Product1 publisher2 min readPublished
Nightclubs and court systems are banning the smart glasses Meta has sold by the millions
A former Google XR researcher told Gizmodo the stigma on smart glasses traces back to the camera they were built around. Bars and courts are already acting on that, and Meta's answer so far is a small indicator light.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Maruchi Kim, a University of Washington PhD who worked on Google's XR team until earlier this year, told Gizmodo that smart glasses still carry stigma because they started off as first-person video capture devices.
- Bars and clubs in multiple countries have banned smart glasses, entire court systems have done the same, and universities are warning students about them, according to Gizmodo.
- Meta has been trying to engineer a fix for owners who alter the glasses to disable the indicator LED that signals recording.
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Why it matters
- constraint Restrictions on where the glasses may be worn cut into the value of a device sold on the promise of being worn everywhere, and the buyer is the one who absorbs that.
- decision Anyone putting an assistant on the body now has to decide whether a camera is required for the feature, because the consent cost falls on people who bought nothing.
- exposure The tiny group Gizmodo describes as abusers decides how strangers treat every owner in public, and no settings screen changes that.
- contradiction In Gizmodo's piece the case against glasses is carried by named researchers and institutional bans, while the case for earbuds is carried by the publication's own assertion.
Meta's answer to the consent problem is a light, and the company has been trying to engineer around owners who alter the glasses to disable it, Gizmodo reports [10]. Even when the indicator works as intended, by Gizmodo's account, the burden sits with everyone else: the light tells you someone is recording only if you know what it means and the wearer happens to be in your field of view [11].
The pitch and the practice have been separate from the start. Gizmodo's version of the pitch is a menu that translates itself in your field of view and a party where the guests' names appear so no introduction is awkward [15]. What owners do is narrower. Nearly all Ray-Ban Meta buyers use them to film bike or snowboard rides, or to get live translation while travelling, according to Gizmodo [7], and GoPro cameras have been doing the first of those for a decade [8].
Kim puts the stigma on the hardware's original job. Companies say "let's just put AI on it," he told Gizmodo, "but it still carries so much stigma because it started off as this video capture device" [3]. Of the two things glasses were built to do, first-person capture and overlay, he said: "I think these are both things that people didn't really ask for" [4]. Gizmodo makes the same point about the sequence, arguing the AI arrived because these companies already had glasses that were not selling in the numbers they needed [5].
What a stranger reacts to is the lens. "A camera mounted near someone's eyes can continuously capture people, computer screens, documents, homes, or conversations from a very natural first-person perspective," the computer scientist Irtaza Shahid told Gizmodo [12].
The audio half of the argument is thinner. Gizmodo writes that the earbuds already in people's ears have spent a decade proving themselves in a way glasses have not [14]. That arrives as an assertion; the named researchers in the piece speak to the camera, not to the earbud [3][12].
Anyone deciding which device an assistant goes on has to work out whether the feature requires capturing a person who did not buy the device, and whether that person can tell it is running without being taught what a small light means. Smart glasses answer yes and no, and that pair is what gets written into rules by people who are not your customers. Those rules apply to the device itself whatever the use, so they cover the owner filming a snowboard run alongside the small number of abusers Gizmodo describes [17][13].
What to watch
- Whether Meta's work on the indicator LED produces a signal a stranger can read without being taught what it means.
- Whether smart-glasses bans spread from bars and courtrooms into workplaces, where someone internal has to write the staff policy.
- Whether Google's Android XR rollout or Samsung's glasses entry ships a tier with no camera in it.