I don’t think it’s paranoid to acknowledge that fashion trends come from relatively few designers and editors, whom could relatively easily be motivated to sync up mass aesthetic sensibilities with engineer constraints.
Luxottica has a monopoly on nearly the entire industry, manufacturing (and even directly retailing) nearly every brand of glasses you can name, and they’re both heavily invested in Meta and their own engineering efforts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxottica https://www.essilorluxottica.com/en/brands/smart-eyewear-sol...
Last time i was following this concept space with any real attention, they had a pretty sizeable inventory of (perhaps a previous version, maybe these are the same equipment) without any clear path to consumers.
Now with the hand waviness of 'preferring' local model they seem to believe that this will make people want to wear something significantly worse than the military 'BCD' frames.
For a company which is practically only marketed to 'the youths' this doesn't seem at all realistic. The primary users of the company's services dont actually purchase the devices they use to access snap, the 'parental units' are the source of funds.
Add to that, the fact that this kind of streaming video capture and broadcast is becoming very concerning for many of the governments when it involves non age-gated and positively-IDentifiable users, and the road to commercial levels of production is getting bunpier, not smoother.
Best-of-luck guys; but why is this year better for this product than before?
Do we really want to live in a world where people have hidden cameras strapped to their faces?
Normal people don’t want this, it’s creepy
1. If I'm wearing smart glasses, whether I'm filming or using it for something else is nobody's business. I paid for it, I can do whatever I want with my computer glasses.
2. The fact that someone wearing them can snap my picture and unveil my entire history with one glance is terrifying. If they don't, the company can still do it "accidentally".
3. You can't have one without the other. So i hope these things crash and burn.
On the one hand, this solves the problem of smart glasses being too stealthy to tell when you're being filmed/broadcast in public by someone wearing them; where Meta's glasses look like Wayfarers, these look a lot more distinctive.
On the other hand, the reason these won't be too stealthy is because they look like those standard-issue glasses the US army was know to give out (upon looking it up: S9 glasses), and those have a reputation.
On the third, mutant, hand, I don't have a fashion sense and I really don't care about smart glasses as a technology, so maybe I'm the wrong person to judge this thing on is merits.
You mustn't be smart to buy 'smart glasses'..
I can only hope there is amazing work being done with this kind of tech in industries I know little of. Surgeons, precise mechanical engineers… they’d surely benefit from this stuff and have the reason to pay for it. But as a consumer product, nope.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRBDLE06qNY&t=210
"What does this monstrosity cost?"
...
All I see is people giving them free feedback. So I would expect Snap to reduce the frames and the bulkiness of these glasses in the next version and finally, the price.
always with the thick ugly frames