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 <i>then</i> someone will start selling a pair through CrowdSupply which are truly open source.<p>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 software is there already, apparently <a href="https://github.com/Mentra-Community/MentraOS" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Mentra-Community/MentraOS</a>
Why wait?<p>Meta Ray-Ban - already hacked by p0pcycle<p>Rokid Glasses - rooted firmware <a href="https://github.com/jaskier-os/client-glasses" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jaskier-os/client-glasses</a><p>Google Glass Explorer Edition - officially supported root access
Unless you can build the OS from source, you don't really control it.<p>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<p>this is very true, but it also has a huge FOSS app ecosystem and highly polished FOSS apps.<p>I've recently been having Codex patch closed source apps making them work offline and greatly reducing their permissions and it works really well.<p><a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.getatoms.android">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.getatoms.a...</a><p><a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hybridcalisthenics.app">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hybridcali...</a>
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.
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> without any ads<p>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.
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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?)<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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 think the term you're looking for is HMD (Head Mounted Display).
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
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.
Would be a cool combo with an EliteBoard G1a.
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
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.
Aren't they usually marketed as XR 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
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.<p>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.
I feel like you could retroactively apply this line of argumentation to smartphones: "don't buy a smartphone"<p>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.
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.<p>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 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>much</i> more visible.<p>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.<p>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.
You're right, we should stop innovating entirely, because bad people and slippery slope fallacies exist in the world.<p>...sorry but that ain't happening.
Making the world a dystopia isn't "innovation".<p>Sorry state of things indeed.
> innovating<p>Innovate what, exactly? The demise of democracy? Authoritarian rule? Technology innovation ain't societal progress, and we should aim for the latter.
> You're right, we should stop innovating entirely, because bad people and slippery slope fallacies exist in the world.<p>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.
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 <i>is</i> 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.<p>[1] <a href="https://bdvorak.com/blog/tech-is-disrespectful/" rel="nofollow">https://bdvorak.com/blog/tech-is-disrespectful/</a>
> parasitic technologies<p>Great turn or phrase. (And/or, great company name. Probably both :)
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
A person from 1800 seeing a video of today's New York city would call it dystopian and the work of the Devil.
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:<p><a href="https://www.formswim.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.formswim.com/</a><p>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.
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.<p>I think this was the same situation last year too.
I recently bought something that might qualify as AR glasses: a new old stock Google Glass XE-C.<p>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 (<a href="https://github.com/zakwilson/OsmGlass/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zakwilson/OsmGlass/</a>).
I'm personally looking forward to AR glasses that can block outdoor ads, like billboards, etc.
I love the style of this site. Makes me want to redo my own site like it's an 80s BBS.
> Pop-up windows were a plague in the 90s and early 2000s, and remained that way until browsers started blocking them by default.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Even the cookie notifications are rife with dark patterns, making it difficult to get to the option with minimal necessary cookies.
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.<p>Or when you're putting something back together and you end up with two screws left over.<p>Or if you want to see your friends' annotations in the book you're reading.<p>We gave control over the web to third parties. We can have nice things again if we just stop doing that.
C'mon man. AR glasses and phones can be used the exact same way.<p>I'd rather read articles on an AR display than a little 6.6 inch screen.<p>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.<p>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.
>All this leads me to ask, what actual incentive (aside from short term conveniences) would I have to buy an AR device?<p>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.<p>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<p>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.<p>This was in a time where we were the surveillance web was just starting to really ramp up around the 2010s<p>Of course, the massive government corporate surveillance state dashed any hopes of being able to do any of this with human dignity.<p>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.<p>Short of an overhaul of human society, I don’t see the kind of technological future that we all wanted happening<p>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
Awkward read that seems like a personal issue for the author and it absolutely doesn't apply to the general populace.<p>I'd welcome AR glasses - it would mean looking at my phone less. The contextual information and HUDs are a net gain.
How many wearing those will be unwittingly participating in yet another (Niantic) Pokemon Go mapping experiment?<p>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.
I'm holding out for Daemon operative glasses. :)<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(novel)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(novel)</a>
This is a pointless rant against something that hasn't happened (yet)<p>They even say "if it becomes mainstream" and then argue as if it has. Total clickbait
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.
Sold! Buying AR glasses before ads get there! :D
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)...
Buy AR glasses and use them to filter out ads.
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.
mainly before the sponsor come out
This author understands neither AR technology, nor consumer electronics.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I can also guarantee with complete certainty that any sort of "neural implant" technology will one day be serving ads directly into your brain.
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…
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Seems a very ableist pov. Pun not intended.
Scrolled down to find the Bluesky/Mastodon links, found them both.<p>Do these people think that you can stop a technology be telling people to not use it?<p>"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".<p>"Do not use LLMs, they are just bad".<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.