{"id":244414,"date":"2025-09-21T17:55:17","date_gmt":"2025-09-21T17:55:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/244414\/"},"modified":"2025-09-21T17:55:17","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T17:55:17","slug":"we-need-to-talk-about-smart-glasses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/244414\/","title":{"rendered":"We Need to Talk About Smart Glasses"},"content":{"rendered":"

With any new device category comes a whole host of novel and sometimes exhaustingly complex questions. Smartphones<\/a>, for example, no matter how mundane they seem right now, are still nagging us with existential quandaries. When should we use them? How should we use them? What in God\u2019s name happens to us when\u00a0we use them, which, last I checked, is literally all the time?<\/p>\n

These are important questions, and most of us, even if we\u2019re not spending all day ruminating on them, tackle the complexity in our own way, setting (or resetting) social norms for ourselves and other people as we trudge along. The only thing is, in my experience, we tend to ask these questions mostly in retrospect, which is to say after the cat (or phone<\/a>, or smartwatch<\/a>, or earth-shattering portal into the online world) is out of the proverbial bag. It\u2019s easy to look back and say, \u201cThat was the time we should have thought about this,\u201d and when I put Meta\u2019s new smart glasses with a screen on, I knew that the time, for smart glasses in particular, was now\u2014like, right f**king now.<\/p>\n

\"Ray\u00a9 James Pero \/ Gizmodo <\/p>\n

In case you missed it, Meta finally unveiled the Meta Ray-Ban Display<\/a>, which are its first smart glasses with an in-lens display. I flew out to Meta headquarters for its annual Connect conference<\/a> to try them, and the second I put them on, it was clear: these are going to be big. It probably seems silly from the outside to make a declaration like that. We have screens everywhere all the time\u2014in our hands, on our wrists, and sometimes, regrettably, in our toasters<\/a>. Why would smart glasses be any different? On one hand, I get that skepticism, but sometimes function isn\u2019t the issue; it\u2019s form. And when it comes to smart glasses, there is no other form like it.<\/p>\n

Meta\u2019s Ray-Ban Display aren\u2019t just another wearable. The screen inside them opens up an entirely new universe of capabilities. With these smart glasses and Meta\u2019s wild new \u201cNeural Band<\/a>,\u201d a wristband that reads the electrical signals in your arm and translates them to inputs, you\u2019re able to do a lot of the stuff you normally do on your phone. You can receive and write messages, watch Reels on Instagram, take voice calls and video calls, record video and take pictures, and get turn-by-turn navigation. You can even transcribe conversations that are happening in real time. You\u2019re doing this on your face in a way that you\u2019ve never done it before\u2014discreetly and, from my experience, fairly fluidly.<\/p>\n

If there were any boundaries between you and a device, Meta\u2019s Ray-Ban Display are closing them to a gap that only an iPhone Air<\/a> could slide through. It\u2019s incredibly exciting in one way, because I can see Meta\u2019s smart glasses being both useful and fun. The ability to swipe through a UI in front of my face by sliding my thumb around like some kind of computer cursor made of meat is wild and, at times, actually thrilling. While not everything works seamlessly yet, the door to smart glasses supremacy feels like it\u2019s been swung wide open. You are going to want a pair of these smart glasses whether you know it or not. These are going to be popular, and as a result, potentially problematic.<\/p>\n

\"metaMeta\u2019s \u201cNeural Band\u201d looks as discrete as the glasses. \u00a9 James Pero \/ Gizmodo <\/p>\n

We may have a solid grasp on where and when we\u2019re supposed to use phones, but what happens when that \u201cphone\u201d in question becomes perfectly discreet, and the ability to use it becomes almost unnoticeable to those around us? When I use a smartphone, you can see me pick it up\u2014you know there\u2019s a device in my hand. When I use Meta\u2019s Ray-Ban Display, however, there\u2019s almost no indication. Yes, there\u2019s a privacy light that tells outside people that a picture or video is being taken, but there\u2019s also less than 2% light leakage through the lens, meaning you can\u2019t tell when the screen inside the glasses is on. I certainly couldn\u2019t tell when I watched others use them. It\u2019s as ambient as any ambient computing<\/a> I\u2019ve witnessed so far.<\/p>\n

I talked to Anshel Sag<\/a>, a principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy who covers the wearable market, and he says the privacy framework around technology like this is still in flux.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are still very much in the infancy of the smart glasses, AI wearable, and AR privacy and etiquette era,\u201d he said. \u201cI think that the reality is that having a wearable with a camera on your face is going to change things, and there are going to be places where these things are banned explicitly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of those environments, Sag said, are private areas like bathrooms or locker rooms, but it could extend beyond just places where you might catch a glimpse of someone naked. Driving, for example, is a major question. Meta\u2019s Ray-Ban Display have navigation built in, and while the company tells me that the feature is designed for walking right now, it\u2019s not actually preventing anyone from using its smart glasses in the car. Instead, it will provide a warning before you do so by detecting what speed you\u2019re moving at. Other companies like Amazon<\/a> seem not to have even thought that navigating on smart glasses while driving could be a safety hazard at all. Early reports indicate that Amazon is plowing forward, making smart glasses that are specifically designed for its delivery drivers to use in a car.<\/p>\n

\"Ray\u00a9 James Pero \/ Gizmodo <\/p>\n

While regulators like the NHTSA have issued warnings about people using VR headsets while driving (yes, people were actually doing that<\/a>), it hasn\u2019t, according to my research or knowledge, addressed the impact of smart glasses, which are much more likely\u2014especially if they become widespread\u2014to enter the equation while driving. I reached out to the NHTSA for comment, but have not yet received a response.<\/p>\n

Privacy concerns shouldn\u2019t just stem from the form factor, either. You also have to think about the company that\u2019s making the thing you\u2019re wearing on your face all the time and whether it has shown to be a good steward of your data and privacy. In Meta\u2019s case? Well, without going into an entirely separate diatribe, I think<\/a> it could do<\/a> a lot better<\/a>. And other companies that are also in hot pursuit of screen-clad glasses, like Google? Well, they haven\u2019t been much better<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And makers of smart glasses shouldn\u2019t be surprised if, when these things wind up on people\u2019s faces, they get some shit for it. Google Glass,<\/a> which came out in 2013, may seem like a different age, and in a lot of ways it is (people\u2019s expectations for privacy are almost nonexistent now), but we also haven\u2019t had to confront the idea of pervasive camera-clad wearables in a long time, so who\u2019s to say things have really changed? Sag says, while he expects some backlash, it may not be like the Glasshole days of yore.<\/p>\n

\"Meta\u00a9 James Pero \/ Gizmodo <\/p>\n

\u201cI think there will be some backlash, but I don\u2019t think it\u2019s gonna be as bad as Google Glass,\u201d he says. \u201cGoogle Glass had such an invasive appearance. You know, it didn\u2019t really look normal, so it really caught people\u2019s attention more. And I think that\u2019s really what has made these classes more successful, is that they\u2019re just inherently less intrusive in terms of appearance.\u201d<\/p>\n

I may not be an industry analyst, but I agree with Sag. I\u2019m not sure there really will be a category-ending backlash like we saw back in the Google days, and a part of me doesn\u2019t want there to be. As I mentioned, I got a chance to use Meta\u2019s Ray-Ban Displays, and the idea all but knocked my socks off. These are the smart glasses that anyone interested in the form factor has been waiting for. What I really want is to be able to live in a world where we can all use them respectfully and responsibly, and one where the companies that are making them give us the same responsibility and respect back. But in my experience, the only way to get toward a more respectful, harmonious world is to try everything else first, and in this case, the first step might be your next pair of Ray-Bans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With any new device category comes a whole host of novel and sometimes exhaustingly complex questions. Smartphones, for…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":244415,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[340,126450,47709,38650,158,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-244414","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-meta","9":"tag-meta-connect","10":"tag-meta-ray-bans","11":"tag-smart-glasses","12":"tag-technology","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115243576929860383","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244414\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}