I have a friend who is absolutely obsessed with roller coasters, but many parks don’t allow you to wear a body camera (to say nothing of phones, you’re absolutely not allowed to hold a recording device). Like, this guy will ride the same coaster back to back for hours and will absolutely watch a recording. He bought a pair for this one purpose. I would not have bought them and he definitely felt extremely conflicted. I think he keeps them in a case at all times and only wears them when he’s about to get on a ride.

Basically, he only bought them as an action camera alternative. He doesn’t use any of their creepy social media features.

There are valid used for gaze focused head mounted ameras.

There is no reason for them to be in RayBams…

Unless RayBam wants to encourage replacements from damage caused by punching anyone wearing their products in the face.

I would love to have properly working glasses with subtitles+translation and maps/navigation built-in.

I couldn’t care less about video recording, that shit’s creepy.

The same sort of people who used to buy x-ray specs.

A know a few people who use them like a gopro - they record bike rides and stuff like that.

But you have misunderstood them - they have a very obvious recording LED, so they’re not designed to record without people’s knowledge. And they have some detection mechanism to tell (by reflected light) if you put tape over it or (electronically) if you break it, so modifying them to record secretly is not trivial.

If you actually want to record someone secretly, you could buy a button camera that an undercover journalist would use for a fraction of the price and not have to do any modification. It wouldn’t upload everything automatically to Instagram though, which I think for the target audience of the glasses is a big appeal…

Perverts

Last year at this event organized by a friend we were sat at the table along some radio and tv personalities, not famous, but clearly managing a step up in income than the rest.

Right from the start one of them started to show off his new Ray-Bans that recorded video. Common among rich people to brag about something expensive…

My wife asked, what are you recording? he answered without shame… “I’ve been recording everyone and nobody knew” with a grin on his face.

Going back a couple generations of this tech, I was a little excited about Google glass back in the day.

And to be clear, I don’t have, want, or like meta glasses or any of the other products out there right now. I don’t trust the companies behind them, I don’t like the people who have them, there’s enormous privacy issues with them, and they’re pretty much totally tied to AI at this point and I don’t think I need to get up on a soap box to explain why that’s a problem on Lemmy.

But if all of those issues were somehow solved, I could see them being pretty damn useful.

Part of what I liked about them was that they were obviously not just regular glasses. Not that every passerby is scrutinizing what the people around them are wearing on their face, but they weren’t pretending to be anything they weren’t.

I think they could be useful for capturing pictures and video of things in the moment. I recently went on a trip to Iceland and saw some geysers. I wanted to get a picture of them erupting but that meant I had to stand around holding up my phone for like 5 minutes because you don’t know exactly when it’s going to erupt, and that did take me out of the moment a bit. Would’ve been kind of nice to just set my glasses to record as I stood there watching and waiting.

When I can, I try to get around on foot. Having some sort of HUD to display directions and such would be pretty nice for that instead of constantly having to pull out my phone. Having directions in your earbuds works pretty well in most cases, but does somewhat impair your ability to hear what’s going on around you. Also, in cases like when I was in Iceland, my ears aren’t exactly used to hearing icelandic words, and it kind of seemed like Google’s text to speech isn’t quite up to it either, because it seemed to skip a lot of street names and just said “turn left” making me have to look at my phone to see which specific road I was supposed to be turning at. But even when it did attempt to pronounce the names, most of them sound like gobbledegook to me, and I wouldn’t necessarily be able to match what I heard up to a street sign.

Similarly, I had to pull out my phone to translate more than a few signs, menus, etc. while I was there. Being able to just look at the sign and have a translation pop up in the corner of my vision or overlaid on top of the icelandic words would have been nice.

There is no way to do this in a way that wouldn’t be horrifyingly invasive and disrespectful of other people’s privacy, but if there were, I’m pretty terrible with names, and being able to have a pop-up with name tags or something would be nice in a lot of social situations.

I have a pretty small house where storage and workspace is at a premium, and I can be a bit scatterbrained and disorganized. I often find myself working on my hobbies at a small, cluttered workbench with several in-progress projects scattered about. Having the camera rolling while I do that might be useful for me, so I can rewind and see where the hell I put that screwdriver down, I just had it 2 minutes ago and now it’s vanished into thin air.

Similarly, I like to cook, and I tend to wing it a lot, I’m not following recipes too closely, I taste, adjust and improvise as I go, and I’m certainly not writing my recipes down while I’m doing it. And not to toot my own horn, but I’m a pretty good cook, people tend to really like what I make and often ask me for recipes. Being able to go back and review the video of what I did would be pretty handy for when I actually do want to write one of those recipes down, and I could share some of the video to show exactly what I did for some more complicated steps.

And in cases where I am referencing a recipe or tutorial or whatever while I’m working on something, again, workspace is a valuable commodity in my house. I would rather not have some of it taken up by my phone if I can avoid it. If I’m moving between different areas, like from the counter to the stove, or from the bathroom where I’m working on something to the basement where the water shut off and circuit breaker is, or maybe I have my hands full, or I’m up on a ladder, or maybe my hands are dirty and I don’t want to touch my phone, or maybe I don’t want to be touching my phone while I’m cooking because phones are pretty gross, etc. it could be nice to just have the instructions or or video right there in my glasses.

If the cameras are good enough, they might also be able to take the place of the head mounted magnifier I sometimes use while working on small things, I could just zoom in with the camera.

I used to work in a warehouse, we had rows and rows of racks full of pallets with boxes on them. When we were filling orders, we sometimes only needed one or two things out of a box, and so every time we pulled something out we’d have to print out a new label so we could tell at a glance how many things were in a box. With some sort of smart glasses we could have just had maybe a unique QR code on each box, and the inventory count just got updated. It may have saved us a bit of time and definitely would have saved a ton of labels, and we wouldn’t have needed the portable label printers we had which would have saved a bit of money as well.

When I first heard about them, I thought they sounded useful. I’m a photographer, and one of the challenges is not always having a camera handy when you need it, so the idea of a readily available camera for taking photos of birds, sunsets, landscapes etc, and the ability to use them as ear phones etc sounded kinda neat. I spoke to some vision impaired folk at my local parkrun who use them to help identify what they’re looking at, or read things they can’t read etc. This was in the early days, when I was still a bit naive about where they would go. To me, they sounded like nifty technology.

And then Meta cranked up the creepy spy factor, and people started doing really creepy things with them.

It shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did…

In Germany they’re called “Spannergläser” right translates to peeping Tom’s glasses. Heard that term after the first guys tried to wear and use them around public pool areas.

Seriously, who needs to record someone without the knowledge of the person being recorded?

Spies and influencers who want to record in places that don’t allow recordings come to mind. Like, besides your pervert case.

I should be the target audience. I have bad eyesight and I wear corrective lenses (i.e. glasses). Something like Meta glasses would, in theory, help me see by constantly showing me the world around me, not recording like to be viewed later, but only showing me what the cameras see in real-time.

Unfortunately, that product does not exist as such, and I won’t use the Meta glasses that way because they’re designed to be invasive, and I don’t use Meta products anyway. Also, my job literally has a rule against the pervert glasses, as I suspect many do, and many more will follow. While some people want to use the glasses, pretty much no one wants the glasses used on/around them.

There seems to be an advantage of having a camera that can be always pointing in the direction you’re looking, I know several metal detecting YouTube channels use them.

The glasses do have a light when recording. You have to do a hardware mod where you open it up break the light then put expoxy over the slot to remove it.

Most of the users are girls, mums/dads, influences who want to take videos from their POV. I’ve seen people posting videos playing with their kids and saying they like it because it lets them save the moment but still have two hands free to interact with their kid. I’ve seen youtubers do day in the life videos where they record it with the glasses.

I heard some blind people find them usefull, but else I can’t think of anyone else but creeps.