Back when wearables were new, I contemplated getting one for face recognition. Not for creepy reasons, but because I am “faceblind”, and recognizing people I should know and getting a name for them would be extremely helpful.

And no, I would not use meta glasses for that, first, because they from Zuck, and second, because the control of this are out of my hand. The system I wanted back then only had local processing, and no data hoarding.

I personally think there’s a separate discussion to be had, between

“Who would use glasses embedded camera tech.”

Vs.

“Who would use Facebook glasses .”

It’s the same as XR tech. Can it potentially be very cool? Sure!

But in the hands of one of the most evil and soulless corporations this side of hell? They offer a touch of novelty to some users in exchange for that user ultimately being exploited and used for unconsenting intelligence gathering on behalf of Facebook and whomever it has clandestine deals with.

Otherwise in the case of these glasses, they don’t need to be a commercial success: They’ve got people doing terrible and stupid things. Which gets people talking. Which trends. Which maek stonk go ups.

I got a pair of them a little over a year ago for filming myself skateboarding when the homies aren’t around to help film. It’s cool to see from a first person perspective but the novelty kinda wore off and I rarely use them now. I occasionally bring them out on nature tours to film cool shots of swimming in natural pools right up to waterfalls. I’ve found the best use cases are when being hands-free is important for the shot. I don’t like wearing them in public places unless I forget my other sunglasses. The hands-free audio for phone calls is kinda cool, oh!! I’ve also done a video chat with my SO while going through her boxes in a storage unit on the other side of the country so she could tell me what to bring home. That was super helpful actually. But yeah, overall they are definitely going to be misused in awful ways by creeps a whole lot more than they’ll get used for useful stuff like this so I am not advocating for their existence. Much like AI, people simply can’t be trusted with having this tech.

Honestly, I have no problem with personal surveillance (sousveillance). It’s a shame that companies like Meta made it weird.

I wear secret cameras when I go to protests, for example, because I want to make sure to capture police misconduct without running around with a phone in my hand.

Thanks to Meta, now I have to hide this from everyone, because people like you will assume I’m a pervert.

People that regularly have their rights violated by the police and need to record all their interactions

When I was a teenager, I read the Ender series by Orson Scott Card. In one of the sequels, you meet a character named Olhado, who didn’t have functioning natural eyes and had to have a synthetic alternative implanted to be able to see. The implant included a recording device, and this was touted as being useful for settling disputes.

The desire for minimalist recording devices could come from a place of innocence, even a penchant for justice. But of course anyone being able to get them is problematic, with the prevalence of those inclined to disregard consent.

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.

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…

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.

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.

In Germany they’re called “Spannergläser” that 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.

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.

I’ve seen them start to get used on construction sites by inspectors. It is the modern equivalent of strapping a GoPro to your hardhat.

You can use them just for the audio like listening to audiobooks, handsfree and for prescription glasses at the same time. No need to use the video stuff.