Intertwixt 30: Augmented by Whom?

Everyone seems to hate smart glasses now. Or, maybe not. Or it’s Meta’s glasses. In a season full of overwhelming outrage about the world, politics, capitalism, big tech, AI surveillance, and I’m losing count, everything is milkshake ducking. Game consoles, gadget prices, and certainly smart glasses.

I’m looking at this “Summer of Pervert Glasses” with some side-eye. I’ve been following AR and VR tech for decades. I’ve been thinking about things like cyberpunk fiction since I was a kid. Augmented reality, the very final goal of many of these glasses arriving in waves right now, relies on cameras and AI. I saw The Verge’s Nilay Patel mentioning this this week on one of my threads. It’s what I was posting about to a degree, too.

I’ve known this battle between the mapping of the world and who was doing the mapping would be a challenge. And, here we are. Companies like Meta are trying to make the future happen, but without a good hold on privacy and trust. AI companies are plowing forward, relentless, using fascinating tech prematurely with terrible consideration for boundaries and safety.

I have a hard time calling Meta Glasses “pervert glasses” because it presupposes that whoever is wearing them is a pervert. Criticizing Meta for their purpose making them? Fine. But those who buy them and may very likely not be using them for any sort of spy purposes, just taking photos like a phone or using the headphones or even using them as assistive tech? Come on.

But also, I wear TONS and tons of face tech. This is my work life. So, ok. Am I the pervert? Or am I the early test subject of invasive experiences to come? Victoria Song’s recent Verge piece, I Spy, mirrors my thoughts I had here a few weeks ago and expands on them.

In some ways, yes, reviewing experimental tech makes me the weirdo. But also, I wore Google Glass years ago when commuting to New York, just to see how it felt. It felt ridiculous, and I had to wear contacts to use them. Meta glasses feel normal. I like wearing them at times. I don’t like the position I get put in, now, by wearing them.

I’ll say this, though: this tech is young. The capabilities are growing. They may likely do a lot more. And then, who is brokering that augmented reality, and under what terms?

We’ve questioned these thoughts for literally decades. Keiichi Matsuda’s HyperReality film was an exploration of invasive AR to exactly this purpose, made ten years ago. Any good book fiction on AR has already been here. Tim Maughan’s Infinite Detail’s worth reading.

Is this a culture that’s been naive enough to think this type of tech wasn’t happening? Or was so critical of its ridiculousness that people thought it would just never happen? Meta’s early sales success for their smart glasses are the first mainstream moments of this tech. They won’t be the last. I’ve said this before. Meta is an early mover in a space that will be filled with Google, Samsung, Apple, Snap, and likely many AI companies including OpenAI. Meta has to do more to lay better groundwork, or find itself supplanted by those who can.

I wrote about Meta’s privacy-focused post earlier this week about how current glasses have a firmware update recognizing if an LED camera indicator on the front of the glasses has been tampered with (a thing some people have actually been doing), and then apparently deactivates the camera permanently.

But, Meta hasn’t addressed all the other concerns: whether the glasses are recording and when, and where that data goes. They have addressed some of it, I mean, but Meta’s reliability on privacy is terrible. Like, this same week, Instagram introduced a feature that could deepfake your profile pic into any scenario without permission, and then just as suddenly deactivated it.

Meta’s also expected to introduce facial recognition in its glasses, and may have these glasses last longer and record more often in future modes. Which, well, I expect. All AR glasses will do this to a degree. It’s part of how AR works.

But, how AR involves your world, and with what permissions from you, and how included others feel in the contract…it’s like how immersive experiences work, or systems of play. You have to have a magic circle where those who enter agree to the terms. 

Pokémon Go, now 10 years old, did that, although everyone else in the world around players weren’t always in on the game. Locations hosting events helped make locations feel “safer” to use. But Niantic’s map data from Pokémon Go was used in part to help train military drones, years later, which ended up feeling like a breach of trust between game players and the company that made them. But this is the overlap of AR and AI: where does one map end and another begin? What do the terms allow for?

I saw something else this past week: it was a VR location-based experience, made by Felix & Paul Studios, called Space Explorers: The ISS Experience. The 40-minute walkthrough isn’t augmented reality: it’s VR in Vive Focus 3 standalone VR headsets, in a space built to handle walkabout VR. Eclipso is a venue with big open rooms, empty except for dazzle-like patterns and QR codes for room tracking. 

My son and I tried out the experience, quietly wandering through a sort of skeletal model of the ISS and finding spheres where we’d step into 360-degree 3D VR videos Felix LaJeunesse and Paul Raphael’s cameras shot on the space station years ago. The videos have been on Quests already, and Houston had an ISS experience installation years ago, but this is the first time I tried a walkthrough version myself (I tried Felix & Paul’s Interstellar Arc, a science-fiction future space exploration VR experience inspired by their ISS work, at Area 15 in Las Vegas in January).

The experience was moving, although technologically dated. I want to see scans like these done in Gaussian splats, full volumetric 3D, and really move through the actual space station. But the hour or so we spent there was meaningful, special, not invasive. It was time carved out of the world, in a space designed for this incursion, with our explicit permission to be a part of it. 

See, VR has been solving some of the ideas about immersive and invasiveness, or our roles in the contract, for years. The freedom to have VR headsets use cameras for mixed reality, or skip it. To choose what avatars we represent as. To learn social behaviors, or try to. This is what the metaverse was, I think, trying to iron out. Or claimed to.

Now smart glasses are being thrown into the world with no one knowing the social contracts or understanding the rules of engagement. AR glasses like Snap Specs promise transformative 3D worlds layered over ours, but no actual real-world public places have been designed for that consideration yet. We are still at the very beginning, and also, who’s in charge of our augmentation? How is our personal augmentation being managed? As wearables become systems of deeper assistance and even memory, these concerns are crucial.

Back to reading Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, my second Pynchon of the summer. Pynchon’s wandering, squirrelly fragments remind me of the mess of the world, and its eternal puzzles. But I’m also ready for a Pynchon break after this one.

My other stories this week:

Steam Machine, review in progress: I love the design. I love the clean SteamOS feel. I don’t love the price or the way it doesn’t quite run games as powerfully as I’d expect. But it’s a foot in the door on a new way of looking at game consoles.

X by Xreal a01+ glasses, reviewed: $299 display glasses for playing movies and games that are lighter and still very good, but missing some extras I love in the fancier models. Along with Meta Glasses, these are impressive examples of lower-cost face wearables.