Google Shows Off Android XR Smart Glasses with In-Lens Display

I'm kind of anxious about checking the map when I'm riding a motorcycle in traffic. You can get away with much lower situational awareness in a car simply because you're far more predictable and not invisible.

Speaking of which... I'm still waiting for a bike helmet with a back-facing camera/HUD that is neither vaporware nor "smart" (read vendor-dependent and barely working), and doesn't suffer from basic usability mistakes. That would be infinitely more useful and probably easier to make than this.

Maps not so much, but the people actively watching TikTok or whatever while driving, yes

If they're listening to the instructions, nope. If they are interacting with the display and focussing on the mini map, yes.

Not anxiety by the way, just a healthy amount of distrust.

You're right, it's not much different at all. People have been walking around with headphones for decades, and the same prejudice existed early on when Bluetooth headsets were all the rage. XR glasses simply expand this to another sense.

Can it arguably be more dangerous? Sure. But we'll come up with more technology and regulation to minimize the dangers. And the prejudice will eventually go away as well.

As much as I think that everyone walking around with these things is unsettling in a dystopian way, transhumanism is inevitable, and this is just another step in that direction.

This is not comparable to your two examples which are passive, the new device requires active partisipation will be additionaly distracting in that there will be all of the "gotchas" of modern UI design demanding "engagement". Face it, this is an attempt to have everything a person sees and hears projected by a corporate entity....."real time threat awareness" and instant sales opotunintues, just look at anything and find out "how much™", .....offer price determined by pulse, pupil dialation, previous comments,buying power and purchases. good times

Wearing HELSTARs is a political statement now?

Some are likely to react in ways where there'll be more than just some discomfort. I know I wouldn't be happy to discover someone beaming video of my kids back to the servers of an ad tech company.

Also everyone who dresses differently. Or has different hair color.

And it will haunt the Apple efforts to get these worn advertising screens into the market as well.

Good.

Why would one pay for the privilege to have everything they see overlayed with advertisements and every micro-expression analyzed for even better ad targeting?

I wouldn’t use a smartphone (or a browser on my computer for that matter) if it weren’t routed through my private DNS blocking advertising and tracking.

Whenever I see how the internet looks like for normal people, I shudder in horror.

There's a UK show called Hunted where contestants go on the run and are chased by law enforcement.

It is amazing to see just how quickly they are found because of the all the CCTV cameras.

Two decades past, here in Australia, I worked on a proposal for a another party to develop uniform ubiquitous CCTV software infrastructure for the UK as part of a tender process.

The people I worked for literally tagged it in house as Panopticon.

Big brother social objections aside the one feature I like was ironing out the wrinkles on buses exchanging their most recent footage whenever they parked up at a stop or at lights within wireless range.

The driving intent, at theat time. as I was told, was to be sure to have useful footage survive in the event of another wave of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings

I parted ways not long after that initial period as I expected things to drift in the direction of "Well, now that we have this, how can we use it to increasingly track people other than actual terrorists?"

On top of that they got released more than 10 years ago. We have a new generation of users - I think (might be wrong thought) for gen Gen Z privacy is less of an issue and they are heavy users or tiktok and snapchat (comparing to millenials).

Original glasses looked also more futuristic - new one like raybans looks more like sunglasses so other people less aware about being recorded.

> even commercial ones like source code

I believe this is the most important argument in favor of local LLMs. There are industries where you can just send some info to OpenAI or Anthropic and just hope it will be safe there.

The public backlash was from apple fanboys and apple PR department. Some of internal apple data got leaked a while back and they talked about their PR plans which included seeding social media with "glasshole".