Job sites don't want downtime. Companies aren't going to futz around with a bin of spare replacement glasses if they freeze or the battery dies every four hours.

Industrial and consumer electronics are entirely different industries. Industry isn't typically tolerant of the kind of extended warranty bullshit runaround that consumer brands employ.

For an industrial customer, your thing either needs to be repairable right NOW or it needs to be cheap enough that you can have disposable stock on hand. If your delicate widget can only be repaired by hand-delivering it to nude virgins on a mountaintop, you are not getting that 500k unit contract, you're getting shown to the door.

That is unless you're literally IBM and/or have monopolized your class of utterly indespensible widget. Only then do you have the power to tell Amazon to fuck off and send a warranty claim.

I think something like this might be implemented as part of the helmet for jobs that require it, definitely not built into glasses that will likely always be ridiculous just like riding penny-farthing is kinda ridiculous now.

It would be amazing to be able to look at an equipment nameplate and pull up a cutsheet, installation and operations manual, etc.

In the long run it could spread from commercial to consumer scenarios; perhaps extra fast if there was adoption in the services sector.

I disagree. The idea humans will be in the loop and the best way to accelerate things is to teach them slightly faster is fundamentally flawed. Future industrial will be automated, the only humans who will need comprehension will be the maintenance staff or management, and they will have familiarity and/or alternate tooling rendering glasses a noncritical value add at best.

By the time that rolls around, this stuff will be available for cents on the dollar, just as Shenzhen showrooms were full of AR/VR hardware in 2015 and the industry has gone nowhere for 30+ years.

Are you sure?

Wasn’t HoloLens (from Microsoft) squarely aimed at this use case? What went wrong there?

You should be skeptical of industrial use case as well. Allowing any device with internet access and a camera on it onto the floor of most electronics manufacturing facility is a nonstarter, phones, smart glasses, or anything of that sort. The other thing is, smart glasses buy nothing over having PCs/assembly line machines with screens for HMI, and standard operating procedures can be printed on paper. Also, if you are actually an operator on an assembly line, wearing these glasses for 10 hours a day is the last thing you want at your job.

The case for them gets even worse for heavy manufacturing industry/trades, since you have to think about safety and liability now: what if these smart glasses fall into the machines and cause an accident? Can these smartglasses can withstand the environmental conditions in the workshop?

Now it's even lower friction. Zuck wants absolutely no delay between you having a moment of inactivity and having reels in your face. They need every single drop of your attention on adverts.

> zuck is trying to push bad, ugly glasses

...

> i’m not sure how you got to “four eyes” from there

I'm guessing you're younger than me. In my youth, having glasses meant being ugly.

although it's true and funny that rich assholes often have terrible taste, it's important that criticism of pervert glasses doesn't make their ugliness load-bearing. what happens if the next gen looks good, we're suddenly okay with them?

In this instance, it's directed at people who are literally at the top of the world, having amassed almost unthinkable power and influence, and want to start a fashion trend specifically to grow their business empires.

So yeah, it's a tiny bit different than bullying a classmate for having bad eyesight.

The point of that story was that everyone was going along with something that was obviously nonsense, and the kid who breaks the spell simply tells the truth.

In this situation most people don't buy smart glasses because they don't look good or have a killer use case. It's not the same thing.

> I get a sense that the intent is more to persuade via bullying than anything else, which...I dunno. Doesn't feel great!

Most advertising persuades you with less-than-rational means. It's just fighting fire with fire.

And it's quite justified, because in this case, it punches up against a technology with a net-negative social impact.

Does it make you feel like getting them out of spite? Real question.

It also seems incredibly shortsighted. No fashion conscious person would have been caught dead wearing a smartwatch circa 2012, then Apple partnered with Hermes and eventually things changed. There are all sorts of valid complaints against this tech, but fashion is something so ephemeral that it's a silly to act like it is a long-term hindrance to adoption.

They are billionaires, so it’s fine for us to make fun of them (because the joke is on us)

Lack of bullying is exactly why the world is now run by sociopathic dorks like the ones pictured in the article

I think there’s a difference between full-on “bullying” and what I’d call “blunt criticism”. I think bullying requires an intent to silence or otherwise coerce through fear. Blunt criticism is more about skipping the niceties and saying it plainly, and accepting that your subject might get offended as a result. Calling someone “tacky” is way more in the blunt criticism camp I think. It’s certainly not “nice”, but there’s no way that I read this blog article as trying to change Mark Zuckerberg’s mind through fear. Nobody is getting pilloried for being tacky, and tackiness can even be repositioned as desirable through the lens of nostalgia or similar.

But they are ridiculous glasses. They're so big that they're visibly crushing the top of the Snapchat guy's ears. As a lifelong glasses wearer, this is a billboard size red flag.

This is an emperor's new clothes kinda situation. You could say 'our royal personage seems to be experiencing a sartorial deficit' or you could say 'the emperor's butt naked.'

> Isn't it great, then, that these glasses don't do that?

As long as there’s a lens on them the perception remains. Ala panopticon. Particularly the idea that not knowing when you are being watched means you must assume you are being watched all the time. In the case of your glasses this maps 1 to 1. Your camera is there, it is pointing forwards at all times. We do not know what you are or are not filming.

Regarding your smart phone analogy. Which seems to make the point that you shouldn’t argue against the negative aspects of something that may later become popular, I have a story too. Before smart phones were a thing, my school attempted to ban the ‘camera phone’. Which was a pretty reasonable thing to do in that context and at that time. History shows that this was a good idea, even if the levee broke later with the smart phone which has been an absolute negative in school hours.

Ya.. if they can't admit they're fantastic for cycling or other activities where you want hands free access to some of your phones capabilities and don't want your ears obscured, then they aren't being intellectually honest in the argument. I think that's what most people actually get them for.

it’s not wrong. it’s what is unique about the AR medium in particular. “heightening reality” is whats in discussion. we can talk about it, but its not the sane discussion as photos, or video games, or VR.

  > a facsimile of life that you will convince yourself is real

This already describes our base experience of "reality". It's a predictive sensory hallucination.

I wouldn’t say that “what if the world was digital!” is some kind of apex creative insight.

More practically the people in power need to own real estate. The metaverse, VR, AR, you’re giving these builders way too much credit by connecting it to creative expression.

They want to own the land.