from blurriness in the corners, but the perception is more like holding a tablet inches from your face rather than sitting in a cinema
Well you hold a micro tablet an inch from your retina, don't you.
There is something about distance which we can't fool our brains about (yet), I can watch something on 42" screen 1m from me or on 75" screen 4m from me, that big screen, despite visibly smaller makes somehow more 'wholesome' experience.
I have the xbx a01+. It's still OLED but the color to me feels more like a traditional LCD panel, not as vibrant as a typical TV with cranked up saturation etc. I won't say it's "washed out" but the dynamic range is not as high. It's perfectly usable and sharp enough for regular work though IMO. With mine being 1080p I can see the individual pixels though.
It's an HD 55" OLED display in front of you, effectively.
Do you need to move them up and down the bridge of you nose to focus them?
No, they're always in focus, more or less. The edges aren't comfortable to look at, which is uncomfortable when you're on Slack or chat apps, where lots of the action is on the edge, but they're fantastic for games, movies, webpages, etc.
The Xreal one pro indeed seems to be AR glasses (their marketing page says "AR for all"), compared to something like the Xreal air which is more of a screen-in glasses.
Same here. I’m fully display glasses pilled now and once we get 4k micro oleds I doubt I will main a physical monitor ever again
Would be a cool combo with an EliteBoard G1a.
In The Diamond Age Neal Stephenson used the term 'phantascope'.
My fear is that as usual if they become popular, they’ll just be yet another device used for more invasion of privacy and spying. They won’t stay dumb for long. There will be mandatory apps, phoning home, the works. Look what happened with TVs lol
They can't. They're just a display. If you're worried about the glasses, you should be worried about your computer monitor too.
Do I really need to explain what I meant? I feel like it’s pretty clear, everyone responding to you seems to get it.
I really hate how prescriptive comments have to be on HN sometimes.
Here: at present they are dumb and are generally not being used for spying or paired with invasive apps. However, if they become more popular, that is likely to change, which is something I am not looking forward to. It would mean you’d have to use older, inferior hardware, which is fine for basic laptops and Linux and such but displays get noticeably better every few years. I’d rather not have to use dated hardware for something my eyes have to stare at for long periods just because companies are greedy about data. Or I have to learn how to disable all that stuff, and I spend a lot of time as it is modding/breaking/getting around these things. I am not looking forward to yet another domain of tech/hardware where I have to constantly worry about what is going on under the hood because it’s exhausting and I just want to buy a product and be done with the interaction.
Is that clear enough?
Right, just a display. Like a TV.
Like a monitor. They don't have anything smart, like TVs do.
TVs didn't use to have anything smart in them either. That's why 'Forgeties79' said:
EDIT: Also consider this monstrosity <https://www.samsung.com/us/monitors/smart/32-inch-smart-moni...>Vote with your wallet and don't buy spyware!
We have strayed far from the original point. No one is saying buy spyware.
Right, like a monitor. https://www.privacyguides.org/news/2026/07/17/lg-monitors-ca...
This is the result of a stupid Windows feature that automatically installs software without prompting, which has nothing to do with hardware beyond a mechanism for the OS to identify it (in this case, through EDID).
The solution here is to not use Windows, or to disable this auto-install feature if you do, not to avoid all external hardware the OS is capable of identifying (read: every device connected through any modern bus or I/O interface).
Monitors have abused hdmi to get internet access, too.
Aren't they usually marketed as XR glasses?
XR glasses are 3d glasses. Display glasses emulate a 2D screen.
They are 3d glasses though? They're perfectly capable of doing 3d. The specific model mentioned even supports 6DoF with a camera attachment, it also has onboard processing to convert 2d video streams into 3d.
The 6DOF tracking is to be able to accurately position the 2D screen in 3D space. This works very well. The camera attachment is an optional thing that just passes the video through to your phone or PC; it's used for recording not for XR. The 3D conversion is a gimmick that doesn't work well.
This strikes me as a distinct negative about tech that only bothers with the display and needs and external processor. I guess the MetaVRGlasses must be sending that down the optical channel too.
I wouldn't buy AR glasses, but also feel powerless to prevent myself from being in the reticule of those who do. When you think about what LLMs and facial recognition allow, we're entering a new conception of the public sphere and personal space/human dignity. I think it goes beyond the traditional notion of "privacy" or "public spaces" and closer to questions about moral rights over your likeness and aggregated personal information.
For instance, what if they invented "X-Ray Spex" like there used to be advertised in the back of comic books, that let you see through people's clothes. Do you have an "expectation of privacy" on a subway train against someone seeing you nude, if the technology exists to do it? I feel like similar cultural standards should apply when it comes to triangulating details about your identity from surreptitious recording devices.
"X-ray spex"-like technology exists, is used in airport security screening, and is not without controversy[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_X-ray#Concerns
Social norms around public space can change over long periods of time. But, to me, AR glasses appear to be a bridge too far. They're so baldly voyeuristic, even if you don't understand the technical details.
> we're entering a new conception of the public sphere and personal space/human dignity
I think the Bay Area is entering a new conception of yada yada yada. I think some folks who live here don't realize the sheer strength and scale of the reality distortion field. That which is cool in the Bay is frequently very, very uncool elsewhere.
AR glasses, both in purpose and aesthetics, are inextricable from the attitudes and politics of SV. Public opinion of SV has tanked since 2023 in a way I've never seen before.
I guess what I'm saying is this: Remember the jabra headset dorks from the 2000s? We made fun of them for being dorks. We're going to make fun of AR glasses people for being voyeurs, fascists and ICE accomplices. The social pressure against these things will be immense.
> I guess what I'm saying is this: Remember the jabra headset dorks from the 2000s? We made fun of them for being dorks.
Yeah and now people walk around with Bluetooth headsets on everywhere, 24/7. I don't live in SV (thank God) but I'm afraid that mere fashion won't be enough to shut this trend down. Some people don't care about looking like dorks, and when they wait long enough, the stigma dies down.
My point in the parent comment was that it isn't just fashion this time.
But, to my point, fashion alone was enough to stretch out the normalization of bluetooth headsets by a decade. As of 2020 or so, we were still memeing on "airpods everywhere" people, not that they could hear us.
Nowhere is it written in stone that a technology must be accepted by the masses at all, let alone in the most exploitative form SV can think up.
I feel like you could retroactively apply this line of argumentation to smartphones: "don't buy a smartphone"
But the truth is, there's too much utility in technology. If AR can do useful things that smartphones cannot, we're going to end up with mass proliferation of AR, regardless of what parasitic technologies accompany it.
Smartphones started in a very different time. Our point of reference were PCs and laptops, where we were the owner and could do pretty much anything we want. They took a lot of that away with smartphones, but because smartphones started in the in-between times, they (at least Android) still have side-loading, the possibility of installing browsers with ad blockers, heck even the source code in the form of AOSP, etc.
You can be sure that almost twenty years later, they will use a new device type as an excuse to lock things further down. Remote attestation, no side-loading, no or little browser competition, etc. This has kind of already happened with smart watches, where there is no AOSP-equivalent, virtually no models with unlockable bootloaders, etc.
AR glasses will be the next venue to further trample on your rights. The difference compared to smart watches is that they could potentially replace smartphones.
All this is without taking into account the grave privacy violation AR glasses are to other people. Yes, phones can also make photos and film, but it is much more visible.
Luckily, at least where I live, most people find AR glasses creepy and there is a majority of parliament that wants to ban them (though the government is kinda weak as usual).
The main problem with smartphones is not that they started at an "in-between" time, but that they started in an "in-between" place as a hybrid of a PDA and a traditional cell phone. Cell phones tended to be very closed in large part due to the influence of traditional phone companies, which wanted control over every device plugged into the phone network, and smartphones inherited some of that.
Unfortunately, new devices tend to inherit from smartphones instead of desktop computers; even VR devices like the Steam Frame are clearly based on smartphone hardware, even though it doesn't have (for now) a cell phone modem.
Some of us still do the majority of computing on traditional PCs, a market which remains healthy despite the growth of alternatives, and use "dumb" doorbells, lightbulbs, and freezers.
And given the recent flood of security and privacy problems with smart devices, it's not inconceivable that the tide will turn against locked-down, always-connected devices in the not-so-distant future.
Currently AR headsets are all just mobile platforms with exotic UX. If they could lock down AR glasses why wouldn't they do it with smartphones?
If anything the current set of HMDs are more capable and open than the average phone. What's special about the headsets that make them easier to lock down?
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You're right, we should stop innovating entirely, because bad people and slippery slope fallacies exist in the world.
...sorry but that ain't happening.
Making the world a dystopia isn't "innovation".
Sorry state of things indeed.
> You're right, we should stop innovating entirely, because bad people and slippery slope fallacies exist in the world.
There are plenty of areas where innovating would help people tremendously, with much fewer slippery slopes. Just because people ask you to be mindful of the areas where abuse is already the default use case doesn't mean there's nothing you can do.
> innovating
Innovate what, exactly? The demise of democracy? Authoritarian rule? Technology innovation ain't societal progress, and we should aim for the latter.
It sounds like you already understand what technological innovation is, and that failure of a country to govern its own people effectively has nothing to do with that... so I'm not sure where the misunderstanding is.
We need not stop innovation entirely, of course. But tech should not be in the driver's seat. Tech for tech's sake, and the maximised profits. To ensure that technology is better aligned to the interests of people a helluva lot more and better regulation is in order imho. There are obvious useful aspects to many new technologies, but it is also in a balance to all the negative externalities. Unfortunately the latter are more long-term consequences and the former are more on the short-term gains. There are obvious dystopian tendencies to all the stuff we are inventing now, and somewhere we should call a halt to that, before there is no easy return.
I think there’s good reason to wind back smartphones too. Finding some way to keep the good utility and stripping out the evil attention sucking parts.
There are numerous new projects like the Clicks Communicator and the Minimal 2 that are trying to strike that balance
I recommend it. I have been what I call "phone-lite" for a few years now. It lives in my sock drawer, and I only take it out if I know I'll need it for GPS when traveling. For the most part, my mobile computing is entirely done through my Daylight Computer tablet, which as a wifi-only e-paper device, I find to be minimally attention sucking.
I refuse to install an app if the website functions fine.
And often times if they gimp the site to force the app, I just don't use the service. There are unfortunate necessary exceptions, but by and large I'm extremely stingy about what I install on my phone.
Maybe it is time to reconsider buying a smartphone. Just speaking for myself, I'm tired of how easy it is to get distracted by technology nowadays (I wrote a bit about this on my blog[1]). Plus, we're seeing various (albeit small) movements towards dumb phones and phone bricking. Hyper-mobile, general-purpose tech like smartphones/AR is a recipe for distraction. The value of it is real, but at a certain point it just becomes a way to avoid having any moment of quiet contemplation.
[1] https://bdvorak.com/blog/tech-is-disrespectful/
Well, where are those useful things? Google Glass was 13 years ago, today's devices don't do much different, and neither has convinced anyone outside of enthusiasts to walk around with one strapped to their face all day.
To be ancedotal, I have never in my life seen anyone anywhere using these devices even one time. By no means does this feel like a technology that is "coming"
> parasitic technologies
Great turn or phrase. (And/or, great company name. Probably both :)
Sounds more like some sort of neo-noise-rock/electronica band.
Smartphones seem like critical infrastructure to people that spend a lot of time on their phone. This is less an indication of utility than how inured someone has become to the ridiculous bullshit that smartphones have become.
Am I really the only one who opened the website saw the video first before reading anything and ended up wanting that those glasses exist as shown in that video?
It's clear that whoever made it had fun thinking through the UX that such a platform could have, and not all of it bad.
Same. I watched the video years ago and it's always stuck with me as something I would want. Not the ads of course, but an enhanced "UI" for the real world. The video is exceptionally well done.
Could you explain why? It looks absolutely dystopian.
To an extent, you are right. It looks like a cyberpunk game screen, which, upon inspection, is part of the draw here. I would like to assume that all of this can be changed, customized and whatnot the way I customize just about everything else.
You might see ads everywhere, but see my little meme gallery project plastered instead of every single of those ads, I see real time translation as a tourist, I see an advisor whispering in my ear the proper way to say thank you to this merchant.
You assume those will degrade the same way cellphones did. I am saying: lets make sure it doesn't happen by doing some work now since we absolutely do know what to expect from corporates.
It's like looking at the AOL homepage and the mess of GeoCities and still seeing the potential in the internet.
A person from 1800 seeing a video of today's New York city would call it dystopian and the work of the Devil.
You're making their point /s
I hope that the commenter above you is a bot...
I did recently find a great use-case for AR (of a sort). I got these swim goggles and love them:
https://www.formswim.com/
Being able to see your heart rate, length/set counts, head pitch, and a whole bunch of other metrics in real-time is really helping me improve my swimming. Not affiliated, just a happy customer.
Looks cool. Too bad you cannot listen to music.
Personally, mass adoption of AR is where I squirrel away deep into the mountains and start my Ted years (in spirit, not practice). There's something about having a 'layer' over reality that's just unappealing and spooky. To each their own though.
there's a chance that going into the mountains will make you extend your own layer over reality... see experiments with people isolated or in remote conditions like Antarctica
I've already lost my mind. Can't lose it again I don't think.
I'm personally looking forward to AR glasses that can block outdoor ads, like billboards, etc.
This is a great use case (and likely not nearly monetizable enough to become a reality, unfortunately...).
The only reason I think people shouldn't go for AR glasses is unlike VR, they're still only 1080p-ish in resolution. The resolution of the ar displays is somehow around the 1080p mark with different aspect ratios.
I think this was the same situation last year too.
This is a silly rant I typed out on a whim so don't take it too seriously. And to clarify, the (inevitable) invasive, abusive implementation of AR glasses is what bothers me, not the tech itself, which is pretty cool.
I love the style of this site. Makes me want to redo my own site like it's an 80s BBS.
I recently bought something that might qualify as AR glasses: a new old stock Google Glass XE-C.
All the original services for it are long-dead so it's immune from the nightmare scenarios in the article. It's pretty decent for heads-up biking directions after vibecoding an app for that (https://github.com/zakwilson/OsmGlass/).
> Pop-up windows were a plague in the 90s and early 2000s, and remained that way until browsers started blocking them by default.
And they've come roaring back, on the wake of the well intended but arguably misguided GDPR specification about cookie notifications. It's now common to see popups on many sites in the exact same style.
Popups are such terrible UX that it forced websites to mostly abandon them, but once people were used to them for another reason, ads were quick to follow. They are usually an ad from the site itself rather than a 3rd party, but that hardly matters.
Even the cookie notifications are rife with dark patterns, making it difficult to get to the option with minimal necessary cookies.
It's easy to forget but pop-up ads originally created an entirely new OS-level window, not just a JS "popover" like we have these days.
C'mon man. AR glasses and phones can be used the exact same way.
I'd rather read articles on an AR display than a little 6.6 inch screen.
If you don't want ads, the solution is running open source OS's on these things (which is the most likely outcome for people here anyway), not avoiding the hardware entirely.
Im waiting for prices to come down but having experienced AR glasses before, they're a great compromise between VR (too sweaty) and having to use either a larger laptop/ipad.
Yeah a phone is a 5d FOV. its appauling.
The only effective defence I can think of is regulation. Not in the USA, I can't see that happening, but the EU could and likely will put up some kind of fight.
I'm not exactly the EUs biggest fan, but at times like this I'm so glad it exists.
Not to drift to far from the topic, but what the hell is that Temu video, people seriously use this app??
I forgot to label a test tube the other day and found myself surreptitiously trying to smell the contents so I could tell the solvents apart. AR goggles would've been pretty nice about then. They'd remember which of these are dangerous.
Or when you're putting something back together and you end up with two screws left over.
Or if you want to see your friends' annotations in the book you're reading.
We gave control over the web to third parties. We can have nice things again if we just stop doing that.
>All this leads me to ask, what actual incentive (aside from short term conveniences) would I have to buy an AR device?
There was a time, at least for myself and a lot of people in the AR wave, where we were trying to make computing integrated into everyday life such that they kind of disappear.
The idea was that genuinely we could have “spatial” computing where there really was very little difference between the digital and the physical because we could build a digital twin of the real world
The only way you can do this reliably is to have a constant stream of data from fixed and egocentric sensors which have context about the world around you to give you more information to make your life easier and more integrated.
This was in a time where we were the surveillance web was just starting to really ramp up around the 2010s
Of course, the massive government corporate surveillance state dashed any hopes of being able to do any of this with human dignity.
We did used to dream of a better world, not naiively I and others have been writing about the risks and dangers of all these things while still pushing them forward.
Short of an overhaul of human society, I don’t see the kind of technological future that we all wanted happening
I still use my xreal glasses from time to time but the social ecosystem doesn’t exist to actually make progress. Maybe in another half century
How many wearing those will be unwittingly participating in yet another (Niantic) Pokemon Go mapping experiment?
Niantic Spatial mapped over 30 billion real-world images and street scans from millions of players visiting public parks, sidewalks, murals, statues, and general urban landmarks featuring over 1 million distinct mapped locations including many government and military installations.
Or might this become a case of some AI app on the phone summarizing everything the user is looking at and doing?
Tue Nov 10 15:18:58 UTC 2026: User is staring intently into the eyes of a sheep.
Tue Nov 10 15:20:07 UTC 2026: >smart-watch< User heart rate increasing.
This is a pointless rant against something that hasn't happened (yet)
They even say "if it becomes mainstream" and then argue as if it has. Total clickbait
"I disagree with this" is not an identifier of clickbait, anymore than your whinge about "pointless rants" (as if this is the first blog you've ever encountered in your life) notwithstanding.
But hey, at least you got that sweet X-clapback in without saying a single insightful or vaguely responsive thing. So there's that to be proud of.
You must not like a lot of sci-fi fiction then. Total clickbait stories about things that haven't happened and might want to warn against.
The clickbait is the title of the article not describing the article.
Sold! Buying AR glasses before ads get there! :D
I'm holding out for Daemon operative glasses. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(novel)
Also, if you're walking down the street in headgear capable of always-on video capture and face recognition, don't be surprised if people knock (it) off your head.
Though thankfully the second amendment exists, for exactly those situations where some ideologue springs a physical assault on you at random.
This happened quite a bit when Google was marketing the Google Glass headset.
Or don't listen to some narrow minded rando on the internet and do buy them, if you have a use case.
Can't wait to have "Log in to OneDrive to backup your videos [OK] [Remind Me Later]" in my peripheral vision 18/7 (minus the 6 when we're asleep)...
Man, I love the extra weight and seriousness that font and MS-DOS layout give to the article.
> REAL-WORLD POPUPS? Are you insane?
Indeed.
Buy AR glasses and use them to filter out ads.
Awkward read that seems like a personal issue for the author and it absolutely doesn't apply to the general populace.
I'd welcome AR glasses - it would mean looking at my phone less. The contextual information and HUDs are a net gain.
mainly before the sponsor come out
This author understands neither AR technology, nor consumer electronics.
The idea of always on 6 dof tracked advertisements that show up all the time is a bad product that consumers would not buy. The battery would not last long, it would be annoying to use compared to other devices, and it would struggle to deliver value.
The author writes as if web browsers, Windows, Android, and iOS have ads built into them popping them up randomly when that is nowhere near the case.
Counterargument: what they've done to TVs.
I am shocked that people still buy TVs which come with so much adware and spyware out of the box.
The law of ad entropy in technology states that over time, ad coverage always increases. First in the applications hosted on the platform, and then eventually the platform itself will just start serving ads. At the heat death of technology, all platforms will be completely covered in ads, leaving no more more energy for useful work.
See: the web itself, search engines, app stores, desktop search, operating systems from desktop to mobile to TV... the list is endless and the trend is relentless. It already started with AI, now injecting ads directly into chats.
So I think it's not a stretch to predict AR platforms will be the same and the ads will be in your eyeballs. It doesn't really matter that these anti-features will cause the product to be worse for users if it makes the platform more profitable for owners.
I can also guarantee with complete certainty that any sort of "neural implant" technology will one day be serving ads directly into your brain.
This ignores competition. Users will use other services and devices if there are too many ads and not enough value in return.
This ignores capitalism, which in the limit trends toward mon/duopoloies, regulatory capture, cartels, and cronyism. In the long term, the firms that survive are the ones that capture their customer base and abuse them the most, not the ones who offer the best products.
That video is a piece of art. I actually love the "Clear the area" animation on the street, the red arrow plowing through before the traffic and the virtual fences on the sidewalk. But we will probably get the ads and the shittification before that.
I was seriously considering the Xreal Aura after having gotten the 1s ~6 months ago, but I figured that between the uncertainties of Google's support and likely rapid progress in the hardware if the software support materializes, they'd be obsoleted too quickly to be worth it.
I don't find the claim that people will be expected to wear them constantly as having any credibility. The post overall reads as absurd hyperbole to me, on par with AI-bros fawning over how their machine god can exterminate humanity.
I’d go for this type of eyewear solely for the convenience of adjusting my Rx without the annoying annual visits. But there is no chatter about this, everyone concerned about cameras and some sort of contextual reality. Which is fine, just saying…
How would this... work? The shape of the glass lens is what focuses the light onto your retina correctly. I don't think you could adjust your prescription via software, but I would love to learn otherwise.
How would you know what your prescription is without the eye test though?
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Scrolled down to find the Bluesky/Mastodon links, found them both.
Do these people think that you can stop a technology be telling people to not use it?
"Do not buy books from Amazon, go to a library". "Do not use Google Maps, paper maps are perfectly fine". "Do not have Slack on your phone, your boss does not need to be able to message you off-hours".
"Do not use LLMs, they are just bad".
Is this just plain virtue signaling? Can't imagine anyone thinks telling people to not use AR/AI will actually work.
Right now I'm using Picobot on my Vision Pro in a Linux Riscv5 emulator. Some might say thats 3 evils in one.
You can just disagree with their opinion. I don't think you really believe that we should mock people for fighting against something inevitable, unless you disagree that the thing is bad, in which case the inevitability is not the salient part of your opinion.
It ok to fight for what you want.
But this is about imposing your will on people "I think AR is shit, so I ask you to agree with me and stop using it"
This is such a pedestrian take. If you don't want HYPER-REALITY to predicted the future you don't have to.
The same people who say don't buy AR glasses because they will turn your whole world into the internet, are the same people MAKING that happen.
You don't want your phone to be out all the time? Build the infostructure for labeling priority notifications, and allowing them permanent access to your field of vision also allows you to hide the phone and low priority communications almost all the time.
Email used to be really disruptive to my focus, everyone expected fast response. Slack didn't just add to our disruptions, for many of us it allowed us to drastically scale back the time spent on lower priority communication like email.
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