TL;DR: you now need to pay a $20/month “meta premium” subscription to use a 100% offline feature that runs on your own malware-ridden smartglasses.
If you don’t subscribe, you can use the feature that is already included in the hardware that you already paid for 3 hours each month
The now-paywalled feature boosts the voice of the speaker in front of you, something that even low-end ANC earphones are doing now. 5 minutes of free usage per day is basically nothing.
good! hopefully this will discourage everyone who bought them from using them, so they just sit in a drawer somewhere or get recycled instead of spying on unwitting people, and meta will fail to make back the huge amounts of money they’ve invested in tech that most people don’t want 😌
It’s funny, I would love to some have the novel tech they developed (HUD / display built into glasses since I’m wearing them anyways). The problem, as usual, is corps taking the piss with prices and profit then spying on you and everyone around you non-stop anyways…
I would 100% be open to some HUD glasses delivered with a FOSS OS that works completely offline and/or via your phone (but still offline). But that’s seriously wishful thinking given our corporate and political overlords
Yah, like videos or guides on screen whilst I have my hands full soldering or something seems like a great application.
I can’t think of anything I would want to have pop up in my view. I have a phone to hand all day, and the notifies me of important things.
Can you think of anything that you actually want so see constantly or so immediately you can’t pull a phone out of your pocket?
As someone with auditory processing disorder, the only thing i want is real-time closed captions of whoever is talking to me.
This, this is a really good answer. Thanks for bringing it up.
Oh that would be nice.
Yeah that and where sounds are coming from
IRL subtitles is a great idea
I think directions while walking would be better than carrying and looking down at a phone.
How fast do you walk that you need to constantly check? You can also have you phone all out instructions for the next turn.
I’d rather just have that overlay like Google already has for walking instead of pulling out my phone every few intersections or having it loudly announce that I’m a tourist to everyone in earshot.
Dude, you asked for examples of what people might find useful and now you’re just shitting on all of them.
For me, this doesn’t solve anything. This is looking for something to fit tech in.
You can already do this with your phone, and it isn’t like checking your phone whilst walking is going to kill you or someone else (unlike using your phone whilst driving).
You can also use the sign posts around you, my city has more than enough for people walking to get where the need, or at least the rough area.
You can also use headphones for the verbal call outs.
Another alternative would be a smart watch. Loads have maps or bread crumb style maps.
The real answers have been for more disability or accessibility not seeing Google maps constantly while walking.
Big cities have started putting lighted crosswalk indicators on the ground because people are so glued to their phones they don’t see them at eye level. So yes, people are stupid enough to walk into traffic while looking at a phone. Also, it is really obvious to others when you’re navigating with a phone. Scammers realize you’re not from the area and now you’re a target because you look like a tourist.
Yeah, and the dork glasses will most definitely won’t give any weird vibes.
Anyway, on an entirely different topic, have you ever heard the term glasshole?
Unless you’re actively looking for them, the raybans aren’t going to stand out as smart glasses.
Christ, I’m not here to defend meta or the assholes walking around harassing women, I’m saying there is a potential use for AR glasses.
Cycling navigation might be a useful feature. I don’t have a phone mount for my bike and worry about the risks of damage if I did mount one.
As someone who has used their phone and had a major accident on it with the phone mounted. I will never go with smart glasses, they were the first thing that I noticed was smashed up. My phone survived(mostly) despite the bike being a complete write off, that will happen when getting hit by a kayak at 50kmh.
I had a Quadlock mount and just their sticker mount on the phone, you can get cases for popular phones though. I now use a Garmin computer for my riding.
Is noone questioning getting hit with a 50kmh kayak while biking? Just me?
Hahaha, in brief. cycling out from my old seaside village, getting to the crest of a very steep hill(just shy of 20%) and get over taken by a pickup on a blind corner, thankfully no traffic coming the other way, but hit the downhill part and it is fast 80kmh speed limit down a country lane with 2 lanes of traffic. I hit about 70kmh, and the pickup is pulling away slowly.
Then the kayak shaped missile launches out of the bed as it hadnt been secured properly. Hits the road in front of me, I try to dodge, but it slides across like it is homing in on me. On the brakes as much as I can be in the small window I had to react and drop some speed before it clobbers the front of my bike. The rest I am sure you can imagine as a bike comes to a sudden stop and I dont.
The thing that keeps me from mounting my phone to my bike is, I’ve read, that the vibration from the bike can damage the camera in the phone.
Also, how do you get hit with a kayak on a bike?
I never had any issues with the vibrations causing damage. Would definitely be something to consider, as I can see the reasoning about it damaging something like the zoom functionality. Mine was on a out front mount so maybe that helped reduce it?
As for the kayak incident, I posted it in replay to someone else, but here is the story:
Hahaha, in brief. cycling out from my old seaside village, getting to the crest of a very steep hill(just shy of 20%) and get over taken by a pickup on a blind corner, thankfully no traffic coming the other way, but hit the downhill part and it is fast 80kmh speed limit down a country lane with 2 lanes of traffic. I hit about 70kmh, and the pickup is pulling away slowly.
Then the kayak shaped missile launches out of the bed as it hadnt been secured properly. Hits the road in front of me, I try to dodge, but it slides across like it is homing in on me. On the brakes as much as I can be in the small window I had to react and drop some speed before it clobbers the front of my bike. The rest I am sure you can imagine as a bike comes to a sudden stop and I dont.
Following recipes. These days I print them out because it’s a pain constantly washing your hands to check the next step on the phone. But I’m not buying smart glasses just that. My normal glasses are expensive enough already.
For following a recipe, could you not just increase lock timer on your phone? I am also a terrible cook, and a male, so I constantly wash my hands when handling food(I am that meme).
Invariably it’s having to scroll that’s the issue and you don’t want to be cross contaminating via your shiny black mirror.
I’d pay good money for glasses that displayed a grey rectangle over real life ads.
Possibly the only reason I could see to invest in them, but I live in a country that isn’t completely plastered in ads(yet).
I think the number of comments below you show the uses of glasses like that. I really think they would a lot of people who are disabled etc. For me they would really help me with some of my memory issues, especially since i’m looking to have a career in a genre of music where’s it’s frowned upon to have sheet notes
And I asked because I am ignorant about some of them. I also think a lot of what has been posted has been looking for a problem, not solving something.
Needing Google maps when walking? Is honestly a terrible reason. Phones, sign posts, smart watches all already solve this.
Someone just posted about closed captions when people are talking to them due to a disability, that’s a really good reason to have some kind of smart glasses.
For your situation, I don’t think smart glasses are really the answer, and are more of a band-aid. The real answer in my mind is using the sheet notes and getting the stigma changed(but I understand that is a lot, lot, lot harder than just getting smart glasses).
Yeah, I also try a lot to break the stigma. But I think a lot of people are ingrained in their ways and tradition and it takes more time or effort to see past it. It would also help to get a type of Shazam for the tune that’s playing to know what sheets to play too.
In any case, fair play to you for recognising there are some uses that could enable people.
Yea breaking stigmas is always the most uphill battle. I know it is not the same, but you see a lot of resistance to better tech in cycling. Things like disc brakes which are just better(outside of the tiny minority of cases) having so much fight against them.
I will say i am pretty opposed to the tech in many normal cases. Especially as it just seems like such a massive privacy nightmare at best. Or just shoe horning in tech for no real reason. I do think that everyone is already so in grossed in tech(I know I am a lot of the time) that they forget to just look around them and take in the world, and I think that smart glasses are that tipping point of going to far for most people.
I am happy to see that some really good use cases have been brought up, I am not all knowing I would in fact call me ignorant about a lot of things as I can only know what I know. But almost every good(even great) reason I have read has been based around improving life and interactions for people with disabilities which I can honestly get behind.
They’d still have the issue if non consensual “filming” though, unless it was a camera free hud.
I’m a huge nerd, so I’d love a HUD like the B movie Sight Extended, gamifying my life to motivate me to mow the lawn and clean and wear pants. Sadly it seems the corps and gov will just use all this stuff to track and harvest the data from our every word/thought/blink and monetize every bit of it they can. Will likely end up more like the ad dreams from Ready Player One where ads are 90% of your vision, and they will only be used by creepy creepers for creeping.
I always thought it would be cool if you could just leave AR notes lying around. Like put a digital note reminder on the fridge. Or a cute meme or joke somewhere your partner would find it. Or an IRL message forum that only exists at a specific location, you can’t access it remotely. I dunno how you could implement that, but it would be interesting.
Subscriptions for offline features should be completely illegal. In fact Meta is probably already technically illegal.
If we lived in functional democracies most large multinationals would’ve been split up a long time ago, including Meta.
Instead we live in a grey area of plutocratic corporate dictatorship.
This is the kind of enshitification thats good for society.
Fuck these privacy invading creep goggles. I hope they continue to make them worse to use and posses
Garbage in - garbage out
Lol.
This should be in “leopards at my face.” They didn’t care about the impact of their carless decisions, and now they are getting screwed.
their carless decisions,
Idk if they was a tacit reference or accidental, but…
I bout the bool and.couldn’t get far in it. It made me sick.
Pretty sure the author nailed it, but I hit a paywall before I could copy it.
Anyways:
The only plausible explanation is they licensed this feature, expected huge sales to cover the license, and now can’t.
I don’t think they have licensed it per use, it was likely a flat fee and now they’re desperate to recoup it. They can’t do it by sales, so it’s monthly fees.
It might not even be this directly, but some other license and this is just where they can squeeze consumers. They might have even just picked what gets used the most
These things are very clearly just used for data collection for AI training. Making the users offset the cost is just bonus.
beginning of the end for yet another set of AR glasses
beginning of the end? i haven’t even seen the beginning of the beginning!
When did these come out? Wow, that was a steep enshitification slope.
Aren’t you supposed to wait for something to be widely adopted before you enshittify it?
I get long-term enshittification in pursuit of short term Line Must Go Up but I feel like this would significantly impede it even in the short term.
Kinda reeks of Meta being in financial trouble.
They’ve sold something like 10 million of these things, probably more.
We can do something about it. The same way we shut down google glass, make them socially unacceptable. Ridicule anyone you know who owns a pair, loudly point them out when you see them in public, etc. Bring back “glasshole”.
Source? It took Apple over a year to sell 1 million iPhones originally and there have been 5 million Steam Decks sold total IIRC. I would doubt they have sold 10 million glasses in a few months.
Be careful with that though, last time people with legitimate vision assisting technologies were attacked along with people wearing Google glass.
Yeah I haven’t been able to verify this claim. Closest I’ve come is about 7 million units sold and that was a year or more ago.
It doesn’t look like this was a year ago, it looks like the 7 million claim is total as of this first quarter of this year. Even still I’m not sure I totally believe that they managed to sell 5 million in the last year.
I think I didn’t make it clear but as of 2025 they sold 7 million units. There’s conflicting information about whether they sold 7 million pairs in 2025 and more in 2023/2024 which could equal 10 million pairs though. But I haven’t found anything yet that says they’ve sold 10 million pairs in plain language.
https://thenextweb.com/news/meta-smart-glasses-privacy-crisis-apple-google-snap
Everything I am seeing says 7 million total globally as of the first quarter of this year. Which is still quite a bit more than I thought they would’ve sold.
Meta’s finances must be in the shitter to be enshittifying a premium product.
Zuck is fucking desperate. He’s grabbing hold onto anything he thinks might make money right now. Tossing more and more money at the current Mets problem to try to force himself to relevancy.
People think mush is a loser but it’s clearly zuck that is barely invited anywhere.
What, were they too popular before? lol
Finding ways to make an awful product even worse.
So they’re killing their product before it even launches
Anyone dumb enough to buy these is going to have a rough time finding any sympathy for it.
