I don't understand why Meta is so insistent on making the camera and creepy video recording the primary feature of these glasses. They do have a ton of other uses. The speakers are genuinely great. It's useful to be able to hear notifications while walking. Having a decent AI for asking random questions is nice as well. It supports live translation. And unlike Airpods it doesn't tune out the rest of the world, which I like. And the new models have a display, which could be useful for stuff like maps.

Release a model without a camera and people might actually give it a chance.

I do all* of that with my phone and a Bluetooth bone conduction headphones. It kinda seems like the glasses part only make sense if it's for loading it up with a camera. You know, for looking at things, with your glasses.

I agree it would be nice to have a non-skeezy offering, but I think that would be an entirely different product line.

[Edit: oh, well, I didn't realize some but not all of the meta glasses do actually have a tiny display built in. That would be the other use case, for the looking at things, through your glasses.]

* Okay, the sound quality is just alright, but if Meta wanted to pivot to headphones, I'm all ears, as it were.

The whole VR shtick they were hyping up for a decade now and even rebranded whole corporation for, only really works if everyone is wearing these cameras 24/7. They failed at advertising the experience itself, so while that is shelved they are exploring other paths. These glasses are intended to normalize widespread pervasive recording as a primary objective, and to collect vast amounts of data for the LLM "training" as a secondary.

PS: two of my friends found no issues with these, bought a pair each and excitedly recorded with many other people present. Like, the issue didn't even register. I foresee that a lot of people will follow, if the price will be accessible, and one day it will be.

In theory I could see really enjoying them in an action sports (backcountry skiing, mountain biking, rock climbing) setting. I'd want 1) true AR that could annotate terrain with stuff like slope angle, aspect etc, 2) all the GPS and monitoring functionality of a Garmin watch, and 3) a high quality action camera that could replace a gopro with less faff.

From what I can tell we aren't particularly close to putting this all together in a consumer usable package.

My father uses them to record and share videos of some of his craft work, and they're actually pretty good for that.

But that can only be a niche use-case - the sort of thing you'd expect to work better as a minor product from Logitech or GoPro, rather than as a celebrity-endorsed consumer flagship from a tech behemoth.

> Release a model without a camera and people might actually give it a chance

They also have to look radically different, because anyone who sees someone wearing the current design will always just assume the person using them is a creeper recording creepy videos whether or not the glasses are even capable of doing that. The association is already made from the current model.

The financial motive must be capturing video data for AI training. Moreover, this data won't be entirely passive: the glasses can tell the user to do something and then observe how the video feed changes.

The more nefarious motive is to inject a layer of AI between humans and nature.

Eh, realistically speaking the camera is it's main selling point. If you want just audio, why not get eg an aftershockz headset. They've been around for over 10 yrs and work very well for that exact usecase (speaker that doesn't block your ears whatsoever)

The translation feature is also available on your phone which you'll need to pull out when using it anyway, because otherwise the other party won't understand what you're saying either...

> I don't understand why

A self-definition as an intrusive peeping Tom is not easily overcome.