For the past two weeks, I’ve been using a new camera to secretly take photos and record videos of strangers in parks, trains, stores, and restaurants. (I promise it was in the name of journalism.) I wasn’t hiding the camera, but I was carrying it and no one noticed.
I was testing the recently released $300 Ray-Ban Meta glasses that Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire made in collaboration with the iconic eyewear maker. The high-tech glasses include a camera for taking photos and videos, as well as a set of speakers and microphones for listening to music and talking on the phone.
Glasses, Meta says, can help you “live in the moment” while sharing what you see with the world. For example, you can stream a concert live on Instagram while watching the show, instead of holding your phone. It’s a modest goal, but it’s part of a broader ambition in Silicon Valley to move computing from smartphone and computer screens to our faces.
Meta, Apple and Magic Leap have all promoted mixed reality headsets that use cameras to allow their software to interact with real-world objects. Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg posted a video on Instagram demonstrating how smart glasses could use AI to scan a shirt and help choose matching pants. Laptops could ultimately change the way we live and work, companies say. For Apple, which is set to launch its first high-tech glasses, the $3,500 Vision Pro headset, next year, the end goal is a pair of smart glasses that look good and do interesting tasks.
Over the past seven years, helmets have remained unpopular, largely because they are bulky and aesthetically off-putting. The minimalist design of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses represents what smart glasses could look like one day if they succeed (although older lightweight wearables, such as Google Glass from a decade ago and glasses the sunglasses launched by Snap in 2016 were failures). Elegant, lightweight and decidedly trendy, Meta glasses blend effortlessly into everyday life. No one – not even my editor, who knew I was writing this column – could distinguish them from ordinary glasses, and everyone was blissfully unaware that he was being photographed.
After wearing the Ray-Ban Meta glasses virtually non-stop this month, I was relieved to take them off. Although I was impressed by the comfortable and stylish design of the glasses, I felt bothered by the implications for our privacy. I also worry about how smart glasses may largely affect our ability to concentrate. Even when I wasn’t using any of the features, I felt distracted while wearing them. But the main problem is that glasses don’t do much that we can’t do with phones.
Meta said in a statement that privacy was a priority when designing the glasses. “We know that if we want to normalize smart glasses in everyday life, privacy must come first and be integrated into everything we do,” the company said.
I’ve worn these glasses and taken hundreds of photos and videos while doing all kinds of activities in my daily life – working, cooking, hiking, climbing, driving a car and riding a scooter – to assess the impact of smart glasses on us in the future. Here’s how it happened.
My first test with the glasses was wearing them in my bouldering gym, recording my maneuvers on the routes in real time and sharing the videos with my climbing buddies.
I was surprised to find that my climbing, overall, was worse than normal. While recording a climbing attempt, I fumbled with my footwork and fell. This was disappointing as I had already successfully climbed the same route. Perhaps the pressure of recording and broadcasting a smooth climb made it worse for me. After removing the glasses, I completed the course.
This feeling of distraction persisted in other aspects of my daily life. I had problems concentrating when driving a car or scooter. Not only was I constantly preparing for the opportunity to shoot video, but the reflection of other cars’ headlights was emitting a harsh blue strobe effect through the glasses’ lenses. Goals safety manual because Ray-Bans advise people to stay focused while driving, but they don’t mention headlight glare.
When I was working on a computer, glasses seemed unnecessary because there was rarely anything worth photographing on my desk, but part of my mind felt constantly preoccupied with the possibility.
Ben Long, a photography professor in San Francisco, said he was skeptical that Meta glasses help people stay present.
“If you have the camera with you, you’re not immediately in the present moment,” he said. “Now you ask yourself: is this something I can present and record? »
Privacy eroded
To let people know they’re being photographed, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses include a small LED light built into the right frame to indicate when the camera is recording. When a photo is taken, it will flash momentarily. When a video is recorded, it is on permanently.
While I’ve taken 200 photos and videos with these glasses in public, including on BART trains, on hiking trails, and in parks, no one has looked at the LED light or confronted me about it. And why would they? It would be rude to comment on a stranger’s glasses, let alone look at them.
The issue of widespread surveillance is not particularly new. The ubiquity of smartphones, doorbell cameras, and dashcams makes it likely that you will be recorded everywhere you go. But Chris Gilliard, an independent privacy expert who studied the effects of surveillance technologiessaid hidden cameras in smart glasses would most likely allow bad actors — like people who take sneaky photos of others in the gym — to do more harm.
“What these things do is they don’t make something possible that was impossible,” he said. “They make something easy that wasn’t so easy.”
Albert Aydin, a Meta spokesman, said the company takes privacy seriously and has designed security measures, including tamper detection technology, to prevent users from covering the LED light with tape.
In other mundane situations, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses affected me in strange ways. As I was about to cross a driveway in my neighborhood, I saw a car start to reverse. My immediate reaction was to hit the record button in case I needed to capture the driver acting irresponsibly. But he gave in appropriately and I walked across, sheepish.
Slice of life moments
Although the Ray-Ban Meta glasses didn’t make me feel more present or safer, they were effective at capturing a particular type of photo – life moments that I wouldn’t normally record because my hands would be worried.
With the glasses, I filmed a video of my corgi, Max, barking loudly to go out for a walk while I tied my shoes — a side of him that his Instagram followers don’t normally see. I recorded video of my dogs and my wife as we hiked a trail, which would normally be difficult to do with a smartphone while keeping your hands steady. While cutting up some leftover meat to make lunch, I recorded my Labrador, Mochi, looking at me with hungry eyes.
The images had a dreamy quality – the camera seemed to float as I moved. My wife and I agreed that we would carefully review the videos of our dogs. But even if these types of moments are truly valuable, that benefit likely won’t be enough to convince a large majority of consumers to buy smart glasses and wear them regularly, given the potential costs of losing privacy and the distraction.
However, it is easy to imagine certain applications that could allow smart glasses to become widespread one day. A holographic teleprompter displaying talking points in the corner of the eye during a presentation, for example, would be killer. Whether this product is ultimately developed by Meta or even Apple, which hopes to make smart glasses after its Vision Pro headset, that future doesn’t seem too far away.
