[HN Gopher] Google shows off Android XR smart glasses with in-le...
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Google shows off Android XR smart glasses with in-lens display
Author : tosh
Score : 40 points
Date : 2025-05-21 11:01 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.macrumors.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.macrumors.com)
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Smart Glasses 2: Revenge of the Glassholes
|
| Will it take off as a general consumer product this time?
| Probably, for some (unfortunately).
|
| It will create a whole new class of distracted people in traffic,
| that's for sure. Someone lost in a smartphone screen is at least
| visually recognisable ("Better look out for that smombie about to
| cross..."), but someone dutifully following Google Maps
| directions on one of these could actually look like they are
| aware of their surroundings, whilst their full attention is fixed
| on the little map widget.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Is that much different from people lost in their thoughts or
| focusing on their podcast ?
|
| As you point out, distracted people already exist, and new
| classes of them will appear every day. The problem exists and I
| don't want to minimize it, but from a driver's perspective the
| difference sounds minimal, and doesn't affect how you'll handle
| the situation (someone looking aware might not actually be)
| metalman wrote:
| This is not comparable to your two examples which are
| passive, the new device requires active partisipation will be
| additionaly distracting in that there will be all of the
| "gotchas" of modern UI design demanding "engagement". Face
| it, this is an attempt to have everything a person sees and
| hears projected by a corporate entity....."real time threat
| awareness" and instant sales opotunintues, just look at
| anything and find out "how much(tm)", .....offer price
| determined by pulse, pupil dialation, previous
| comments,buying power and purchases. good times
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I'd somewhat love to hear your thoughts on this crossing at
| one of the most busy crossing of Tokyo
|
| https://youtube.com/shorts/TvL2SR33XEA?si=F_fnbcvRGrizZ0rQ
|
| The shibuya crossing also has at least 2 giant screens,
| with sound, and have been there for decades now. All of
| them have camera, and they probably have been checking the
| effect of each of the ads since the screens have been
| setup.
|
| There's a lot to discuss I think.
| thenthenthen wrote:
| Any ppl never bump into eachother there ;)
| imiric wrote:
| You're right, it's not much different at all. People have
| been walking around with headphones for decades, and the same
| prejudice existed early on when Bluetooth headsets were all
| the rage. XR glasses simply expand this to another sense.
|
| Can it arguably be more dangerous? Sure. But we'll come up
| with more technology and regulation to minimize the dangers.
| And the prejudice will eventually go away as well.
|
| As much as I think that everyone walking around with these
| things is unsettling in a dystopian way, transhumanism is
| inevitable, and this is just another step in that direction.
| frankvdwaal wrote:
| I am curious, do you have the same anxieties about car drivers
| using maps applications to navigate?
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Maps not so much, but the people actively watching TikTok or
| whatever while driving, yes
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| What about people actively listning to podcasts?
| xnx wrote:
| Whatabout talking to a passenger? Looking at and touching
| a screen is significantly more distracting than listening
| to a podcast.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| If they're listening to the instructions, nope. If they are
| interacting with the display and focussing on the mini map,
| yes.
|
| Not anxiety by the way, just a healthy amount of distrust.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| I'm kind of anxious about checking the map when I'm riding a
| motorcycle in traffic. You can get away with much lower
| situational awareness in a car simply because you're far more
| predictable and not invisible.
|
| Speaking of which... I'm still waiting for a bike helmet with
| a back-facing camera/HUD that is neither vaporware nor
| "smart" (read vendor-dependent and barely working), and
| doesn't suffer from basic usability mistakes. That would be
| infinitely more useful and probably easier to make than this.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| > Revenge of the Glassholes
|
| We need to continue to collectively make anyone wearing these
| things uncomfortable.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Some are likely to react in ways where there'll be more than
| just some discomfort. I know I wouldn't be happy to discover
| someone beaming video of my kids back to the servers of an ad
| tech company.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| I assume with this stance you don't backup to icloud or
| google drive.
| Disposal8433 wrote:
| I don't but its irrelevant. Also it's not a backup
| anyway, but you should respect people around you anyway,
| it's basic politeness.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| We can't even agree on basic terms, so I dont think we
| can continue this conversation.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Nope. I use a combination of home NAS and S3 (for
| compressed photo archives).
| muppet9066 wrote:
| Hasn't it already happened? There are doorbell cameras,
| CCTV, dash cams, drones, and everyone using a phone is
| pointing a camera. Cameras are everywhere in public
| already.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Holding a phone up to film something is visibly different
| to wearing glasses which are effectively always on.
| Cameras are everywhere but there's an expectation that if
| I meet you in a private place or invite you into my home
| then you will not be recording everything. In the case of
| a glasshole there's no way to know if this expectation is
| being broken.
|
| I'm not sure why the distinction with having a dash cam
| on a public road needs to be pointed out again and again.
| muppet9066 wrote:
| Anyone carrying a phone can always be recording audio
| discretely and home assistant devices exist in private
| homes. These have already become commonly accepted risks
| to privacy in the same situations you've described. I
| think we as a society end up just trusting others to
| respect our privacy. That said, the glasses have
| advertised features like memory that aren't all that
| useful unless always on. If the glasses push to be always
| on, then there's definitely a risk that it could invade
| the privacy of others without the wearer's intent.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| > Anyone carrying a phone can always be recording audio
|
| They can and that's different than the capacity of the
| glasses we're talking about. Again there's a distinction
| here and I think a good faith discussion would avoid
| intentionally blurring these lines. If we are going to do
| that then my argument becomes against mandatory
| livestreaming of every visit to the toilet.
|
| > These have already become commonly accepted risks to
| privacy in the same situations you've described.
|
| We routinely ask people to leave their phones behind when
| entering e.g. concert halls or classrooms. Glasses
| overlap with something necessary for accessibility and
| can't be so easily removed.
|
| > I think we as a society end up just trusting others
|
| Who are "we as a society?" There are different cultures
| who will approach this differently. In the United States
| they ended up trusting one another not to shoot each
| other while in other societies they legislated against
| the casual carrying of firearms. We don't have to accept
| glassholes walking amongst us just because we accept that
| people have smartphones.
|
| > there's definitely a risk that it could invade the
| privacy of others without the wearer's intent.
|
| I was actually arguing with the assumption that this was
| a certain outcome of the technology.
| muppet9066 wrote:
| Avoiding phones in some classrooms and concert halls
| hasn't slowed adoption of cellphones, that's what I mean
| by society accepting the product and their privacy risks.
| Simply turning off cellphones is likely enough to stop
| glasses from being useful on their own as they tether to
| a phone. We have the same merging of accessibility device
| and recording device already with air pods which now can
| be used as a hearing aid and can record audio when
| tethered to a phone. With on device (on the phone) image
| processing and machine learning advances they may be able
| to address the privacy issues to most peoples
| satisfaction. The only point I've tried to make in this
| discussion is that I don't think the product is likely to
| fail due to privacy concerns anymore as we've watched our
| privacy steadily erode over the last couple decades this
| has become a much smaller concession than it once was.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| > that's what I mean by society accepting the product
|
| Yes, and gun control is what I mean by society not
| accepting a product. Your logic is that one product has
| been accepted so we must now accept this different
| product, but the logic doesn't hold when there are many
| products we reject.
|
| > Simply turning off cellphones is likely enough to stop
| glasses from being useful
|
| They will simply sync once reconnected to a phone and
| eventually they will have all of the telecommunicative
| capabilities of phones.
|
| > a hearing aid and can record audio when tethered to a
| phone
|
| I've already said that audio is qualitively different to
| video. I don't care if someone comes to my kid's birthday
| party and records them singing songs but I care if
| they're going to film them in the pool.
|
| > I don't think the product is likely to fail due to
| privacy concerns anymore as we've watched our privacy
| steadily erode
|
| It's strange to me that you frame it as an erosion of
| privacy while in the same breath campaigning for becoming
| a passive victim of that erosion win absolutely no desire
| to criticise what's happening to. It gives me a great
| pain in my heart to see that capitalism she democracy
| have so thoroughly failed the Western world that we have
| completely shed any illusion of agency in shaping society
| or the market to serve us rather than the other way
| around.
| tjpnz wrote:
| >I think we as a society end up just trusting others to
| respect our privacy.
|
| No. There are elements in society who can never be
| trusted and we can't lock them all up. I suspect it's no
| coincidence that Meta won't ship their glasses to
| countries which have the strictest laws designed to make
| it harder for said individuals. As a resident of one I
| hope it stays that way.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Exactly my feeling. In 2025 I no longer have the patience
| for American businesses telling me what my society needs
| to accept.
| muppet9066 wrote:
| Unscrupulous individuals are more likely to use cameras
| that are intended to be concealed to avoid suspicion
| rather than glasses that have a fortune in advertising to
| make people aware of what they are and what they do.
| These glasses company have tons of money to lose for
| mishandling user data. Meta's glasses are available in
| many countries considered to have strict privacy laws all
| around the world: (Canada, Germany, Sweden, etc.) :
| https://www.meta.com/help/ai-glasses/4961066940605960/
| numpad0 wrote:
| Wearing HELSTARs is a political statement now?
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Also everyone who dresses differently. Or has different hair
| color.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| What? That's an absurd misrepresentation of what I said.
| Having a different colour of hair is in no way comparable
| to filming me and my family and sending the footage back to
| an ad tech company in the US.
|
| I don't care about the appearance of the glasses--that's
| not what makes someone a "glasshole"--it's the behaviour.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| It took exactly one post for this term to come back. The word
| was invented by apple PR to ensure that this product didnt take
| off. Here it is again.
| sdoering wrote:
| And it will haunt the Apple efforts to get these worn
| advertising screens into the market as well.
|
| Good.
|
| Why would one pay for the privilege to have everything they
| see overlayed with advertisements and every micro-expression
| analyzed for even better ad targeting?
|
| I wouldn't use a smartphone (or a browser on my computer for
| that matter) if it weren't routed through my private DNS
| blocking advertising and tracking.
|
| Whenever I see how the internet looks like for normal people,
| I shudder in horror.
| izacus wrote:
| It's more interesting that somehow it didn't appear with Meta
| camera glasses which are very popular.
|
| Meta is fine with HN crowd it seems?
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| > It will create a whole new class of distracted people in
| traffic, that's for sure.
|
| Yes. Transparent glasses are much worse than looking down on
| your phone.
| dakiol wrote:
| I think the problem here is traffic and cars. Seems crazy to
| think that it's normalised to be in alert mode 100% of the time
| when out of your home because of cars. Every corner, every
| cross, I need to stop and double check for cars otherwise my
| life could end.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Sounds like the plan is an attempt to position Gemini as a more
| useful Siri-like assistant by giving it better input and output
| capabilities in the form of AR glasses
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| I'm wondering what convinced the management to try this idea gain
| after Google Glass failed as a commercial product.
| kuylar wrote:
| Putting Gemini in it.
| ncruces wrote:
| Google Glass development never really stopped. The enterprise
| editions where on sale for years. They were shelved around the
| time work on these translation glasses was announced.
| oldpersonintx2 wrote:
| oh come on, Google Glass was so early, it could never be
| expected to be anything but a hint of a tech demo. no one
| believed it was a "product"
| smegger001 wrote:
| because other companies have done it without it instantly
| triggering everyone that saw them. Snapchat has Spectacles and
| Facebook/RayBans have ReyBan-Meta and neither are having
| customers called glassholes and getting beaten for wearing head
| mounted cameras everywhere. honestly i think the reason is for
| whatever reason popular media demonized google glass as evil
| privacy invading spying device thus killing it in its infancy
| and ignored snapchat and facebook when they did the same thing.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| The public backlash was from apple fanboys and apple PR
| department. Some of internal apple data got leaked a while
| back and they talked about their PR plans which included
| seeding social media with "glasshole".
| smegger001 wrote:
| I wonder if there is a case that could be made against for
| inciting violence as there were people who were literary
| beaten for waring google glass.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Seeing Meta sell millions of them?
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| It will cost 10 times less.
| Disposal8433 wrote:
| Glass had a backlash when privacy still existed. Now we have
| the Rabbit or the AI Pin, and everyone tells their deepest
| secrets (even commercial ones like source code) to ChatGPT
| without thinking about what could go wrong.
|
| Even on HN we can see users saying that AI is better than a
| psychiatrist.
|
| If it is cheaper than a Meta VR thing, it could be as popular
| as the latest iPhone.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > even commercial ones like source code
|
| I believe this is the most important argument in favor of
| local LLMs. There are industries where you can just send some
| info to OpenAI or Anthropic and just hope it will be safe
| there.
| Disposal8433 wrote:
| That's why I'm not involved in the LLMs nowadays. I'm
| waiting for the whole thing to cool down, and when they
| have a real local and useful solution for sensitive or
| regulated industries, I may use it but I'm not in a hurry
| and I don't believe the FOMO around it.
|
| Its like Google Search. They sold a lot of books for a
| technology that you could learn in 5 minutes.
|
| The fact that I am not disgusted by those new glasses is
| worrying me more. Privacy is really dead outside my house
| and there is nothing I can do about it.
|
| At least it replaced every Google and Apple devices I own
| with Linux and custom OSes that I fully control, it gives
| some peace of mind as long as you remember to spend a few
| minutes to backup your stuff every week.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| I understand why you are not in a hurry but I'd like to
| offer a counter-argument. I have a machine powerful
| enough to experiment with local LLMs and interestingly
| enough at least some models are on a par with what OpenAI
| used to charge for (GPT4). It means I can experiment and
| see what these models are capable of, whether it makes
| sense to use them to solve my problem, and if not - why,
| and if anything can be done about it on my part. And
| because the API is the same, it's relatively easy.
|
| It's not necessary to be at the bleeding edge, two steps
| away is also fine, but today LLMs are just another tool
| in your toolbelt and I reached the conclusion it makes no
| sense to ignore them, in spite of how irritating the hype
| (or, sometimes, plain lies) can be.
| pzo wrote:
| On top of that they got released more than 10 years ago. We
| have a new generation of users - I think (might be wrong
| thought) for gen Gen Z privacy is less of an issue and they
| are heavy users or tiktok and snapchat (comparing to
| millenials).
|
| Original glasses looked also more futuristic - new one like
| raybans looks more like sunglasses so other people less aware
| about being recorded.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Meta Quest 3, Apple Vision Pro, Meta Ray-Ban camera glass,
| XREAL Air, Meta Orion. Google has to respond.
|
| No one wants to talk about how those headsets are used or how
| are usage breakdowns by regions, though.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| Your examples are the reason I asked. Whatever Meta was
| thinking the result was a flop in spite of billions spent on
| research and production. Apple halted the production of
| Vision Pro.
|
| So I'm very curious - what caused Google's CXOs to think they
| absolutely have to revive the dead horse everybody tries to
| resuscitate but nobody succeeds?
| cladopa wrote:
| I see that as a dystopian future. Google wants to model entire
| cities in real time, just like London with all the cameras
| everywhere, but for the profit of a private company and three
| letter agencies.
|
| It used to be that in a small village everyone knew what everyone
| else was doing. Now with cloud connected cameras it will be
| impossible to have privacy on cities. A google camera will see
| and follow you anywhere you go. They will recognise you, they
| will track your movement when you go out of reach of one camera
| into another.
|
| That is too much power and we should not give it to anyone,
| public or private.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It is not only London.
|
| CCTV is everywhere in UK.
| defrost wrote:
| Two decades past, here in Australia, I worked on a proposal
| for a another party to develop uniform ubiquitous CCTV
| software infrastructure for the UK as part of a tender
| process.
|
| The people I worked for literally tagged it in house as
| Panopticon.
|
| Big brother social objections aside the one feature I like
| was ironing out the wrinkles on buses exchanging their most
| recent footage whenever they parked up at a stop or at lights
| within wireless range.
|
| The driving intent, at theat time. as I was told, was to be
| sure to have useful footage survive in the event of another
| wave of:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings
|
| I parted ways not long after that initial period as I
| expected things to drift in the direction of "Well, now that
| we have this, how can we use it to increasingly track people
| other than actual terrorists?"
| stavros wrote:
| Yeah, I don't like the "it's OK to have tyranny for
| everyone if it means we prevent a few deaths a decade"
| choice that's constantly being made.
| threeseed wrote:
| There's a UK show called Hunted where contestants go on the
| run and are chased by law enforcement.
|
| It is amazing to see just how quickly they are found because
| of the all the CCTV cameras.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I can imagine.
|
| Many years ago I use to regularly be in southern UK,
| between London and Cardiff, I think never saw a bad parked
| car at least in the city center, exactly because there are
| always a bunch of cameras around.
|
| No way to try out one's luck regarding if a patrol will
| ever happen to cross that street.
| Eavolution wrote:
| I wish we could just ban CCTV cameras in public areas (banned
| for use by private or government entities), as the privacy
| tradeoff is immense.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| This sounds to me like the most straightforward trying to solve
| social problems with (blocking) technological solutions.
|
| You'll only stop that future by securing a democratic
| government and have it protect citizens with solid privacy
| protection. Fighting technology is an already lost battle (we
| already have the means at scale)
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Honestly we are already there with all the doorbell cameras
| people have.
| dvh wrote:
| 1. Ok, the subtitles are in the lady's bust area, does that mean
| that glassholes 2.0 will look down there when they talk with
| someone?
|
| 2. The popup on the bottom right corner "Gemini start translate"
| is black on top of light background, does that mean that these
| new glasses can display dark on top of light background? I
| thought this was impossible with current technology. Or was it
| faked like magic leap faked the jumping whale demo?
| dakiol wrote:
| How they usually address the fact that 50% of their target market
| is already wearing glasses? Would they just ignore that 50% in
| their first iteration and then sell customised smart glasses ?
| andybak wrote:
| I always wonder this. I was in the target market for Magic Leap
| / Apple Vision Pro but I never considered buying either because
| of (among other reasons) the extra hassle of prescription
| inserts (both for me and for guests who would want to try
| them).
|
| I presume someone has done the maths - but it's always killed
| my interest in these form factors.
| muppet9066 wrote:
| At Google io, the presenter commented they have prescription
| lenses in the pair they were wearing
| avrionov wrote:
| This was addressed in the presentation. The are partnering with
| eyewear brands starting with Gentle Monster and Warby Parker.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Aren't these just the xreal aura's? I like AR glasses, but I
| don't really want a camera in them. Especially because of the
| glasshole effect.
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