From using various VR systems, a hololens, and reading reviews of the vision pro I really feel like hand gestures are a bad way to interact with AR systems. They might work in a pinch (heh) but some sort of small controller that can act as a pointer and has a button or two is superior in every way.
It's interesting that meta went through the effort of bundling an accessory but stuck with hand gestures anyway.
6dof input from hand gestures is a killer feature but it has to be rock solid. So far only controllers can do it but it's getting much better every year.
Haptic feedback, discrete buttons and precise analog input from controllers are also very important. The downside of controllers is that your hands are full and it's just not feasible for an all day wearable.
Hopefully someone figures out a good compromise be it rings or gloves or whatever.
My killer feature will be a keyboard (/mouse) in a wristband(s), which comes along with, or nearby 6dof (also worthy, but not a personal grail).
Electromyography is an awesome technology, among other reasons, because it can (or will) detect neural signals below the activation (movement) threshold, meaning you should be able to train yourself to type without moving your fingers. A viable way to thought control without the invasive aspects of other approaches.
Back in the nineties, I said the computer user fifty years from then would look like a hippy. Headband (neural interface), sunglasses (I thought monitor, but AR is cooler), and a crystal around their neck (optical computer, maybe a miss, we'll see what the next decade brings, a slab in a pocket will do for now). Given my zero trust of end stage capitalism near my noggin, wristbands are an excellent transitional, as long as they're local (or can be made so, happy jail breaking)
Unless EMG signal processing has had some breakthrough in the past 10 years, it is not a very precise interaction mode. I worked in a lab developing it for quadriplegics to use with the muscle on their temple (we tested above the thumb as well). You can get rough 2-axis control with some practice, but that's with an adhesive EMG pad. Can a wrist band get a clean signal?
For typing, I'd expect you need to combine with eye tracking. So you're back to the Vision Pro UI.
On its own, EMG makes a good button, I'd expect. Maybe 1-axis control.
Thanks for the reality check. Wait some more, use voice for now, is what I hear... Although a decade is a long time in signal processing and Meta has dumped a boatload of cash into this.
No 6dof either ?
Sorry for using you as the 'say something wrong, get corrected' research method, but kudos for jumping in. ;}
The haptic feedback you get from touching your thumb and forefinger to simulate a click is actually better than a button because it feels more organic and natural.
Where it falls apart is not being able to feel yourself touching objects which nothing other than a full glove is going to be able to simulate. Controllers and rings provide no benefit over Apple's approach.
> Controllers and rings provide no benefit over Apple's approach.
When I touch a good quality button, I can feel the actuation point, and it's the same every time - I can learn to tell reliably whether I've pressed it or not.
When I touch my thumb and forefinger for a camera, I can't reliably tell what point it'll get detected as touching, because it isn't the same point each time.
As a result, I have to hold them together until I'm sure it's registered.
As a user, knowing unambiguously whether you've activated a control or not is a huge advantage for controllers & buttons.
It sounds like the wrist strap thing will have haptic feedback for when the gestures get registered, so you'll at least know when that happens. It sounds like that might actually make it better than the annoying capacitive buttons that's popular these days with no feedback…
> The haptic feedback you get from touching your thumb and forefinger to simulate a click is actually better than a button because it feels more organic and natural.
Where did you experience this? My only experience is with the Apple Vision Pro and it failed like half the time
Isn't haptic feedback supposed to mean that you feel something as feedback that an action happened? If so, then this would be more like haptic feedforward. Apple vision reacts because you feel something, and that sounds as reliable as it probably is.
Apple doesn't react because you feel something. Apple estimates, based on the kinematics it recreates from it's camera feed, when something happens. It is NOT looking for a visual gap between fingers to disappear, as this would require an exactly correct camera angle.
I guess you get the natural haptic, but the feedback is visual/audio (happens in software). In any case the link between haptic and visual/audio action is kinda broken on the vision pro
the reason is that it is camera based, unlike Orion. And this is why people describe Orion as magical, whereas nobody talks about the hand gestures of the Apple Vision Pro (but people do talk about the eye tracking of the AVP as magical)
> Controllers and rings provide no benefit over Apple's approach.
This is the problem with fanboi-ism... the hyperbole is so clearly false. Let me list the ways that controllers are better:
- Typing/Chording
- Cheaper
- More efficient, no cameras pointing at things the user can't see. No continuous video processing.
- No dead zones where the camera can't see.
- Accuracy. For all but a few camera angles, Apple has to guess when you're fingers make contact. it works best with bigger movements, but the bigger the movement, the longer that movement takes. There's a reason no big-name competitive games have been ported over.
- Actual haptic feedback. Play Horizon: Forbidden West on PS5 to understand just what haptics can communicate to you... it's so much more than tapping your fingers together.
Apple's approach is amazing, and it's good for the use cases that Apple tells you are important... but there's so much more than that. You're doing a disservice to Apple by going full fanboi.
Users can just connect a ps5 controller to the Vision Pro, of course it's an extra expense but for Vision Pro buyers that's pretty much insignificant.
And all the sensors, cameras and superfast processing will still be needed for that immerse quasi AR simulated experience, so there are no cost savings there.
Where do you figure? Last I checked mushy, organic keyboards are not preferred.
I mean, it's just laughable to suggest that inpu work just as well on the AVP. People are not using the virtual keyboard if a real one is available. Gamers want clicky buttons too.
There are clear benefits and disadvantages of each setup.
I agree, and I also think that walking around to items positioned statically in space is a really dumb way to do embodied computing. I mean if an app is associated with your kitchen fridge or whatever fine, pin it to your kitchen fridge, but if I'm going to be enveloped in an omnidirectional high def display, I want a way to bring the windows to me, not have to move my body to different windows.
Anyway, Logitech made an awesome little handheld keyboard for home theater PCs, called DiNovo Mini HTPC, I was able to pair it with Vision Pro.
Uses: Being able to physically walk around a life-sized 3d model of an engine, human body, etc.
2. Tying AR to a point relative to the user
Uses: Heads-up Display notifications, virtual screens, etc.
These things are not mutually exclusive.
Even once you've placed a "AR object" at some static absolute location, I'm sure you can scroll through the list of active processes similar at any time, and snap it back to your body.
As somebody who hates the sedentary aspect of software engineering, I messed around with a friend's Apple Vision Pro and fell in love with the spatial computing aspect. I do a great deal of pacing when working through problems, and the ability to physically move around multiple virtualized workspaces was really engaging.
I have Xreal glasses, and it's handy to be able to pin a window to a physical spot (well, direction in this case). I used that feature to have basically a virtual TV on my laundry room wall while I watched a video on how to fix my dryer as I was fixing it. But if I'm playing a game or watching other content, I don't want to have to focus on a single spot, so I have the window always in front of my face.
I disagree. Physical activity enhances mental well-being and the quality of cognition. A system that allows one to design their workspace with regular movement in mind is going to be a boon for people who are usually chained to a desk for purely virtual work, forced to navigate cramped UI with their finger. Say I'm editing a video; you're telling me my media bin could be a literal bin a few steps away, allowing me to physically separate my "media selection" task from my "cutting and moving clips" task? Knowing that this kind of encapsulation helps to improve focus, and the movement would help with circulation and stress? Sign me up.
That’s a great little keyboard, it reminds me of early smartphone keyboards in a good way.
I wonder if Apple decided against a controller in order to allow third party solutions to flourish . They can take their time and see what people gravitate towards.
Most of these products arnted aimed at consumers, but industrial tech. While the critque is great for enthusiasts, it makes no sense for what this type of industrial use will occur.
Hololens and Glass got relegated to industrial use. Pretty certain Meta would rather cross the chasm and get to everyday consumers, but the tech and use case doesn't cut it for that yet, which is why they aren't going to sell these until it's more of a home run. Seemed like they even had a subtle dig at Apple for pushing to get high end AR into the hands of consumers prematurely.
Imho hand gestures are the best way to interact with XR.
If your only experience is the HoloLens, you’re roughly a decade out of date with how well it can work today.
There’s also not been much until the Vision Pro that combines eye tracking with hand tracking which is what’s really needed.
You should really try the Vision Pro, because it really does move hand tracking to the point where it’s the best primary interaction method. Controllers might be good for some stuff , in the way an Apple Pencil is, but most interactions do not need it.
Why do you need a controller for any of that? Those are all point and click, with low precision and large hitboxes. Which is perfect for eye+hand. Almost every review says hand+eye is greatly intuitive, almost every user in the Vision Pro communities as well. Even Meta are using hands+eyes as the way forward.
What exactly are you missing that a controller gives you for those tasks?
I did buy a Vision Pro, but it's a nearly unusable device and outside of fora, I've never met anyone whose had a positive experience, so I suspect even among Vision Pro users, it's a minority opinion.
Hand tracking is not a feasible input method for routine computing.
I'll have to dig mine out of the box and try it again, version 1 of the os basically had one gesture which was click. I hate the gaze and click interface, it works OK for Netflix but invariably I would fall back to using the trackpad on my MacBook to actually do any work.
Hand tracking has also been pretty great on the Quest for some time now. I've got the first-gen one, and you can very comfortably type/navigate the UI with no controllers.
Traditional personal computers have both a keyboard and a mouse / trackpad. Game controllers have both joysticks and buttons.
While analog manipulation devices (mice, trackpads, joysticks, the 3D controllers) are good at physically precise manipulation and navigation, keys and buttons are good at symbolic / textual entry and logical / symbolic navigation with comparatively very low effort and high speed.
When VR / AR acquires a fast and low-effort symbolic input mode, comparable in efficiency to a keyboard, and it becomes possible to build highly productive interfaces driven by it, like Vim and MS Excel are driven by the keyboard, many interesting developments will happen.
Kind of a pointless comment to make if you haven't actually tried the Vision Pro.
Its interface is unlike anything else and really can only be experienced in person. The ability to simply glance at UI controls and slightly move your head whilst resting on your leg really does feel like magic.
And the UI is built around it so if you are looking for example at a sidebar it will lock you into choosing the options unless you substantially look away. This makes using it much easier and faster than a controller.
yeah. Call me oldskool but I still think a small controller with laser pointer is optimal.
You can move the point at least as fast as your eyes and a button press will be faster and more accurate than pinch, and no occlusion. Plus more buttons gives you additional actions for the same onscreen target.
A controller with a laser pointer might be good, but not optimal.
For a pointing device, moving a stylus on a small graphic tablet (in relative mode, i.e. like a mouse, not in absolute mode), in order to position a visible cursor on a target, is both faster and more precise and also much more comfortable than pointing forward with a laser pointer or an equivalent device.
When you are not at a desk, perhaps one can make a pointing device with a stylus that you hold like for writing and you point downwards, but the relative movements of the stylus are used to control a visible cursor that is in front of you, or in any other direction. That would still be much better than a pointing device that forces you to point in the real direction of the target.
Especially when only the relative movements are of interest, it is easy to measure the 3D orientation of a stylus with a combined accelerometer/magnetometer sensor.
I think the Quest/Index/etc. controllers are a far better form factor than a cylindrical tube, for this use case. But then I also think we should be adding XBox controller input to CAD applications and such, so maybe I am the weird one. We should get over the idea that gamepad = unprofessional, because these are seriously engineer, ergonomic, highly sensitive input devices.
If all you wanted was a pointing device to make selections on a 2D gui interface, then the laser pointer form factor would be better. But I’m going to be an old fart and ask why are you doing this in AR then? Just use a screen. I’m more interested in the different human interface possibilities that are opened up by tactile input and 3D visual controls.
We should be using index controllers to build “grabby” UIs. I’m curious what this could turn into. It opens up a whole new human computer interface medium for intrinsically spatial applications, just like a good stylus on a tablet opened up creative use cases.
while I agree, you also just don't have a choice as otherwise you force the user to carry a controller with them all the time (and even then the experience sucks because you have to take out/reach for your controller every time you want to usei t)
It depends why you think hand gestures are bad. The wrist babd is detecting brain waves and allows for hand gestures while the hands are out of the field of view of the cameras.
The EMG wrist band is the most exciting part of this release, IMO. That strikes me as a great solve that pushes into software a lot of hard problems that were solved with hardware previously.
The Vision Pro uses optical sensors for hand tracking, so if your hands aren't visible to the device it obviously can't track them. Electromyography solves that problem, and I could imagine Apple integrating some variant of this in a future Apple Watch, and just falling back to optical sensors if you don't own one.
Yeah it is surprising because it seems like a relatively obvious solution. The Watch doesn't use electromyography though [1], it looks like it currently uses "the accelerometer, gyroscope, and optical heart sensor with a new machine learning algorithm." I wonder how accurate that is compared to the EMG solution Meta is using.
> The company that looks most poised to capitalize on a product like this is still Apple.
It's also possible they don't ever put out an offering in this form factor. They never released a dual screen phone. They never released a touchscreen laptop. This might be one of those things they just don't touch.
Also, I wonder if they'll have a tough time filling the form factor with stuff to do. The lack of apps was a huge reason the APV flopped, while Meta has a large headstart in making it possible for devs to build for their device, even those without exp in spatial dev / game dev / etc.
> It's also possible they don't ever put out an offering in this form factor
Couldn't disagree more, if it was possible to bet on this I would bet all my money that they do release something like this. It'll probably be called the Vision Air or something. I don't remember which article it was, but there are reports that Tim Cook only agreed to fund and ship the Vision Pro because he was told that the same tech will be put into glasses in a few years.
I'll gladly take that bet. Apple is known to be very conservative with hardware form factors, and the AVP was a huge risk for them, and a departure from their previous ways of working that they'll be reluctant to return to after its failure.
If there is a secure/verified way to take the bet I will gladly put some money up! So if Apple sells an eyeglass-like form factor AR product, then I win right? I guess we need a deadline? 2040?
The 100 degree field of view in the AVP is noticeable because it is a VR headsets. Most VR headsets like the Meta Quest 3 have greater field of view than the AVP, which is why the 100 degree is so noticeable.
AVP is AR. They made a big deal of being able to place windows all around and above your workspace, but taking advantage of this requires large head movements.
I had a Quest2 but sold it years ago. I'm not comparing AVP to any previous VR experiences, I don't even remember what the FOV felt like.
Not the same thing. AVP uses passthrough video, which is subject to the same field of view as the virtual content. These glasses are actually glasses, so the real world has an "unlimited" field of view -- only virtual content exists in the 70 degree FoV.
You can emulate this on the Vision Pro by removing the light seal entirely. It makes a dramatic difference, but also makes it impossible to use virtual environments or any immersive experiences.
Many conversations you will have when you wear smart glasses (I wear meta's ray bans often since October) is people's concerns..oh u are filming me and I don't know ..stuff to that extent.
Is that true? Last time I was reading about holographic lenses, it was a flat white laser backlight fed into a waveguide (the hologram part), and filtered through an LCD. An actual LED projector would have darker darks, but I would much rather have a higher resolution..
It's definitely helpful to hear about the waveguide production problems. Obviously, that's going to be the greatest hurdle; after all, they are manufacturing a completely unique object with very small feature sizes.
Huge kudos to Meta for breaking new ground and doing a ton of R&D/M&A to get to this point. Once MicroLED comes on a little further and the form factor shrinks this could be the next consumer electronics platform.
Silicon carbide is really interesting, we need high RI materials to make this work.
Hopefully glass 3D printing or similar will make cheap, Rx waveguides possible.
It is helpful for becoming negative to negative companies where they deserve it.
IG Farben had great technology (for that time) but needed change of name and half of century of good service so they have been removed from our memory as producers of Cyclone B. Now they are known as Bayer. And my neighbor (concentration camp survivor), while he was alive, wasn't buying Bayer products and he was quite vocal about it. Any of them, regardless of technology, different people, different products,... Guess why. Will you say he was negative?
Thats why FB was renamed and I am eagerly waiting what they will be like after 50 years. Until then, they will not be anywhere near my devices and even less filtering my sight.
For me personally they build a lot of trust back with their work on llama. Also they do have capable software engineers. But hardware is a different thing. I am still burned by their handling of hardware support for Oculus devices. To such a degree that neither VR nor AR is of significant interest anymore, never mind developing software for such products.
That said, I was never a Facebook user. I do have an account and that is that, which I tend to not use in most browser session because of Facebook surveillance.
If you are android user, dont know about Apple, 3rd party applications are full of Facebook SDK, try installing https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard/releases (and pay author a coffee, he seriously deserves it) and check the domains apps are accessing. You might figure out you are Facebook user. Just nobody told you.
This was the point of App Tracking Transparency (ATT) on iOS. If an app embeds a third-party SDK that tracks you, such as the Facebook SDK, they are required to get your permission first with a system popup. They aren’t allowed to track you silently without your knowledge.
To be clear, ATT is the system Apple put in place for native apps that is enforced by the App Store review process. When it comes to the browser, I think you’re more interested in Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP).
You should check out WebKit‘s tracking prevention policy:
Yes, I am aware, that Apple is trying very hard to be the only one in ecosystem, that is tracking you where you cant do anything to avoid it due to completely closed phone.
With such a cure, you don't need disease.
That is why I was using heavily modified Android.
As I could prevent Android tracking me and kick the Google spyware out of it completely.
I am now using Sailfish ( https://sailfishos.org ) and I don't need to care about Google or Apple any more. Need to patch banking app from time to time and use plastic cards, but this is acceptable (well, not from bank software but I couldn't care less, they are free to port it to linux and make it open source /s ).
---
Anyway, the GDPR is requiring from applications to disclose tracking and allow you to chose what tracking if any, you will allow, before it occurs. Not only that, PIA cant be a payment for app usage.
So in theory, Apple is only enforcing what is already required from applications by EU directive.
Paid and provided by "Pay to win games, targeting kids, not preventing fake news (covid, human harrassment etc.), probably someone died due to lack of taking ownership/responsibility, election fraud through not acting on it.
Yes i do like Llama but lets be honest who paid for it and for what.
Just because suckerburg gives us nice toys...
He could actually start giving his money away to humanity in a relevant and meaningful way to start fixing what he did to our society.
I don't think we need more billionaires giving their money away. I think they and their companies need to pay tax properly so we can vote on how it's spent.
> Paid and provided by "Pay to win games, targeting kids, not preventing fake news
Guess what? New iOS features and YouTube videos are paid-for and provided in the exact same way. Both Apple and Google are complicit in spreading misinformation, advertising to kids and profiting from lootbox/microtransaction revenue. But nobody consciously objects to Apple for partnering with Taboola, or Google for supporting extremism on YouTube. No sane critic lashes out at Tim Cook or Sundar Pichai demanding they donate their life savings to offset the obvious damages they've created.
I think Meta and moreover Facebook is a purely detestable platform. It's absolutely hilarious how unwilling this website is to apply the same criticism to their other favorite services. The cognitive dissonance is arresting.
That's true, but my stance frankly wouldn't change if they also thought Google and Apple needed to spend the rest of their existence as a charity case. My point is more that it's a silly measure of damages, since this behavior is table stakes in the FAANG echelons. It's like saying that we should reject Open Source contributions by Google and Amazon because they pay their engineers with money made off exploitative server deals. It's a reach.
I don't really understand your point. Company A is corrupt, the company B and C are corrupt too (and D, E, F,...). We have 3 corrupt companies. Why would here be any problem saying that company A is corrupt? Or from another perspective, why would be A less corrupt if B and C are doing the same thing?
Open Source contributions are there for three reasons. Either the license requires it (Google Fuchsia is a step into avoiding this and keep next generation hardware close source), it is a public relations stunt or they want other software developers work for them for free (which is also lowering the wages for their developers).
Never ever mistake any company that has public stocks doing anything else but earning money for the stock owners. As they didn't buy the stocks to support charity but to earn money, which is the greatest reason why their products are worse deal for their customers on y2y basis.
Apple is responsible for plenty of death in foxcon companies.
Google, is a lot different than Apple or Facebook. Google did a lot for our society through Android, Google maps, https, Gmail, Kubernetes and Search.
YouTube had a problem with fake news and especially the algorithm (flat earth etc.) but they actually acted on it a lot faster than facebook ever tried.
But yes pls don't assume something without knowing were my viewpoints are. There is no cognitive dissonance but we talk here about facebook and not about every other companie on the planet.
I have made my peace with React (I know I can draw anything I can imagine with it, which I can't say for Vue, I can even draw 3-d worlds) but many people think React ruined web development.
Why are you downplaying them as “a tech company selling ads” when the most relevant characteristic of theirs is facilitating genocide in Myanmar, then obstructing the investigation, and fuelling ethnic violence in more places like Ethiopia?
I'm not sure exactly what the extent of the "facilitation" was in the first link, so what I'm about to say might be a little vague, but the second doesn't appear to be about them covering up their role in said "facilitation", but rather their refusal to provide so much user data to The Gambia looking to prosecute Myanmar officials for war crimes.
The way you've phrased that makes it sound as though Facebook were trying to hide the actions they took to facilitate things, which I think is a miscommunication.
I think the Myanmar experience has a lot to do with why Facebook tries to disappear politics talk on Threads. I mean, negative talk about your neighbors is how political violence starts.
People on the Fediverse get high and mighty about the Myanmar incident but in a Fediverse world the Myanmar government would have run the big instance in their language and would have defederated anyone who tried to stop them, alternately outsiders could have defederated but then they wouldn't have any influence.
Fediverse folks could have refused to run a server to support genocide but there is no way they could stop their software from supporting genocide. A centralized system like Facebook does have more control and more responsibility but when they took that responsibility later on Myanmar kicked them out
Why ? The discussion is about fixing brand reputation, and he quotes probably one of the most disgustingly successful rebrands in history. If even IG Farben managed to successfully rebrand, surely a company that just went "a little too far" with private data, can too. Looks quite on topic to me.
Not only my point stands, I still remember a world almost without narcissists, people traveling for fun, not to take a photo to brag, times where people listened to doctors not some people recommending horse dewormer, UK not suffering due to Brexit consequences ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8425058/ ), people actually bonding in person,...
“Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
You are underestimating the horror that Facebook did to human society. I am accusing them of crime against humanity. And all that, just for selling ads - where you will be able to see the comparison with IG Farben, do whatever it takes, to earn money.
I accept the argument, that if they wouldn't, someone else would, but nevertheless THEY did it or we would be talking about someone else.
Even if you don’t like it, idiots do have as much right to speak as any Nobel Prize winner. Not only that, the more they speak, the better, as the chances of stopping being an idiot increase. All Nobel Prizes were at some point also idiots, if they’re still not idiots today about some topics.
Nope, I am quite rational here and if I wouldn't witness change in society, I wouldn't believe it. I am seriously worried for humanity, as what I am seeing today is: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808 (and this was shot in pre-facebook era)
Fun fact, they didn't have large budget for shooting so they were searching for footwear that would look futuristic. They found some unknown company producing cheap "shoes" so horrible that the director wasn't worried for it to succeed as "no one would wear that". The company was Crocks.
Go back to any random year in human history and ask the older people whether they think the world was better when they were young. They will all say "yes" (evidence for this exists in countless survived writings, as well as other social phenomena like people becoming more conservative as they age). It's one of the most natural things in the world.
That alone should be a very strong signal that maybe your nostalgia is not based on a rational unbiased observation of the changes in society.
edit: and to be clear, obviously there have been times in history where things really did get worse for a period. But if you're proposing that that's happening now, you have a massive burden of proof to overcome, and you should be absolutely really totally sure that you're not being influenced by rose-tinted glasses. Which I'm not even sure is possible.
So what? You believe the world has gotten worse every year since the beginning of time? Or is it that all those older people throughout history have been wrong, but somehow it's you that's finally gotten it right?
Whatever. I don't have time to fight every logical fallacy you produce. I think I have explained it well, there is no need for me to bother with everyone who doesn't understand it.
Fair that perhaps they (the director specifically) thought that (they look like something nobody would want to wear) about Crocs. Heck, I thought that back then, many did. So perhaps that's why Snopes is saying it's true.
But Crocs had actually become somewhat popular already before Idiocracy.
The more realistic full picture explanation being that they chose something that they or someone on their staff, like many "look at those idiots" types (myself at the time included), already knew and considered a stupid trend is much more likely. It doesn't at all negate that they in fact thought nobody with taste would wear those shoes, but I don't think that choice was entirely made in isolation not aware of the trend.
The effect of watching the movie and seeing Crocs worn was yet another of those pieces of evidence that the stupid people of today connect to that fictional future world, like all the other stuff on the movie dialed all the way to the top (energy drinks, corporate sponsorships, etc.)
The mere fact that someone knew of Crocs, thought of them, and chose them because of their ugliness, means they were popular/successful enough to pop up on someone's radar, despite them ostensibly not being something that would be worn by anyone. Perhaps they didn't know how much more popular Crocs would become but they for sure must have picked them as an artifact of things already going in a weird direction (Why can you get this? Who would want this? Someone must, these will be the stupid people of tomorrow.)
But also, actually, so what?
Look at some of the fashion of past decades older movies. Some of it is cool but a lot of it is super ridiculous.
And if you look at Crocs, are they really objectively stupid? Treating them as a high fashion item probably is. But they are versatile and robust, good for many types of use cases were people used to wear other types of cheap plastic sandals. People wearing leather shoes surely thought sneaker were stupid until they became so mainstream that they were evaluated more objectively.
Citing idiocracy and Crocs seems like a very weak argument to your case and even Idiocracy's point (fashion choices don't indicate the world is getting stupid). Mind you I'm not disagreeing that things have gotten worse in many ways and social media is definitely not helping. OTOH, Facebook actually was somewhat reasonable for a long time, and useful to connect with people. Only once the Twitterification of it started did it get so bad. But somehow Twitter never gets the bad reputation.
No. Crocks became popular after Idiocracy. Check the year they were shooting as it took them a few years to release it. Chat with Mike Judge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBu_RpKqCg8
At most, it just laid bare to see what were the normal social interactions and thoughts of millions of people and made possible far more viral spread of ideas. On the last one, I don't even think it's social media's fault, it's probably the whole internet at large, it's just these sorts of interactions happen most there.
I have been active on internet forums since the mid-late 90s. Facebook and Instagram and their other social media didn't create any of those bad human traits, they were rampant to begin with.
What these normie-networks did do was make a UX for public posting so easy that scores of low-education users were able to be influenced and re-share low-infromation-quality stuff in huge magnitudes. FB is guilty of making a super accessible user experience, and then in not being aggressive early enough in having high standards for its userbase. But it didn't invent society's ills.
I found myself stepping back from social media and deleted a lot of my accounts in 2016 -- the election and the Cambridge Analytica thing was a big reason. LinkedIn could have been the worst because I had spent so much time promoting myself and prospecting, I met a lot of good folks but I also met so many bullshitters who helped make me into a bullshitter.
The influx of normies circa 2000 did not seem so bad to me but Facebook and Twitter were another thing.
I was thinking a lot about it, but at the times of IRC and forums (and modems ;) ) this was not an issue on society scale. Facebook actually revolutionized it and made it available to anyone including showing the more contraverse opinions to other people as it was more likely for them to click. They were/are literally pumping up all the bad in society, to earn more money.
My point is that the less savoury aspects of human interaction were still happening, just not in the open. The popularity of the internet as a medium of human interaction just made it visible, recordable, searchable and pressed the gas pedal. I wouldn't particularlyblame FB for inventing this.
So your argument is that making computers and the internet easier to use for normal people is cause for societal destruction? I can’t be convinced, but that does seem like more of an indictment on people than it does tech.
Let me repeat him as you probably didnt catch it (I dont understand how, but this is one of the things, I dont understand, so I wont argue about it):
“Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
I can just confirm that what he has seen and described is correct. And the more that you are standing your ground, the more you are proving, he was correct.
facebook has not been negative, they notably refused to play ball with the antipoaching agreements with other big tech companies in the bay, and technical people such as myself greatly respect them for it
My non-computer-nerd midwestern friends, some of whom are blue collar and zero of whom are anywhere near making coastal FAANG or finance money, all hate Facebook.
Why is this an argument? First of all x many people using something doesn't necessarily mean something is good (network effects if not fake accounts) but also buying up competition is somehow seen as a positive?
Was just going to write that there is no way people trust META to become their eyes. Maybe some smaller player. We already greatly distrust f*n mobiles which eavesdrop on everyone's conversation. Considering recent cyberpunk breach I actually expect more people to try to distance themselves from this all. It will probably be top product for telemedicine and teletutoring one day, but it will never be safe in the hands of Meta, no matter how many lammas they put in the loose...
Think about it - sometimes it is much more about trust than technology. Yeah, I know all your chats go back and forth commercial GPTs, but you know half of my GPT interraction is already local inference based and it does similar job, and is OK. So that much about wanting to let s.o. see your naked friends. Their days are numbered and if you see how IT history unfolded - there is always rush to the cloud and away from the mainframe. Its like the breathwork in criya yoga, happens simultaneously in a sense.
From the funny side of things - such wearables open perspective to lot of people talking to themselves being O.k. in society. Perhaps we could only agree to have such visual interface when things get closer to what guys have in Cyberpunk 2077. Honestly I really hope someone developes a genetic enhancement or all children born 2000 suddently become enlightened enough to master telepathy.
I'm much more fascinated by the propspect of personal electronics, and how cheap they have become. I don't want Meta in them for sure, and nobody apt-get installs gcloud or fb as his must have tool.
Often out of necessity. I fantasize about disconnecting, but the reality is more complicated; it would difficult for me and others around me were I to disconnect.
Perhaps very soon we also start bringing jammers of all sorts when the device is not to be trusted. Not a new concept - every sane person uses firewall and/or VPN.
you should definitely have a firewall but the security advantages of a VPN are questionable, pushed hard by VPN vendors, who are biased due to what they're selling. They're useful for evading DMCA takedowns but that's not about keeping hackers off your machine.
I carry mobile phones only out of compulsion. I often wish for the time when we didn't have this leash around our neck constantly. I would drop this and go back to landlines if I could
And they'll likely drop support/updates for it quickly after release... These out of pocket devices are sunsetted faster than mobile phones, especially so because they require completely independent development teams that companies love to roll essential staff off of.
There have been so many attempts to make VR glasses that it's really not innovation at this point, it's just gimmicky throw-away pocket tech. Something far better to invent is a phone that can project on walls, or project a full-size keyboard onto a table for an easier writing experience.
Most of these companies are gutted by investors, and turned into profit machines... There are very few visionaries leading projects now, and huge hurdles with IP theft and related lawsuits that hold up most of the typical innovation, unless these companies come up with game changing ideas that focus less on pushing out ads, they're going to fail with micro-projects like this. VR glasses have been around for ages, none of what Zuckerberg demoed was revolutionary, gotta be honest about it.
I used to work with psychology researchers conducting experiments with wearable cameras. Anything involving human subjects needed IRB approval, informed consent, ethics review, etc.
But with essentially any piece of tech you use (not just FB), you check "I agree" on a document you'll never read and give the same data to a private company who will use it however they want. And they charge you for it.
Imagine if I told you a research organization decided to throw out all their ethics and start charging their research subjects to be experimented on, and that this was actually a really solid business model.
Smart TVs really are stupid, but at least netflix ads only show up when you're using netflix. AR glasses would plaster ads all over any show you watch on any platform, as well as on sunsets, walls, family members, etc.
The technology they've packed into these things is amazing - it's an incredible achievement.
But, that said, there's also plenty of room for negativity around the actual product conception. It may have niche applications, but it just doesn't seem that most people need or want AR for everyday use - it's a solution looking for a problem. For gaming VR seems a better fit than AR, and same for Metaverse in general.
AR seems a bit like Segway two-wheelers - cool and fun, but with limited actual use. I could see AR glasses being used in the same way as Segway's end of life use for tourist city tours, or for other similar rent-to-use entertainment experiences.
The sad thing is that there are a lot of things AR glasses could be useful for in my everyday life, but it all assumes that those glasses are working for me and me alone. I'd never use a product that was going to spy on everything I see and do. I'd never use a product that would fill my vision with ads either.
> The sad thing is that there are a lot of things AR glasses could be useful for in my everyday life
Can you give some examples, because I honestly can't think of any. I certainly can imagine these in specific, mostly niche professional contexts, but as "the next computing computing platform", no thanks.
To be clear, I'm fine if this is "just me", but take this quote from the article:
> You can take a hands-free video call to catch up with friends and family in real time, and you can stay connected on WhatsApp and Messenger to view and send messages. No need to pull out your phone, unlock it, find the right app and let your friend know you’re running late for dinner – you can do it all through your glasses.
Even under their own description, the phone experience is better for me in every way. I don't want something strapped to my face - I want to perform a task and then put my device away.
Sort of the whole point of this style of waveguide optics is that the screen is not pressed up against your eyeballs. It's projected out 3-6 feet in front of you (and ideally, anchored to the real world in some way).
I highly doubt it. People are people and don't change much. Teenagers especially are all about personal fashion/appearance, and outside of a short-lived fad don't seem likely to want to wear a computer on their face, regardless of how fashionable you are able to make them look. You may as well build the battery pack into a baseball cap and say you have to wear that too.
Teenagers don't have any problem wearing airpods even though those look really stupid. I wouldn't count out the power of marketing or teenager's need for approval from their peers.
> [...] airpods even though those look really stupid
speaking /as/ a teenager, that's presumption. maybe it's an Apple-sponsored mindhack, but I actually think wireless earbuds (incl. AirPods) look quite a bit better than their dangly wired counterparts.
Could be part mindhack! I remember Apple's iPod advertising campaign which centered around silhouettes of hip looking users with the trademark white dangly wires snaking into their pocket. I guess with this desirable tech hidden in your pocket, the wires were the best way to recognize that someone had one!
I guess since airpods are visible (and expensive) they are now the desirable focus, and anyone with wired earbuds is hopelessly out of date!
Making them stick out visibly from the sides of people's heads was absolutely a design choice so that people could be "seen" with the product.
Apple is very big on being a status symbol which is why they put a giant shiny (at one point glowing) logo on their laptops and why they spent a lot of money trying to convince iphone users to not use a case which would hide the logo.
Maybe I'm just a lot more accustomed to seeing wires than sticks pointing out of people's ears, but I'd hardly be the first person to say they look dumb. It was a concern reviewers took into account (see for example https://mashable.com/article/apple-airpods-review) and people often say they look like Q-tips/antennae sticking out of people's heads (or worse https://screenrant.com/hilarious-apple-airpods-memes/)
Part of it is that they stick out way too far so you can see them when looking at someone directly. It's especially distracting in cases where they're sticking out in different directions.
it might just be that I was never in a terribly wire-laden environment -- I'm in college now, where something like 70% of people have airpod-shaped devices in their ears at all times, and even in high school seeing wired earbuds was infrequent. the AirPod aesthetic is the only one I remember wrt listening devices.
I don't know if the same effect would occur with these glasses, though. it seems unlikely that they'll have significant /public/ use amongst young people any time soon. I've never even seen an Apple Vision Pro.
I really hope you’re wrong. I suspect that the future is technology which blends further into the background rather than being shoved closer to our faces.
I agree with your ideal goal, but there are hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on getting it in directly into our eyeballs.
Maybe we'll be lucky enough to die before it's normal for this stuff to be integrated into our brains (which again, billions of dollars being spent on figuring this out).
I think the main question will be if Meta can run the glasses under a different business model than ads/personalization. I know Meta feels like they missed out on owning the hardware ecosystem with mobile, but a big part of why Apple's product work is because their business model is not ads.
If they can fix their incentives there it will address 80% of the concerns in this thread.
Counterintuitively I think a passive screen affixed to your face will reduce your reliance on all other screens. Glasses aren't a great form factor for scrolling feeds, but they are much better at connecting you to your physical world (which phones are the worst at). That plus just the posture improvements [1] that glasses can provide over the phone may make this a winner.
It doesn't matter if they can or can't, Apple will do a better version of this and people will buy it because they're a much less shitty / shady company than Facebook.
Don’t show it to the public if you don’t want their opinion. Assuming meta knew this, it’s pretty insane that there are people defending the honour of their billion dollar corporate bff.
Even when it isn't a "prototype" and simply just doesn't have a consumer version, the public will be negative about it. Look at the Apple Vision Pro. That's a shipping product with a massive negative public opinion because it doesn't have a consumer version and no one understands if they are "Pro enough" to care to buy one. Look at Microsoft HoloLens. That was a shipping product with some large Enterprise and Government customer contracts. But the public perception of it was miserable, which is partly why Microsoft dumped a lot of their research in that area and lost of their brains in that area to Meta, so it's ironic and hilarious to see Meta making the same mistakes again that Microsoft already made with a variation/iteration of the same tech.
I think the hardware and idea is great. But I simply can't ignore the fact that it is made by Facebook, which is basically the posterchild for modern addiction optimizer adtech business.
The last company I'd want to put right in front of my eyeballs for any extended periods of time is Facebook.
This is the only comment on here about fb that makes sense. Meta is fully capable and willing to make products that protect user privacy, and they have in the form of WhatsApp and others. But what they definitely aren’t capable of is building things you aren’t addicted to use in order to generate them revenue constantly.
Maybe as they transition to hardware they’ll spend more time making their products worthy of chronic upgrades rather than chronic addictive usage.
Agreed. I was commenting [1] on how this could be one of the posts where HN is totally wrong about looking back 10 years from now, similar to the Dropbox post.
To be fair, that post wasn't wrong. To this day I still carry a USB thumb drive, most people I know have/use them, and they're still selling very well. Linux users are still fully capable of moving files around themselves.
The problem with waveguides are the manufacturing defects are on the micron level, and you need to get those channels perfect - then produce the same pattern a few more times for other colors, and hope they all perfectly line up.
I don’t see 3D printing being a solution here for a very very long time
I agree, though it's hard not to be negative. My first thought after "oh cool" was "how long until this thing languishes and gets discontinued?" The recent history of AR devices doesn't exactly do Meta a service.
I agree, just because you don’t like a company or you don’t have a use for the device doesn’t mean that it can’t be a good step forward for tech in general, and for those who will find a use for it.
I wish I didn't have to be so negative because these are cool, but it's Facebook. Surveillance and ad tech that cause brain rot are what they do for a living. At this point they could just sell versions of these products that aren't subsidized by evil, and they still choose not to do so. This means no matter how much they talk about the future of AI being open, no matter how nice their AR glasses are, I can't do business with them. Everything facebook does is burdened by being facebook and I for one am glad at least one demographic won't let them forget it.
IMO it is ironic the EU has forced Meta to take leadership in educating the public on the significance of "privacy," but not in the way the EU wanted. "Privacy" means two different things: (1) censoring sensitive personal life info from the public, versus (2) limiting government power. Who will invent the words to distinguish the two, I don't know, but it will turn "privacy ethos" into "X ethos" and "Y ethos," and Apple will sort it all out.
Some people have morals and ethics and believe that its not okay to just do what facebook does without taking responsibility.
You build a platform which allows you to share fake news and pay to win shit to billions? You make sure the algorithm makes you as much money as possible?
You know who made sure facebook fixes this? Politics, not suckerburg.
And your moral ethical construct should not just benefit you and work for you but for all.
Plenty of companies are not ethical and not your friend. If you have family and actually care, you wouldn't worry that facebook teaches them garbage? fake news? etc.? Just for the sake of making money or being allowed to do what they want?
Im curious why you would even debate morals here if your main objection is to make 'as much money as possible'? Just accept that its not a moral goal to have.
Moral would be "Making as much money as possible without hurting anyone and benefiting the society"
I often advocate things not for me. I'm quite good in understanding the facebook algorithm and all of that shit. I advocate this for my friends, familiy and other fellow humans including you.
This would be like Telsa coming with new tech. Tesla / X-Twitter & Facebook / Meta are companies I will never financially support. They make money off propagating misinformation and their CEOs are not decent human-beings.
I mean, sure, I get that. But also, are any big tech CEOs decent human beings? It's hard to participate in tech at all with that strict of a moral code.
I think they're referring to Musk going off the deep end in general. There's also the whole "We'll have self driving cars in two years!" That they've been peddling for the last decade.
Even the way they marketed their early cars as self driving/autopilot was deceptive. Plus they covered up safety issues, and there have been many privacy issues as well.
Facebook's ongoing behavior towards its users is consistent with the original quote. I don't see any evidence that something has changed besides PR slop.
I just want to elaborate on something here, the full quote is "yeah so if you ever need info on people just ask; I have over 4000 email, sns, addresses" "What? How'd you manage that one?" "people just submitted it, I don't know why. They 'trust me', dumb fucks"
That's not a great look seeing what they've done since then and people always focus on the wrong part of the quote. "I would've said the same thing" (would you?) - he was offering his friend user info.
Changing for the better? Really? Facebook under Zuckerberg has done plenty of predatory things, such as track users across non-Facebook websites, create shadow profiles for people who don't even have accounts, conduct studies to try to make the platform as addictive as possible, and sold access to peoples' private messages revealed in the the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal
When he called people "dumb fucks", he was including you
I met a lady once, we were in a line at DefCon. She worked on these and was quite concerned that they'd end up on the heads of children, feeding content-reaction biometrics about those children to people who would then use that data to manipulate those children in harmful ways.
I'm curious if people think that that's worth worrying about, or if the idea of optimizing ad placement based on whether it makes your pupils respond in the desired way is the kind of thing that's only effective in sci-fi.
Nick Clegg (public affairs guy at FB) is currently lobbying to get VR headsets on schoolchildren. I can't think of anything I want less than my kids wearing those things while in class all day.
IMO this was one of the worst political catastrophes in 21st Century UK politics. Young, educated people formed a core part of their voter base at the time. This demographic felt betrayed by the Lib Dems propping up a Conservative government and a tripling of university tuition fees, increase in VAT, and introduction of austerity. Clegg also failed to lead an effective campaign in the "Alternative Vote" referendum, resulting in an overwhelming defeat and decades-long setback for voting reform. (N.B. there are interesting parallels between this and the Brexit referendum. In both cases, the opposition was allowed to spin it as personality politics.)
Only now has the Lib Dem vote share recovered, largely due to an implosion in the Conservative party and a relatively regressive Labour electoral campaign.
You see, the "struggle" in learning that comes from trying to form concepts out of text you read from books or from teacher's voices you listen in school instead of a complete audiovisual intuitive feed like VR will provide, is actually necessary. Your children will get impaired if they don't build the skill to learn from non-tech methods. Schools in India (and mostly Asia) enforce chalkboard and pen-and-paper methods of instruction at all levels, and I believe kids are better off for it. Ed-tech had insane hype in India at one point, with startup players getting billion-dollar evaluations, and it turned out to be a massive bubble that burst and broke the country's startup economy. I believe one of the main reason for that is that ed-tech solutions simply aren't as effective as they are imagined to be.
Ed-tech will not work in schools until people (teachers) learn to use technology properly. Simply putting on videos for kids (as you say) cannot replace all the skills the traditional model gives us.
No. I am saying the opposite. The better edtech gets and the better "experiences" it provides, the worse it will be for the children's development as they will impair their ability to think and learn for themselves. Learning from reading and writing is superior because it enforces higher conscious engagement at the part of the students. The friction and struggles are important.
What you are saying will make them consume information, not learn.
Reading and writing don't necessarily enforce higher conscious engagement than any other medium. Take for example music: one can read about how a musical instrument works, even write about how a musical instrument works, but neither is remotely comparable to the conscious engagement required to play the instrument.
I grew up around the golden age of 'edutainment' produced by publishers such as Dorling Kindersley. They released books with full-colour illustrations, video cassettes, interactive computer software and games on specific topics that all complemented each other. What's particularly special about this is how the same information can be taught effectively to different children, each with their own unique characteristics. The curriculum is consistent even though the leaning style is allowed to vary. So yes, the struggles are important, but there's no reason to miss the opportunity to learn in another way while one overcomes these struggles.
I enjoyed DK encyclopedias in my childhood too. Also had a full set of Britannica CDs. But do these qualify as ed-tech when they are not being used institutionally? Wasn't the original comment about using VR/AR solutions in classrooms?
I can see both sides of the coin here. There's huge potential for both beneficial educational applications as well as huge potential for manipulation and getting people hooked on attention stealing technology.
Things like Titans of Space [0] and Wooorld [1] are good examples. The sweet spot is apps that let you physically experience things that are otherwise impossible as a learning experience, rather than trying to understand it as dry abstract concepts.
I've had the same concerns about mobile phones, tablets, and computer screens. In fact, mobile phones and tablets seem to have an even greater addiction factor, and their smaller screens could be more harmful due to prolonged close-up use [1].
If you put kids in them 8 hours a day, it would be a concern (although I don't think there is substantive evidence either way yet). I think there's a safe middle ground where using something like this for up to couple of hours in a day at most is very unlikely to have any significant effect. It's just not enough fraction of the time to cause a major impact, especially older kids (teens).
we are already several years into millions of kids using VR headsets. I would say it may not be "proven" but it's also well beyond completely "unproven" in that if there were major effects we would definitely be seeing them organically by now.
That's why Meta tells users not to let children below 10 years use their headsets. And those between 10 and 12 should not use it for more than 2 hours per day.
It’s really interesting how much eye tracking can glean. I’d be curious to test some of those algorithms on myself and see what it said; do you know if there’s any open source stuff that lets you play with it?
Cocomelon are already focus group testing their addictive hypnotic kids videos. They don't need millions of kids to develop this crack for kids, just a dozen or so.
Speaking of which, I just recently blocked Cocomelon on my kid’s iPad. How insane is it that a company is purposefully putting out crack in video form targeted explicitly at toddlers!?
Brought to you by the same people that thought cigarette candy was a brilliant idea.
Is your position that, since people said the same thing about kids reading books, then there is nothing we can give kids that will have a negative outcome on their development? A book can only be read, which requires cognitive effort. iPads can be watched and listened to, which requires no cognitive effort. It's obvious which one kids will choose to do.
As opposed to any old Saturday morning cartoon? I was about to say "without the ads", but Netflix is pushing those hard. They're all designed to keep engagement.
I'm not sure what people expect kids to do on iPads except watch stuff, 99% of the time.
Am I worried about a a mega-corp programming all the nations children? Yes!
But lets not forget that programming of children already exists. TV, social media and ... parents and grandparents and teachers.
The raw technology adds nothing. The software implanted we certainly need to think about.
I don’t think ad placement for children should be the primary concern.
Unless I’m misunderstanding the current state of the technology, it’s possible today with a little effort to put my biometrics in a feedback loop with (say) GPT-4o, and use those measurements to rapidly produce and refine an increasingly horrifying series of images, personalized to my lizard brain reactions.
That’s gross, but the same technique could be applied more subtly. Imagine the worst things people suspect about TikTok’s algorithm, but with biometric feedback on its individual effectiveness.
Pushing ads at children is a major concern because children have zero defenses against the kind of sophisticated manipulation advertisers use against them.
More than just ads though, collecting data on children is dangerous as well. We really don't need corporations starting a dossier on children and placing them into buckets at such an early age. It's bad enough we hand school children chromebooks so that Google can track their test scores, growth, and intelligence
Maybe it could actually be used for the inverse - automatically overlay any ads in your field of view with pictures of kittens, or something like that.
As cool as these are I’m not sure a lot of adults (at least in Denmark) is going to put these things on children. Facebook isn’t exactly a popular brand these days, and even though Instagram made it rather big with kids from the previous ages I think the next generations will be less likely to get on the Meta platforms. In part because what you’re asking about here has been revealed as something Facebook does.
It’s all based on anecdotal knowledge, but at least in my little bubble of the world nobody wants their children on Meta if they can help it. Which is a little bit hypocritical considering a lot of the same people don’t mind using Google, OpenAI, Microsoft products and so on. For some reason Facebook has taken the brunt of the dislike and I think a lot of my colleagues might actually feel better about their children being on TikTok than any sort of Meta product.
Not that you can really avoid being included on the Meta platform if these things start filming you in public.
> my colleagues might actually feel better about their children being on TikTok than any sort of Meta product
As a former scrolling addict, I can attest that Instagram is by far worse for mental health than Tik Tok. It's about the algorithms.
If you show Tik Tok that you like certain niche content it will learn that and only show you it, when it tries to show you something else that you don't prefer (once every 100 videos in my case) if you show disinterest it won't show more of it.
With Instagram, what you prefer (e.g. mindful content) is secondary to bombarding you with content that triggers endless scroll behaviour. I've tried training it to not do that by clicking the explicit "not interested" button, on dozens of videos at a time, multiple sessions, but it just wouldn't work. At times it seemed like it is finally learning what i prefer, and then next day mindless memes are again 90% of the feed. In contrast, Tik Tok required a tiny fraction of explicit training that I prrformed on Insta, and on Tik Tok it was very effective.
I can say with absolute certainty that Instagram is very detrimental to my health (hence I don't use it), and suprisingly Tik Tok is actually pretty great.
My usual Tik Tok session now looks like this: I launch it, get a video that's really relevant to me, and for every video that I watch there's about 30% chance that I'll close the app because I'm either thinking about what I learned or researching it. My endless scroll behaviour is never triggered. And I don't usually use Tik Tok more than 2 times a week. This isn't because of willpower, it's because I genuinely value the content it's providing me and I need time to digest it. Watching more often would be like wasting it. This has been going on for about 6 months now.
Disclaimer: I wouldn't be suprised if I'm in some a/b testing program within Tik Tok, and it might be using a variant algorithm. I don't have evidence, but I know that for a time my UI was a little different than others' (e.g. no favorite functionality).
Problem is not children having access to it. It is more parents outsourcing parenting to YouTube/TikTok or Meta. If parents still take responsibility on how much and where the child spends their time, it is no different than any other tech gadget. People are concerned about new tech since the time of Guttenberg.
I think that's a realistic scenario. They will certainly attempt to use the data accessible by XR devices to make ads more effective. Actually succeeding at doing so seems realistic to me, too.
Whether the legislature has notably limited data collection for ad purposes by then - probably not.
If it’s Facebook for sure. I’m still waiting to see if Microsoft has actually changed or is just doing a very long PR stunt. A lot of Balmer execs are still there. Putting a new head on the fish doesn’t necessarily prevent the rot.
we need protections for children. An argument can be made that adults are responsible for their data, perhaps protections here are also needed, but children can't be held responsible. I would not want my children's data being harvested for some multimodal model; these days even toothbrushes are iot devices. Where will the data harvesting begin to end?
1) This is Google ads, not Meta
2) Google is definitely being sneaky here with targeting to the “unknown” category, but technically speaking they’re not targeting kids - just everyone who they don’t explicitly know is an adult. It’s an interesting legal question, it does seem to violate the spirit of the law somehow.
I've long been a huge skeptic of the whole Metaverse project/undertaking, I think I've called it a smoking crater where ten billion dollars used to be.
But this is really interesting: it sounds like the display works, and it sounds like the puck is workable, and it sounds like both can squeak above the line in terms of battery life. If those things are true I may turn out to have been completely wrong.
I don't know the first thing about silicon carbide display substrate thingy yields, so I can't remark on whether or not that's a "scale will make cost acceptable", but I bet some mega geniuses at Meta think so or they probably wouldn't be showing this much.
If it turns out that I was dead wrong on this I'll be glad I was, it would be really cool if it works.
> I think I've called it a smoking crater where ten billion dollars used to be.
It’s less of a waste of money if it paints Facebook as a technology leader and distracts lawmakers, and helps give the company mind space among the tech press.
In fact the metaverse may have started out as DC strategy [1].
Facebook Inc. is old and boring, catering to a predominantly older cohort and becoming “Big Social” by buying up anything promising (Instagram, WhatsApp). But Meta Inc. is a scrappy pioneer at the forefront of American tech that’s creating the future™. Be harsh with them at your peril, is the implicit message to lawmakers.
If you look at it as a PR / Corporate defense strategy, a billion is actually cheap.
The Verge's article[1] mentions that the consumer version planned to be a few years out won't have silicon carbine lenses, and that those lenses are responsible for the majority of the cost of the Orion device due to extremely poor yields. Sounds like they're pretty great otherwise so maybe they're return to it at some point in the mid-future.
I agree regarding the undertaking - enormously costly, but if they can make it "just glasses" it might actually end up as the "next computing format" Zuckerberg was looking for. (Even in that case though, whether it was worth the investment/Meta can stay on top I don't know.)
I think it's fair to assume this is where the VAST majority of the Reality Labs spend was going ... cutting edge R&D on getting this kind of form factor, whilst some others (who perhaps lack object permanence) thought it was all going on Horizon.
Aswath Damodaran did an analysis on Meta valuation. He found out that even if all the 10s of billions being invested give 0 in terms of revenue it doesn't have much impact on its stock value and in turn companies value. So, I think it would be stupid for Zuckerberg to not invest in Metaverse unless he is missing some better opportunity.
$10B? Closer to $50B now. They're spending about $3-4B per quarter at the moment, and their guidance last earnings call was spending in RL would only tick up in the coming quarters.
Given that this is AR, not VR, and that AR has never even been as popular as VR outside a few industrial niches, I don't think this should change anything in your estimate of the value. Despite all the hype, the only thing that XR has ever been mildly popular for has been VR gaming. AR glasses can't do that well, since everything is transparent, instead of making you feel like part of the game world, so I would personally bet these will be as DoA as a consumer mass market product as the Holo Lens was.
AR was never popular because there never has been a consumer device for it. When Google glass was first revealed there was a huge buzz for it.
Holo Lens hat the problem that it was both too expensive and too bulky.
If meta can make this sleek and affordable I can really see this picking up, I can think of many use cases where this would be better than both a smartphone and a VR headset:
- Navigation
- Cooking
- Interior design (like the IKEA app)
- reading (holding a real book and 'click' on words to get definitions and translations like on an ereader)
- music playing and instrument learning
I don't see it being the thing that makes it popular, but navigation is an easy thing for me to see improved by AR. Some people are comically bad at reading maps and admittedly, sometimes it's hard to orient yourself when your phone is not properly oriented and there aren't obvious markers to orient yourself with.
A bright blue line right on the ground highlighting your path would be an easy QoL win. Albeit small hence it not being the thing that I think makes it the popularizer.
-- As you say with the ikea app, I think my point is just one example of a wide variety of situations where people have a hard time visualizing that is made literal by AR.
This is a silly take. AR games are perfectly possible. Games don't need to look photo real to be immersive and a holographic animal with enough grounding in physical space still feels real, anyhow.
Additive displays do make it hard to port existing games but that was true for mobiles and touchscreen. If the platform is popular, it will have games.
> I've long been a huge skeptic of the whole Metaverse project/undertaking, I think I've called it a smoking crater where ten billion dollars used to be.
Following your train of thought, we can assume that even with skepticism, if the price is right, people will buy it, just as we purchase many other gadgets. While the market size may be smaller than that of mobile phones, it could still become appealing once people start seeing their neighbors and friends using it.
Because when you make a strong (some might say strident) assertion in a forum, and you think you may have done so in error based on new information, it's just good manners to acknowledge that you may have been mistaken.
They are as small as the technology can be made today. Meta knows that they are still too big. Zuckerberg said on stage that they will attempt to miniaturize them further and this is not a consumer product today.
Making them as small as they are is an incredible feat actually. They are better than Hololens in every respect and Hololens is absolutely massive in comparison. There are at least 5 cameras, two HD projectors, an IMU, microphones and speakers in this thing plus the chips and batteries to run them all continuously for two hours.
Now that you mention it I can see from Prada's side they need to get out ahead of the clunky AR goggle game and make it a fashion statement and meet the technology in the middle once it's miniaturized a little more
Meta's got the RayBans colab but they're gonna need the Prada colab if they want to sell at 5 kilobucks
I was an early adopter of the Galaxy Note which looked outlandishly large and goofy, back when people still spoke in awe of how Jobs made the 3.5" iPhone to fit the human hand naturally and no other form factor could possibly be right.
Fast forward today and nearly every phone looks like a galaxy note. Turns out when the utility is there, people will adapt.
> to fit the human hand naturally and no other form factor could possibly be right.
I still think this is correct. "Features" like Reachability, and even Screen Time, are software solutions to hardware problems.
I don't think people would be as addicted to their smartphones if they stayed small. At that size, they were more of a tool, and a means to get something done when away from a proper computer. As the size increased, it became mobile-first, doom scrolling entered the picture, and people started asking if phones were bad of our mental health.
Sure, but if a phone is your primary computing device, as it is for more than half the world's population, it makes sense for it to get bigger as well.
Those of us with larger hands are happy with larger phones with bigger screens.
But even people I know with smaller hands generally prefer larger phones, probably for the same reason most PC computer users prefer larger monitors rather than the 14" monitors of yesteryear.
It still seems like an improvement though. They could be mistaken for very unfashionable glasses. That’s so much closer to what people want, than Apple or Microsoft’s headsets.
Actually it is a little bit annoying, people might actually get away with wearing these things, which means Facebook spyware might be entering everyday life. I’m glad I’m too old for parties.
Thick rims like those are considered high fashion right now. It's the opposite of goofy and says a lot about the audience here that you're all oblivious to this fact.
Modern men’s clothing often originated as work clothing (e.g. jeans) or military clothing (e.g. chinos), or something with practical use (ties stopped you spilling food on your shirt).
>... and says a lot about the audience here that you're all oblivious to this fact.
What does it say beyond, "This person doesn't pay attention to high fashion", and why does it feel like you're judging people for that? Who cares if people aren't into it? To my mind, your comment says a lot more about you than what ignorance to high fashion says about others.
It's obviously fine not to be into fashion, but if you're not, you shouldn't go around making judgment calls or confidently and incorrectly saying people wouldn't wear something for fashion reasons. It’s revealing in the sense that it shows how narrow-minded we can be, judging everything based on our own perspective and assuming it applies to everyone.
Wow, that's quite some chip on your shoulder. You're managing to project things on to my post that I didn't say, at all.
Literally all I said was I thought they were large and goofy looking. I didn't say anything about people wearing, or not wearing them, or anything about whether they were fashionable or not. You've taken my post, read things I didn't say, made up stuff, and then judged me for it.
All OP said was that they found them goofy looking. Whether or not you're into high fashion doesn't change the fact that taste is entirely subjective and everyone who finds them too thick, or goofy looking, is more than welcome to that opinion. Doesn't make them out of touch or narrow minded at all.
And please, look at all of Meta's own comments on the size of this prototype - it's obvious that the size isn't because it's "in" in high fashion, but because that's the smallest they could reasonably get it.
There's a reason they call it high fashion and not just fashion. But granted, maybe theres some billionaire bubble that's in on the joke and loves the look of this.
Wanna see the first prototypes for mobile phones? And even then it's really good compared to a Quest, but def. not good enough if you're going to wear this on the daily
My dad ran a hospital and literally had one of these things: https://hips.hearstapps.com/autoweek/assets/s3fs-public/IMG_... - Things seem to move so quickly these days I'd guess the Orion things will be reasonable to buy in 6/7 years. Getting old sucks!
The benefit of a mobile phone was extremely obvious to everyone as soon as you said what it was.
I've been reading about AR for years and I still have no idea how, if at all, I would use it. Never really come across a use case that's compelling for me. Getting WhatsApp messages without taking my phone out of my pocket feels like the opposite to the direction I'd like to move in.
>I've been reading about AR for years and I still have no idea how, if at all, I would use it.
I do: to display a moving map from Google Maps while cycling. It'd be incredibly handy for navigation in a city. Everyone these days uses a navigation app in their car to navigate (esp. to unfamiliar destinations), but how do you do that on a bicycle? You can get one of those phone mounts for your handlebars, but it's really clunky, and difficult (or impossible) to see in bright sunlight. Plus, in my experience, phones tended to fall out of them, as it was hard to find a mount that would fit a modern-size (read: large) phone; they seem to all be designed with 2010-model phones in mind.
Peak Design has, in my opinion, a better solution than quadmount - it mounts securely (magnet + slot) and keeps the ability to wirelessly charge. Do have to use their case though, but it's a very attractive case. I use it in conjunction with the Trek BellBeats and I'm satisfied.
Ok, I looked this up but there's a big problem here: it only works with certain phone models (and requires using their case). There is a "universal" option which basically glues a part to your existing phone or case, but this only works on certain case materials, and rubber isn't one of them (so no Otterboxes allowed). (Also, no polypropylene, polyethylene, or silicone.) So it might or might not work, depending on your phone and case.
But it doesn't solve the visibility problem: good luck seeing your screen in direct sunlight. And also the problem where you have to look down at your handlebards, refocus your eyes for close-up vision (this is really bad if you're over ~40 due to presbyopia), and try to make out the info on the screen, and not get hit by a car or run into a pedestrian or other road hazard. If you're navigating inside a dense city, this sounds positively dangerous. AR glasses would fix all of this.
Well, it works well for my phone.
I don't have a big problem with seeing the screen in sunlight.
Looking down is definitely an issue, but not for simply following a route. In fact, for turn by turn nav, I prefer audio. And no, I'm not interested in your opinions about the safety of that :)
AR glasses might work better, but they'd introduce other issues, like conflicting with sunglasses and helmet. Plus a huge expense. I suspect for me even if I owned such a thing I would rarely use it for this case.
>AR glasses might work better, but they'd introduce other issues, like conflicting with sunglasses and helmet.
Well ideally, the AR glasses would double as sunglasses (perhaps photochromic so you can use them at night too). And if they had the same size frames as regular sunglasses (and not these huge clunky ones seen on the prototype), then they wouldn't interfere with your helmet any more than regular sunglasses.
>In fact, for turn by turn nav, I prefer audio. And no, I'm not interested in your opinions about the safety of that :)
Well I'm going to give it to you anyway :-) I've tried audio for turn-by-turn nav, and it really sucks. Not because of safety, but just because it doesn't work well. It's hard to hear if it's noisy, it doesn't tell which road to turn on correctly, etc. I guess if you're in some rural area and there's only one turn visible in the next kilometer, it's fine, but I live in Tokyo and roads here are tiny (1 car wide at best in many places) and close together, so when it says "turn right", that doesn't really tell me much. It also doesn't help much because nav usually wants to direct me on main roads instead of side roads, but side roads are much better for cycling: on main roads, you either ride with traffic and get hit by trucks, or you ride on the sidewalk and dodge pedestrians going in and out of storefronts (the latter is preferred by almost all cyclists here). But on the side roads, you can avoid most of this. The problem, however, is that many side roads don't go far before they're blocked by a park or a train line or something else. A moving map would show you the road layout so you can choose for yourself a convenient route, and also be able to make quick decisions for alternate routes in case you miss a turn or just want to ride a different way for some reason. On top of all that, the audio is just plain loud and annoying and rude to all the pedestrians nearby, and makes me feel embarrassed.
You could have things overlaid on top of real life content in order to provide you assistance, hands free. For example, think about GPS turn by turn navigation while walking or having a recipe displayed while cooking it.
The problem is that people would really dislike that. It's even satirized in Snow Crash in an extremely unflattering portrayal of the kind of person who would routinely do this.
> The benefit of a mobile phone was extremely obvious to everyone as soon as you said what it was.
I would say the same about AR. I'm surprised by your comment. Lately I've been using it a lot when shopping for furnitures (to place the furniture in my space and see how it fits, amazon and a bunch of furniture places let you do that).
That's how fashion works. If someone is indifferent about what you wear today then expect them to be indifferent about it in 5-10 years too. But if someone makes fun of it today expect it to be fashionable within 10 years.
I hate owning too many socks so I would wear "long" socks with everything, including shorts. I would also tuck my trousers into my socks when cycling. This was considered a massive faux pas 10 years ago. Guess what the youth do today? Yep, long socks are in!
I bought a pair of glasses last week that look exactly like the 60's photo, but with a brown frame. Wasn't familiar with GI Glasses before, I just think that design looks cool.
The first iphones and ipods were stunning for their time; they changed the industry and people would wait for hours on end in line at stores. It seems like a reach to compare these glasses to that.
I'm not comparing actual devices. I'm comparing how large they were when they were first released. The original iPod and iPhones were bricks compared to what the latest/last versions and it didn't have a touch screen and cameras.
The point is, the size of new technology tend to shrink fast.
The original iPod might have been a brick compared to the iPod nano, but it still wasn't that big. I don't think many people today would be upset to carry an original iPod. It was much smaller than the discman sized devices it was competing with.
The original iPhone was one of the smallest iPhones ever made. It did nothing but get bigger over time. If you want to compare the modern smart phone to a Zack Morris phone, or the bag phones that came before it, that would be a better way to go if the argument is size reduction over time.
True! But society can move backwards sometimes, todays smartphones are growing and and each generation of BEV gets heavier!
Something in the collective unconscious is screaming "put the biggest brick you can make in my hand and give me a main battle tank to go to TJ's." and industry is happy to oblige!
Maybe wearing a gigantic ugly thing on your face that beeps and has flashing lights isn't such a far step
That's why this AR sunglasses bid is absolutely the wrong move.
Someone needs a lesson about the uncanny valley. Short story: unless you are all the way at the top go down, not up. Lean into the goofiness that your limitations demand. Make a decent new thing, not a strange old thing.
I don't know, right now I'm more interested in the capabilities of these glasses. But the video showing people's reactions to using them... That's what seemed a bit strange to me. Or you sat "goofy".
It's because the lenses aren't transparent OLED displays like the ones LG is making. The images on the "screens" are literally being projected by small projectors fitted into the frame onto the lenses.
The problem is that these companies keep wanting to put processing in the glasses. The glasses should only have the minimum circuitry to send, receive and render very high definition video. All the processing should be done in another device (like the arm band) that is carried nearby (like the wireless microphones they use in TV or concerts: https://www.amazon.com.mx/UHF-Wireless-Microphone-System-Kit... ). That way you are not CPU constrained.
I would say have a "cache level" like combination:
* very low/few computation done at the glasses level
* medium computation done at the brick unit level
* hard/intensive computation done in the cloud.
> The problem is that these companies keep wanting to put processing in the glasses.
I agree. The obvious choice is to offload to our insanely powerful phones. Unfortunately WiFi is too disruptive on mobile OSs and raw Bluetooth is.. well does that even need an explanation? Apple are probably the only ones who could deliver a seamless high bandwidth link and decent pairing, atm. But they spent their prototype-billions on a headset instead.
On the other hand though.. do we really need to run multiple cameras and a realtime image processing pipeline to say that the cacao on your countertop is, in fact, cacao? These AR “experiences” make cool demos, but once the novelty wears off, nobody wants to play planetarium or anatomy class for hours a day.
Note that without the whole AR part of it, there’s still some really cool hardware for all kinds of purposes. That can be really handy when you want or need both hands free. For instance POV video for say sports, HUD and voice interface for eg cycling, maybe watching videos while working, anything requiring gloves (cold, wet hands, gardening) todo-list in the corner of eye when shopping, etc etc. You could reduce form factor and increase battery time significantly, even if you keep accelerometer, gyro, projector, light sensor, cameras etc. But for some reason, utility is not even a priority with these companies.
Yeah, I know but with a puck, which isn’t feasible for consumer. A phone already has sufficient compute, but Apple and Google would need to provide/open up radio- and pairing protocols.
I understand your position. It's the architecture that a lot of players in the space (e.g. Qualcomm) are doubling down on --- and it seems intuitively obvious that we should tether smart glasses to ubiquitous phones.
The problem is that by doing so we make glasses secondary, auxiliary devices. You wouldn't leave your house without your phone, but if you forget your tethered glasses, well, no big deal.
The only way we move past phone as personal computing form factor is making alternatives standalone devices. If you could do everything you do on your phone, but on glasses, you might drop the phone habit. If you can't drop the phone habit, and there are only so many things you can take with you when you leave your house, AR glasses will always be an afterthought.
Is it feasible to do wireless transmission of video at extremely low latency?
Wireless microphones are not a good comparison because they are probably analog, but even if they are digital a few dozen milliseconds of delay is going to be imperceptible for audio in a way that video is not.
Having built similar tech (Meta, YC S13), it's been a great year with Vision Pro, Orion, Spectacles and more coming out.
Currently at my co, seeing most day to day use out of XReal, and keen for Visor.
AR/XR/MR/VR app I'm most looking forward to is a 360 location share with the sharing user in AR, and the receiving user in VR, with additional virtual objects shared between. Orion would be great for the send side, with a few extra cameras and Vision Pro on the receive side.
The main thing letting down tech today is how open the platforms are for external developers.
The lack of projecting black I don't see as an issue, clip on something for VR (ok 70 degress isn't quite enough but getting fairly close), or just dim and use gradients for day to day work.
I think we're still at the most basic level in terms of understanding optical physics and ultra high resolution much smaller devices will come out, probably not too soon though.
I remember Meta (your old Meta not the new Zuck's Meta) had an amazing section of the site where you could submit and see sort of like Kickstarter proposals for use cases and I always wondered where all that creative devkit type passion went. Probably on a couple hard drives in a lockup.
Ah yes! I remember working on this. It was born out of asking all the YC founders what they wanted to see - and anyone else we met as well. Formed the basis of our second kickstarter which we self hosted and was much more successful.
> The main thing letting down tech today is how open the platforms are for external developers.
You mean how closed they are? Apple was bad about this, but I think Meta is pretty good with helping spatial / game devs? Am I wrong about that? I don't work in the space, it's just my impression
Yes, correct. As in their degree of openness (not much) is what's letting them down. I see how you could have read it as I meant their too open, which I definitely don't think is the case!
Hard edged, per-pixel light blocking is impossible for the foreseeable future. What's possible today, and what Magic Leap has, is diffuse dimming of large areas of the display.
The problem with light blocking is that when the blocker is millimeters from your eye it is completely out of focus. Unlike for the display, you can't use optics to make it appear farther away and in focus because the direction of the light it needs to attenuate can't be modified (or else your view of the world through the glasses would be warped).
For a near-eye light blocker to work, it would need to be a true holographic element which can selectively block incoming light based not just on its position but also its direction. Each pixel would essentially be an independent display unto itself that selectively blocks or passes incoming light based on its direction, instead of indiscriminately like a normal LCD. I have no idea how such a thing could ever be fabricated.
Damn! That's a throwback. I remember reading about you guys in an airplane magazine once and getting hooked on the concept. I always wondered where y'all went...
a bunch at Vision Pro, some at Zuck's Meta, some at Hololens, some doing other things. Meron is doing BCI, I'm doing AI infra - strongcompute.com (YC W22)
I just can't imagine ever buying something like this from Facebook. I know everyone shits on about Google being bad and whatnot, but the things I buy from Google aren't really part of their advertising business. I pay for Workspace and Google Cloud Platform, and those things don't advertise at me.
I am more likely to cruise around already logged into Google as a result of using those things, which obviously plays into their ad business, but those products that I pay for aren't vehicles for advertising and I don't think Google would ever try to make them that.
Likewise, Apple does obviously advertise some of their own services (like iCloud backup) in mildly annoying ways through their devices, but by and large I'm buying a thing from them and only to the extent that I am engaged with one of their Apps (like TV+ or Music) do they try and advertise at me.
In neither case are their platforms inherently about advertising.
Facebook just strikes me as a fundamentally different company. Even if I were to pay them for these glasses I would have no confidence that it wasn't just a gigantic suckhole being fed into their slush fund of data.
Agree with the sibling commenter here, this stance baffles me. Google have been caught breaking the law on data collection enough times at this stage that there's absolutely no reason to ever assume they aren't being as invasive & insidious as they can be in their products.
I think people seem to give Google a free pass because so much of their presence in our lives is implicit/invisible but they are so much more embedded than Facebook could ever be.
I take a totally different position than you do. If I can't think of a technical reason Google can't get data from something, I assume they do. Why do you think otherwise? Google's full of exactly the same rapacious MBA types that Facebook is, and has the exact same obligations to its shareholders. They're essentially the same business (trap users in your services to mine their data and show them ads). I honestly see very little difference.
I find the MBA hate on HN so weird. The founders and leaders of these companies are technologists first. We need to look in the mirror - there's no dodge that software developers, not MBAs, have built these invasive, addictive, misleading, and dangerous products.
MBA's are almost never first-time founders. You can find them circling above these companies and positions only after a company has become successful, looking to extract more "value" out of an already-existing (and usually captive) userbase.
The MBAs tell them to build invasive, addictive misleading and dangerous products and they have to do it otherwise the software developer gets replaced with another one that will do the job.
There is always a comment saying Apple is much worse than people think compared to Facebook or Google. But there are never any Sources. Google and Facebook track you wherever you go on the internet. You can't get away from it. Apple only shows ads in their App Store. And you can turn off Apples tracking in their Settings. How is that "Much worse than you think"?
I don't think that's a nitpick, that kinda voids their point entirely.
Apple is a lot worse then most of their users believe - but even at their worst, they're leagues more privacy focused and less invasive then Google, Facebook and Microsoft are.
But they're still getting worse every year, and the time when they were actually torchbearers for privacy have slowly faded over the years as MBAs have strengthened their hold on the company and Steve Jobs influence waned.
It's still of value to have companies that have different incentives even if they will still try to prey on you, if only because you get to spread your digital footprint among competing companies rather than allies.
Going back to Apple, their stance on privacy is more geared towards their internal consumption (abuse?) than towards privacy violation-as-a-service for sale. That's not great but I'll take anything I can get.
I know what I'm sharing with Apple is up for grabs by them to use "against" me. And I know the same is true for Google of Facebook, so no real difference here. The problem is the next level, where what I share with someone else is up for grabs by Google or Facebook, or the other way around. This huge web of data collection and sharing is the big problem, not the posts that I'm volunteering to give to FB or the emails I choose to host with Google.
In other words, when you talk to me alone you choose to give me the information, you're aware I will use it in some way to shape my actions. If you tell me your phone broke, I'll offer to sell you my spare, and you won't turn red that I used the info. But if a stranger shows up at your door a minute later to sell you a phone we're suddenly having a different conversation. Same if you go to a pharmacy on the other side of town to buy some medication and the moment you make the payment I send you a text offering my regrets for your illness.
"A lot worse" can mean very different things if you talk in relative or absolute terms, or if you think some practices are just as bad as others.
I have a simple (simplistic maybe) way of ranking the tech giants for privacy: how much of their revenue is ads. Facebook is the worst (98% I believe), followed by google (~90% last time I checked). Apple is in the “least worst” category by this metric for now, but they are slipping.
It reeks of the same "both sides"-ing going on in US politics right now. I have an iPhone, and I refuse to install any Google or Meta apps. Am I being tracked? Of course. Is it still an order of magnitude less tracking than the former companies? I'd wager it is.
Don't get me wrong. Apple definitely has problems. But the thread was specifically about facebook and ad tracking networks. And to conflate different arguments that have nothing to do with tracking into just "Apple Bad" lacks a lot of nuance.
The problem with ad companies is not that they show ads. But that they are trying to paint a perfect picture of you to sell you stuff. And they are painting that picture by spying on you and your peers.
I hope that you can see the difference between spying on your users and selling that data to advertisers and using telemetry in some product. If you ever worked in software you will know that having telemetry can lead to massive improvements in the product. That said, that data has to be confined to the applicable use case and has to be anonymized.
If you really think there is no difference between ad tracking and telemetry you are right. Apple is a lot worse than people think, but better than Google/Facebook.
But if we are talking just about ads, than Apple is definitely not worse than people think. Because they hardly even have an ad network and when they ask you if you want to be tracked you can just select "No".
Apples main advertisements are the app store placements.
You're vastly underestimating the significance of that, as this is personalized too. It's also been shown that you cannot actually opt out of everything, only some things.
At the end of the day, I still consider my Apple devices to be less intrusive then the android and Windows devices I use, but you seem to have an outdated view of Apple's business practices - at least from my perspective
Did you not read your own links before posting them lol?
> Mind you, this is definitionally a conspiracy theory; please don’t let the connotations of that phrase bias you, but please feel free to read this (and everything else on the internet) as critically as you wish.
This is a conspiracy theory in terms of the Apple's intent. Everything written in the article is true and verifiable.
> I just don’t think any of those things is particularly bad
If it's fine with you that Apple sends info about every file you open on you Mac to their servers, read the corresponding discussion. The comments explain well why it's a serious privacy breach.
Yes, there are plenty of thing in my life that I think about more than what Apple knows about the files I open. I can’t change it and it doesn’t help me to get twisted up in knots about it so I don’t worry about it.
This statement would need more details. Firefox is in the repositories of most Linux distros' main repositories, most of which only allow free software.
With this option enabled, unfortunately.
Now, even if technically true for the official distribution (because I don't know, the DRM part, or something like this, although technically, I believe it is not part of this distribution, it is downloaded by open source code on first use), this seems like a weak rebuttal.
At this point, I know this link almost by heart. This is not useful. It doesn't mention Firefox at all. It doesn't contradict at all what I'm saying. It doesn't hint at you being right neither.
But okay, let's dig in anyway. PureOS, a FSF-approved distro listed by your link, has a FSF mirror and this mirror contains Firefox [1]. Mistakes (to be proven) aside, this makes for quite a strong endorsement from the FSF itself, actually.
Now I expect some more substantive argument or I won't answer anymore. I'm a friend, I'm heavily biased toward FLOSS, it's not like I'm trying to downplay your activism around free software, but we need strong, convincing and correct and kind, gentle and respectful arguments if we want this to work. It's not even like I'm trying to defend Firefox at all cost, I don't like some recent moves from Mozilla including this one.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. You are right in principle that FLOSS apps can and do have telemetry/surveillance included. In practice, it's much, much less frequent than for any proprietary apps. If we go even further and make the FLOSS definition as strict as it gets (i.e., stick to FSF), then such problem almost disappears.
Does any other FSF-approved distro include Firefox? I guess Firefox should not belong to PureOS. If you read the criteria for the free distros, you will see that anything that downloads or even mentions nonfree software should be excluded. Even Debian was excluded for this reason, including one with only "main" repository enabled. Firefox mentions DRM and downloads it in just one click. AFAIK PureOS didn't include Firefox in the beginning, but the users demanded it.
> You are right in principle that FLOSS apps can and do have telemetry/surveillance included
Note that I was just replying to your "Firefox is non-free" statement, not to this. I do agree that the tracking story is way better when using free software in general (but that indeed, it's not a guarantee, especially when using official installers from sloppy software editors).
----
Code that is under a free software license that downloads (and runs) non-free software is still free software.
This can be seen as an anti-feature, F-droid would call this one "Non-Free Addon" [1], but this is a separate matter.
For a distro to be approved by the FSF, it needs to only include free software, and also match additional, more restrictive criteria such as, indeed, not promoting non-free software. But this doesn't qualify some specific software, it qualifies a distribution.
In addition to DRM, Firefox also has other issues, including these:
- it allows non-free addons on its extension repository, and even recommends (promotes) some of them (also Non-Free Addons)
- it includes features that depends on non-free services, like pocket (Non-Free Network Services [2])
I don't like them, but that doesn't make Firefox proprietary. Worst case, it isn't suitable as is for a FSF-approved distro. Which, again, goes beyond the quality of being free software.
The fsf.org blog post you link to (which I'm also familiar with) shares concerns (which I mostly share, indeed), but doesn't state that it makes Firefox non-free software. There's one point that I would debate from this link:
> We agree with Cory Doctorow that there is no meaningful distinction between 'installing DRM' and 'installing code that installs DRM.'
The distinction is meaningful, because embedding the DRM code in Firefox itself would make Firefox non free. However I agree that it makes Firefox promote horrible software without even warning the user, which is not great at all.
tl;dr: The concepts of FSF-approved distro and free software should not be mixed up. They are both useful but separate concepts. I could even see someone being full pro free software but thinking that FSF-approved distro goes too far.
> But this doesn't qualify some specific software, it qualifies a distribution.
I never thought about it. Why wouldn't it be the same for any software? A distribution is nothing else but a (large) set of software. Do you think one could find a software that downloads something nonfree in the FSF Free Software Directory? I do not expect that.
Nowadays, in our connected world, it doesn't matter if the software nonfree or it downloads a nonfree piece. It's effectively the same thing.
You could extend the criteria for fsf-approved distributions to extensible software, it would make sense.
Then you'd have free software, and then fsf-approved software, a subset of the former.
I guess they defined criteria for distributions specifically because they needed to provide guidance to people building distributions. You have to be specific to be clear and useful, many things are probably irrelevant to general software.
> Nowadays, in our connected world, it doesn't matter if the software nonfree or it downloads a nonfree piece. It's effectively the same thing.
Well, for me a line is definitely crossed between the proprietary code never reaching my computer or the code sitting here. I'm personally comfortable with an option to download proprietary software that is disabled by default.
I'm quite comfortable with Debian offering me to install non free firmware as long as it's optional and clear. I'm fine with its documentation mentioning non-free software as long as it's clearly marked as well (and done reluctantly). Of course I would not be happy with Debian's wiki recommending proprietary software left and right. But I think forbidding to share some knowledge goes a bit too far (it is borderline censorship), and is not even practical: even Purism recommended a way to upgrade the Intel microcode when spectre and meltdown were discovered and mitigated [1]. Although they claim that the patch isn't part of PureOS, they are the ones maintaining the distro, it feels close enough and quite artificial for an update of something that's already running in the CPU anyway.
I believe that it was quite clever of RMS not to try to put those restrictions in the free software definition.
> Do you think one could find a software that downloads something nonfree in the FSF Free Software Directory? I do not expect that.
Typically, Firefox with the non-free extensions.
We need a pure message from the fsf, but I don't believe the fsf-approved distro criteria help a lot, they are so impractical (and borderline undesirable imho for the censorship part) that if free software oriented distros like Debian and Fedora respected them, the free software movement would probably be weaker, with way fewer people being able to switch to a free distro. It would possibly be counter productive, because there would probably be fewer people helping other switch, and working on free replacements.
It's a tradeoff: too many compromises dilute and weaken or even cancel the message. Too few makes the message irrelevant to too many people. And I don't believe discussing solutions based on proprietary software is compromising if done correctly. You at least need to know what to reverse engineer to produce a free alternative. Convincing people that free software is the right way to handle computers is important, and it is far more effective if it is within their reach. Migrating from windows or Mac to a (GNU/)Linux distro but with non-free firmware is already a net win. If the alternative is to just stay on windows, that's possibility way fewer people convinced that free software is the right way to do stuff, and possibility fewer people working on getting rid of proprietary software.
> but I don't believe the fsf-approved distro criteria help a lot, they are so impractical
They are, but it's by design. You are not supposed to follow them as an ordinary user. They were created in order to show the one true freedom as it should exist.
Oh, I didn't realize there is a FSF free software directory. Thanks for the (re?)discovery.
> They are, but it's by design
I don't think anybody actually wants free software without any compromise to be impractical, so no, I would not say by design, it's just a sad reality.
My stronger concern is that it's likely impractical for free software advocacy.
> I don't think anybody actually wants free software without any compromise to be impractical
This is not what I meant when I said "by design". I meant that in today's world, striving for the true, pure freedom is very much expected to be impractical, so do not be surprised that the FSF-endorsed distros are unusable. Nobody wants that but it's expected. This however serves as a goal, so not completely useless. I guess we agree.
they don't need to buy the transactions. they have apple pay that integrates your cards into their system. then they push apple pay everywhere both offline and on. eventually they will own all the data
Apple says that they don't tie transaction data to you personally. But that they do use it for marketing purposes alongside the obvious fraud prevention.
That's one of those little white lies. Sure, they don't "tie your transaction data to you personally", but they absolutely do. Every purchase you've ever made on the internet has been deanonymized to a globally unique "Device ID". The companies that manage those device ids absolutely have your entire online interaction history, everything.
It only takes about 30 bits of entropy to perfectly deanonymize everyone, and I know of many companies that have been doing it for at least a decade or more.
> they have apple pay that integrates your cards into their system
A feature which they've loudly and publicly said many many times they can't use for tracking your purchases, as they anonymize the data before it gets to them.
Apple has a long history of not using user-generated data for their own use, sometimes to their own detriment.
> Facebook just strikes me as a fundamentally different company. Even if I were to pay them for these glasses I would have no confidence that it wasn't just a gigantic suckhole being fed into their slush fund of data.
I agree, and to that I would add the way they've been contributing, if not actively engaged, to push reality-denying propaganda from hostile third parties, including state actors.
Data collection is not only bad because of advertising; that's the most visible annoyance to us, but I'd argue that the kinds of data collection that Google (and especially Apple) enable can be orders of magnitude more harmful (things like client side scanning of content, location tracking even with the phone turned off and these all-knowing AI datasets that are just a query away from learning the most intimate things about you).
The fundamentally different aspect is also at the user end - you need fb account to run these gadgets, spend money associated with this account and when someone tries to “hack” that account (because it is public), you loose it without a chance to ever get back the account or money. There is no way how to contact any living person for support, most you can get is their faq.
I cannot imagine such situation with gmail.
My first thought was, “does Meta have a user base anymore that would be interested in this?” Who is their early adopter demographic?
Someday old people will use VR for escape but only when they are the late adopters. Zuckerberg has lost his damn mind. But don’t tell him that, I want the full Willie Wonka experience.
I've used Facebook for years and the worst that's happened is they've tried to show me some ads. I can live with the forces of evil knowing I've put up "hi mum, here's my hol pics" etc.
Google very publicly commits that enterprise customers (GCP, Workspace) have their data firewalled off from ads. If you have evidence to the contrary, there are many, many companies and governments that would like to know.
This looks to me like a consumer product, so it you should compare it to Google's similar products, not enterprise ones.
Does Google stop tracking you when you pay for Youtube Premium ? When you buy a Pixel phone ?
Like you, I do think that in general Facebook is an evil company, more than the others mentioned, but I don't think that if Google were able to produce a similar consumer device, they would track me any less
This is the form factor that I always wanted from HoloLens (which I own). The release is very light on details of field of view and resolution (other than "best ever" puffery), that's where we'll get a better sense of actual use cases. The ball game shown looked very rudimentary in terms of only taking place in a small directly-in-front-of-user sense. This is also where HoloLens games fell flat -- you'd turn your head slightly to the left or right, and suddenly key game elements would vanish.
Edit -- the home page says 70-degree FoV. Not bad, better than HoloLens (45-degree FoV if I recall), but perhaps not enough to turn your head to the person next to you while still having game elements persist in vision
I tried out the first gen version at a meetup and it was really nifty (the latency was fantastic), but I just couldn't work out what anyone would use it for in real life, it seemed too limited to be useful.
Then you see what Facebook wants you to do with it - see screens in front of you all the time. One with Facebook's "Recommended" page, and a video of some talking neckbeard. There's a feeling of "we were promised virtual reality, and all we got was talking heads of influencers." The hardware apparently has GPS, but that's turned off. So, no Pokemon Go yet. Not even Hyperreality.[1] It's all about ads and clicks.
It can't draw dark. The workaround seems to be to dim out the world and draw light overlays, like almost everybody else. Will it work in bright daylight?
If they get the hardware right, apps should surely fill in with better use cases over time. The Verge demoed a better scenario where orion picked up on food ingredients in field of view and displayed a smoothie recipe using them.
This has been such a frustrating limitation of all the big AR platforms. For years, my company has wanted to make an AR app for a certain industrial use case that scans QR codes. Neither Meta nor Apple allow it! We had to give up and do AR on an iPhone instead. Think about that - the iPhone has more powerful AR than the Apple Vision Pro for every developer except Apple.
You won’t need to. If it’s a thing it’ll be in 10,000 SEO spam headlines, on every other social media everything and repeated on TV newscasts and 1 out of every 2 podcasts.
Even if it turns out that the only application of this is to show ads (which will not be the case), the hardware alone is a monumental achievement of engineering.
I would love to see ads on these, at least once. In contrast, I've never had any interest to even try Apple's VR headset. This is one of the most well-put v1 products ever.
Avoid the MKDBHC trap (or however it's spelled). Innovation beats cynicism, every day.
Assuming you're talking about Rabbit and the Humane pin reviews, those products were garbage and a product reviewer should tell consumers they're garbage, that's literally their job. This isn't the same thing at all because A it's not a product you can buy which they have lied about to get anyone to buy, B it's actually impressive technology.
See-through AR and pass-through VR are not remotely the same thing.
AR is much harder.
They have quite an accomplishment with those glasses, even if image quality isn't great and they're still too heavy.
I still don't see a problem that these solve at any price, which has been the enduring problem with AR and makes me bearish on if a next generation of these glasses is anything more than an expensive toy.
If you watch Zuck's product reveal video, he explains how it's almost a completely different tech-tree.
There's a reason why there's no other similar device on the market right now (i.e. same capabilities).
Also, the interaction through the arm muscles is just awesome (two v1s for the price of one :D). I've been waiting for that kind of UI for decades.
Google actually had it developed about 10 years ago as one of their moonshot projects; but they also had Pichai already, who is dumb as a rock. I could believe he's secretly on the payroll of many competing companies, lol.
The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.
–Jeff Hammerbacher
Oh lament! for what, not just the future, but the present, could have been.
Edited to add: But! Even as I have just written that and stand by it, I just don't know if humanity could have done it any other way. One must sell their soul to 'the green', even just a little, to have the time and space for the kind of creativity that will create a better future. Will we forever have to wade, neck-deep, through trash to find each tiny piece of the puzzle that, when enough pieces are put together, forms at least a picture of a brighter future?
VHS, the early internet, video compression, and other advances were driven by porn.
Now it seems like ads are driving everything. (Sure, including ads on porn, but I highly doubt porn dominates the ad market overall.)
It seems like the widespread adoption that drives and is driven by technological progress always comes down to catering to some base urge. I guess if you zoom out, everything is driven by base urges, just more or less directly?
So far, the puzzle pieces have always been found in the filthy heap of slop the feeds our primitive brains. We have not yet elected someone because they're the wisest, best fit for the position. It's always the person who can stroke our egos and soothe our fears, who lies with a smile that we choose to trust even when we know it's a lie. It's always a lie. We buy the product that makes us feel best to buy. Sometimes these happen to momentarily coincide with our best interests, but usually not, and never after the competition for our eyeballs and gonads has been minmaxed. Rational superiority is never the deciding factor—even when we convince ourselves that it is, it's that conviction that makes us feel good and determines our action.
VHS was not driven by porn, and neither was video compression.
VHS adoption was driven by the fact that time shifting content was a godsend that people loved. This is a huge reason VHS beat betamax, because you could fit more football games on the VHS, even in it's abysmal longest recording quality. People bought VHS recorders well before anyone was releasing ANY media on VHS.
Name a single video compression codec or ASIC that was produced by or for a porn company. Math geeks made compression codecs well before they were viable for software encoding on general purpose computers, and then set top box manufacturers drove the adoption and development of ASICs that could actually use those codecs.
What porn HAS driven is innovation in video streaming platform UI. Youtube has stolen every nice feature it has from Pornhub, who usually deployed them years earlier.
> VHS was not driven by porn, and neither was video compression.
I think you're quibbling over what "driven by" means. Porn was not the origin of any of these, but there's pretty good evidence that its popularity played a significant role in the adoption of technologies ranging from the printing press to photography to streaming video. VHS being cheaper and recording longer caused it to be adopted by the porn producers, which resulted in much more porn being available on VHS, which tilted things in its favor. (Well, that and Sony's ambivalence towards porn on Betamax.) Geeks indeed liked to work on compression, but nobody would have cared without an application for it, and a big chunk of early internet traffic was porn. The difference between waiting 5 vs 30 minutes for a download is pretty influential. Devices with hardware acceleration, including ASICs, were popular because people had applications for them, and a solid percentage of those applications were porn.
I grew up during the development of all of these technologies. I've never been one for watching porn, but even then, it was pretty clear at least in my environment that porn was very influential. Hints and tricks to download and decode compressed video spread very rapidly through word-of-mouth networks, specifically for porn content.
Earlier, the same thing happened for stills, which were more my thing so I have firsthand knowledge. Heck, the standard test image was Lena—what showed up in the research papers was tame, but the extra 2/3 of the image below that is the reason why that was the most popular test image. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna
I share this view and have to fight strong negative feelings every time I see another technically great innovation that is just used to make people esp. young people ill and suffering. Most young people already are Insta, TicToc and YT zombies with crippled creativity and full of anxiety. Now, Meta is trying to steal the few remaining minutes they just can be human beings and not being abused as consuming bots. If Zuckerberg had the tech he would inject this crap into our dreams and promise us a better world. (I guess with my last sentence I lost the fight against my negative feelings ...)
I could not care less about the the privacy of the weirdos who will try to wear these in public. I care deeply about the further normalization of surveillance capitalism.
I try hard to be kind, but I will have very little patience for any individual who wears always-on cameras that infringe on my privacy. I don't use social media for a reason. Meta just wants to sell surveillance devices so they can collect more data, and will try to convince us it is for our benefit.
>will have very little patience for any individual who wears always-on cameras that infringe on my privacy.
I'm not a violent person but wouldn't rule out using my fists if someone was filming me or my kids. That said, I live in Japan, so they'll more than likely be banned or heavily restricted like other devices used to make covert recordings.
Ive used Meta Ray Bans since October and talked a lot about them since on HN and other places like Reddit. Also, almost half of friends and family have mentioned privacy thing too. Though looking through these comments Im not seeing much of that worry maybe the tide is turning.
Overall i dont care to film or take pics of anyone but what im experiencing in life and those Im with. No doubt that's how what the majority of Meta Ray ban wearings are using their smart glasses too.
A year of wearing them and fairly often smart glasses are the next big thing yet they will not replace the smart phone as these tech dudes say they will. You can not take a selfies with smart glasses and we are narcissistic beings.
The press release says "unmistakably a pair of glasses". The fact that you're complaining about the aesthetics and not wether or not they're glasses is a testament to the generational leap they've made here. Apple's VR goggles are glasses with "rendered" external pass through. These actually fit the traditional definition of glasses.
And yeah like in the future, these will shrink in size. Probably by half in five years. Remember in 2018 when we were wondering if we'd ever have the compute available to do "inside out tracking"? Now it's expected as a minimum requirement. How far we've come.
I mean they are prototypes, not available for purchase. Presumably they can clean up the aesthetics and provide privacy guarantees around it when it's actually for sale.
It's just to show what's possible, and to presumably jump the gun on their competitors
While still pretty clunky, I think I'd rather wear these for extended periods of time than Vision Pro glasses (100g vs 600g). This is the type of v1 minimalist design I was hoping Apple would go for. I assume Apple investigated this path but realized they would be cost prohibitive? (although when has that ever stopped Apple before?)
These are entirely different tech skill trees. Meta has been acquiring research companies and empowering researchers to invent cutting edge solutions like micro-led projects and Waveguides whereas the Vision Pro is a traditional VR headset architecture.
Similarly Google has invested in 3D displays that use lightfield displays, with Project Starline.
One would assume Apple has many lines of research towards AR glasses, but nothing is publicly known.
Meta plays the asymmetry game. Apple and OpenAI are secret shops. Meta Orion and Llama can benefit from being more open.
People are generally assuming Apple is also developing these internally. They just don't show off their tech until it is ready. But I would love to know where they are in comparison with respect to weight, size and field of view. I know it is not obvious unless you are very in the scene, but 70 degrees field of view here in this form factor is a massive breakthrough. Most similar glasses are struggling to do 45 degrees.
Apple delayed their effort 'indefinitely' to work on cheaper Vision Pro. They are at least 3-5 years behind Meta at this point. And if past is any sign of the future, Zuck is not slowing down this effort anytime soon for Apple to catch up.
This is going to be a very interesting platform battle to watch.
Around 10 years ago, in an obscure private close-knit investment chat group, a senior Apple engineer inadvertently blurted out how Apple has mostly solved iris gaze tracking and foveated rendering. When I pressed him why in the world Apple would be investing R&D dollars in this (I failed to make the logical leap to Apple mixed reality devices), he clamped up.
Apple plays the long game clearly. Wouldn’t be surprised if the Apple Vision Air already exists in an early beta form in their labs.
I'm sure Apple has prototypes like this internally. Apple clearly thinks AR is the way to go, and even tries to avoid calling Vision Pro VR. I think it's simply the tech isn't ready yet, and Apple isn't the type of company that develops in public. When we see what they have to offer, we'll be able to buy it within a matter of weeks or months.
Vision Pro could even be a red herring to get apps developed, so when their true mass market product launches it will already have thousands of native apps.
At $10K per pair in the first dev batch and the consumer version price still unknown, it's not surprising that this was not a reasonable option for Apple. It's going to be interesting to see the actual price and the specs once these glasses are launched.
Most people aren’t actually familiar with the products or technology. Most only look at a checklist on paper and don’t bother with the details beyond that.
Till these products are common place and people have tried them, it’s unfortunately always going to be the case that the distinction is not intuitive to (effectively) a layperson.
For #4, I don’t think scaling should be a major issue as the tooling industry has been manufacturing at scale for decades now. The only real difference is the customer
I think the requirements at the semi level are quite different than what the tooling industry will be able to produce. The silicon carbide layer thickness probably needs to be controlled at least to the 10 nm level and the film quality will need to be quite high for optical applications. There is some use of silicon carbide in semi in high power electronics, but I don't know how well that transfers to optical quality either.
Complex solution to a simple problem. Just ban ads in cities. Like some cities have already done. Then the ads that are left are just for stuff that is important, e.g. events, music, etc. No need for AI filtering algorithms that have to decide what to block and what to leave.
On the other hand, your solution requires a lot of people to agree and possibly turn away some money, whereas the AR solution (once available) can be individually applied without any decisions by others; only for the one person to decide whether to buy it or not (if they have the money).
So it's not that clear to me which one of these is complex and which simple.
Oh no, what a pain, to make changes to the world based on a broad consensus of opinions, rather than relying on rapacious billionaires to helpfully put their surveillance device into all of our hands without our permission.
Is graffiti also freedom of speech? If i have a wall does it mean i can write whatever i want on it? I guess not. These are social norms. And we could decide that advertisement is not ok in public spaces like it's not ok to walk around naked.
Not an equivalent situation at all. Graffiti makers don’t have billions of dollars to hire lawyers that challenge laws that ban advertising. Society increasingly runs less and less on social norms and more on laws.
Good thing that in reality people are noticing that adds are too intrusive and removing them from public spaces. Or at least regulating them. Google about the cities that have banned outdoor advertisement.
Filtering out billboards on the highway is reducing their impressions, and thus reducing the money that ultimately goes into repairing the road you're driving on.
The modified AR device will instead filter ads, but charge 0.03 cents per ad filtered, and each advertiser will get 0.02 cents each time their ad is filtered. Facebook of course keeps the remaining 30% for facilitating the ad and anti-ad marketplace.
Eventually there will be a bidding war where advertisers will require you to pay 0.10c not to view their ad, which they'll have made increasingly unpleasant to look at, and you'll have to adjust your device's balance and payment thresholds to avoid getting hit by AR jumpscares as you drive around.
Anyway, I pay on average $0.35c per youtube video not to look at ads based on the cost of youtube premium vs the number of videos I watch in a month, so honestly the above price-point seems like a good deal.
This reminds me a Futurama quote:
"Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?
Fry: Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky... But not in dreams."
1) Try and maintain some piece of software on your device to overlay real-world adds?
2) Try and maintain some piece of software on your device to block AR adds?
I know meta (ha) discussions are frowned upon on HN, but I never really understood why, so here it goes:
This link weights in 115MB. It loads a 30MB GIF for its hero image.
That's from a company that was born on and from the Web.
The people that brought you React.
Of course, but who authorizes the launch page of a major new product to be published with no technical review? Or even, any review at all?
Does it feel right when you’re selling a device for visual consumption and the main animation takes forever to load, plays at 12fps while spiking up your CPU?
For a long time it nagged at me that I was sleeping on VR/AR/XR. Couldn't bring myself to spend hundreds of dollars on something I may not use consistently, though. A few months back my wife was restoring a mural and one of the artists brought their Quest headset with Kingspray Graffiti loaded up on it. My wife tried it and loved it so I finally had enough excuse to buy a headset. It's pretty great. The first experience is quite memorable. My "killer app" is Xbox Cloud Gaming. I love laying on the couch with a gigantic, very high-quality screen immersing me in Starfield. Although two nights ago I think I got serious motion sickness. Haven't found any killer/sticky apps beyond that. But it's mission accomplished in the sense that I have crossed the gateway into the world of XR/VR/AR.
It isn't. I miss when I didn't have to examine every new device to see what data about me it's going to Hoover up to some mothership to see how it can manipulate me to do things against my interest.
But to the extent you're pitching it as some sort of reactionary lashing out against the bright glorious shining future... sorry. It's not me. It's tech. There has been a real change in the tech space. I used to just be able to take nearly for granted that tech is going to benefit me. Now I can't.
I phrased it as I did on purpose; to do things against my interest. If you are not actively guarding yourself against that, you're a victim of it, probably a great deal more than you realize. To ignore that aspect of tech is sheer foolishness and getting more dangerous by the year.
> But to the extent you're pitching it as some sort of reactionary lashing out against the bright glorious shining future... sorry. It's not me. It's tech. There has been a real change in the tech space. I used to just be able to take nearly for granted that tech is going to benefit me. Now I can't.
Tech was a lot more fun when the builders were amoral ("I'm just gonna build this, and if somebody misuses it, that's not my problem") rather than straight up immoral, but here we are.
> If you are not actively guarding yourself against that, you're a victim of it, probably a great deal more than you realize
Just check the website in their profile. Cryptocurrency, hell they had a role in Libra (fb coin that got shut down by the SEC i believe). Not a victim but a perpetrator.
I don't know if you mean that to counter my point, but I see it as support. Although crypto isn't really what I'm talking about on the new threat front, it's mostly made of old scams that have existed for a long time.
To put this in perspective I am currently locked out of one of my online bank accounts because I refuse to let them share the data with Facebook. It is setup so you must first agree, and then “withdraw consent”.
The poor bank reps haven’t got a clue what to do, mainly because absolutely no one else has ever refused before. The vast majority of people in the modern world have no grasp of what is going on, and will not until it is too late.
It's not that people can't see the potential, but the more likely of where this particular vendor will take things. Not being able to see the true intent behind marketing would be a horrific thing to me.
Frankly, it sucks. I had so much fun with new tech when I was younger. But many companies, and FB in particular, have managed to crush my expectations time and time again.
Still kinda dorky looking but 10x better than what Snap unveiled last week.[^1] Software looks miles ahead of the AR glasses competition as well. Nice job FB engineers...keep cooking!
I was going to say that Snap's offering was probably cheaper or designed for mass marketing because their page looks like something you could actually buy.
But that isn't the case! Snap will only rent them to you at $1200/year [0], can't imagine what the BOM is like for either of these products.
It says something that sony has the ability to fail like that and continue. Just like FB failed at the metaverse after doubling and tripling down about how it was the future of the company before it just kinda stopped talking about it.
Companies with this much cash can take risks and fail with little to no concequences, smaller companies cannot and thus often choose not compete or just HOPE that they get bought by one of these near monopolies.
Using caps doesn’t make this affirmation any more true.
While you’re correct that it does massively help, money is only a resource, which you can use to trade for a lot of things, but there are people, things and abstract concepts that money can’t buy.
Money buys recovery from failure, which is a double-edged sword. It doesn't buy the ability to learn the right lessons, and eventually the money teaches that failure doesn't really matter, because there's always another chance to get it right.
Which is why it is probably better to be just constrained enough financially that your first attempt really matters to your bottom line, but have enough to be able to pull it off.
https://www.theverge.com/24253908/meta-orion-ar-glasses-demo...
Wireless compute puck. 70 degree FOV. Resolution high enough to read text. Wrist band detects hand gestures and will be used in another product.
reply