https://japandaily.jp/why-you-cant-turn-off-the-camera-shutt...
> Japan’s requirement for an audible camera shutter sound isn’t just a quirky design decision — it’s a deliberate policy meant to prevent secret photography.
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/06/30/new-airpods-to-feature-...
> The IR cameras can detect environmental image changes, facilitating a broader range of gestures to improve user interaction. For example, if a user watches a video using Apple Vision Pro and the new AirPods, and turns their head to look in a specific direction, the sound source in that direction can be "emphasized to enhance the spatial audio/computing experience."
I wonder if the signal could be integrated into AR glasses or headset to provide a wider FOV to the wearer.
Geez, if only the Apple Vision had some kind of gyroscope and accelerometer so it could detect head motion without relying on external hardware...
I had an APV for a while, controlling it with just gestures was sweet. If they're looking to bring those kinds of gestures to other Apple devices via AirPods (i.e. beyond just bringing more gestures to the AirPods), I'm intrigued.
(I don't really want to be wearing them while asleep, but my body sometimes has other plans.)
It’s the only reason why I have upgraded to ANC on the Airpods 4, because I don’t really like ANC, but I want the smart case.
Also the new model can regonize when you fall a sleep and stop the media. I think it works, but I'm not sure how quickly it detects the sleep.
Seems like a negative tradeoff.
That said, as someone who does pottery (messy hands), wears gloves/hats (stuff in the way), and has relatively poor fine motor control, I guess I welcome any solution that doesn't mean getting clay or cold air in my hair/ear.
The battery consumption and latency of the IR cameras will be interesting though. Too sensitive, and you'll eat up your battery. Not sensitive enough, and UX suffers.
1: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102628 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45186975
UI should be consistent, it allows users to learn a muscle memory, this "hide stuff until you're 20cm away" stuff is the antithesis of that (and all good design in general).
Turns out that people become okay with cameras every few inches observing every action as long as you say "It's for gestures.", even though the data stream will inevitably make it back to corpo for training ( and voyeurism[0] by the other parties that'll be in the room).
Same excuse for the VR headsets. "Oh, it has a red LED that fires when recording!" , meanwhile the thing has 30 other IR cams in non-stop loops consuming the environment at power-on til death.
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/uk/nsa-staff-used-spy-...
In fact, it could have been the case already and you would not have known ir.
Wouldn't the bigger issue be that they can abuse the same thing to grab camera and or microphone from your phone? Probably more useful than airpods too, given that a phone's always on, unlike airpods.
Currently I see Apple as safer than, say Google or Microsoft, but not as the privacy bastion it claims to be.
It's opt in, and the bolded option is "ask app not to track", so I'm really not sure what the issue is here.
Years ago, Apple's Weather app sourced their data from The Weather Channel. That meant these three tracking options ragasrding your location:
- Always share - You get real-time weather alerts, very useful some seasons
- Share while using - You get current weather, but lose real-time alerts
- Do not share - Might as well uninstall the app
Then Apple made Apple Weather, which collects weather data from multiple sources, and is supposedly safer to share real-time location with since Apple won't share it with anyone. Before this, The Weather Channel had the real-time location of millions worldwide, and all Apple had for privacy was that prompt.
This is the kind of stack reengineering I'm talking about, that makes privacy a real proposal, but applied deeper so it really makes a difference.
Unless you're some sort of globetrotter going to a new city every week, the app is quite usable just by adding your city.
>Before this, The Weather Channel had the real-time location of millions worldwide
Are you sure apple wasn't proxying the traffic through their servers?
edit: for instance the stocks app very prominently shows the data is from yahoo stocks, but if you check "most contacted domains" in app privacy report, they're all apple domains. It doesn't contact yahoo at all.
Meta showed that it was possible to do that from cameras mounted on glasses.
However, the power required to do that is quite high (30-60mw to detect, more to do the pose extractions)
So I suspect its just hand recognition.
If they add cameras to them, regardless of the implementation, I'm pretty sure that not only is against every gym-policy, but may be an actual criminal offense in certain states.
So I guess what I am saying is: This could be an anti-feature for certain people, or get people into trouble who continue to do a preexisting habit.
So more of an issue in that case; and the laws I am talking about don't have a "IR Camera" exception.
Is having the camera on illegal in and of itself, or only when you're actively recording?
You're essentially setting the scene to where people cannot know if they're being recorded or not while a camera is always pointed at them. That's a problem. Least of all because law enforcement will need to investigate to determine if the law was broken on each complaint.
"But internal processing!" isn't quite the slam dunk defense you seem to think it is. It won't work like that in the real world, people being recorded while changing won't care about that distinction.
I suppose that the "camera" could be as simple as an optical flow sensor [1] commonly used on mice and quad-copters and placed behind the black plastic so there would not be a visible lens [2].
0. https://web.ece.ucsb.edu/~ymostofi/WiFiReadingThroughWall
1. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10164626
2. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/07/camera-transp...
Using this to detect gestures does seem very cool, however. Seems like a fascinating engineering challenge.
Don't know, sounds totally useless, like most on-air gesture interfaces.
We don't want no fucking infra cameras for "better hand gestures and enhanced spatial audio experience".
nothercastle•1h ago
Cthulhu_•1h ago