Why? Its users would still be called "glassholes" just like before. Nobody likes looking stupid in public, and wearing AR ski/diving goggles in public makes you look like a complete tool.

Then there's the issue with privacy. People wouldn't want to be constantly filmed/scanned in public by other people's AR goggles. It would be like wherever you go people having their smartphones pointed at you.

Apple VP is a niche solution looking for a niche problem. It's no iPhone moment.

GG won't/didn't fail due to the perception of "this person is filming me without my consent", that is a strawman meant to create more headlines than the less-sexy "it just doesn't have much purpose and is too expensive." Exactly like with VisionPro.

We're already under 1080p surveillance 90 percent of our waking lives out of the house. A person wearing glasses with a UI layer and a camera walking down the street likely isn't saving that picture, footage, to their home server to then send me a citation over. But the commercial businesses, police, DOT etc sure are, and are all subpoena-able by courts. Less so with a guy wearing glasses.

Not entirely, but it was a much bigger issue than you seem to be giving it credit for. I remember walking into a coffee shop in Little Rock, AR - not exactly a tech hotspot - and seeing stickers on the door explicitly banning Google Glass.

People were really concerned and upset about it. Come to think of it, the release and nonchalant reception of Meta RayBans says a lot about how our culture has changed. That product basically takes all the stuff that was seen as problematic about Google Glass and shoves it into a pair of normal-ish-looking glasses.

But to your example, doesn't the coffee shop have a totally legal camera up providing CCTV recording/surveillance that is literally hidden away on purpose? and same with dash cams outside parked in parking spots, red light cameras, DOT cameras etc.... All of these we have come to understand serve a legitimate purpose, and you'll basically never find anyone who questions them.

The populace (me included) who absorb media at any rate had this idea in their head that people with cameras on their faces are potentially weirdos, because "FANG bad". But those same people (again, me included) will go to disneyworld and register their face/thumbprint :D

Of course, but that wasn't what I was pointing out. I was trying to say that the attitude for wearable recording devices has changed a great deal. Google Glass was extremely obvious; RayBan Metas usually go completely unnoticed.

I doubt anyone had ever brought Google Glass into that coffee shop - and as you pointed out, recording was already taking place anyhow. My point is that society has gone from a place where a bulky, obvious camera on a pair of glasses caused a small-scale societal panic to a place where people walk around with cameras and microphones intended to record the public and no one seems to care enough to even bring it up.

That's a huge shift in only a decade.

> The populace (me included) who absorb media at any rate had this idea in their head that people with cameras on their faces are potentially weirdos, because "FANG bad".

I thought so, too - but it turns out the populace only cares about virtue signaling about it. If the device isn't obvious, there's no pushback even when the people know without a doubt that it's present.

It was a thing - https://www.google.com/search?q=google+glass+user+punched

However the world has changed in 11 years.

But ignoring that, you're right -- one of those two things is certainly worse than the other, but they're both still bad.

Who's "we"? This is not the case where I live. I live in an EU country with very strict laws for privacy and restrictions on video surveillance. You aren't allowed to film random people on the street without their consent, except with some exceptions.

AR glasses would require retooling of such laws, not to mention gaining the public's trust as "send all public images to some megacorp's severs without their consent" is not a popular public opinion here. In Germany for example Google street view was not allowed for a long time also because privacy laws and public outrage(justified and not).

I also dislike your defetist line of thinking "well, we're under 24/7 surveillance anyway, so we might as well allow Apple and Google to spy on us in public now while we're at it". How about NO, how about they can fuck right off.

Though I think long term enough into the future, it's inevitable that governments, even within EU, will allow these corpos to have this surveillance as long as the data is processed and hosted in the EU, and the EU gov gets front door access to the data to spy on its citizens to prevent us from voting right wing candidates.

Case in point; if you can legally provide dash cam footage in ANY type of court case civil or criminal in your locale, then I can promise you that my comment rings true in your country. I can assure you that there are street cams supported by tax dollars, and private businesses with private insurance whom use these to protect their liability.

it is not evil to use cameras; it is a circumstance of the way we have decided things should be in most "western" countries.

Don't take my comment so personally. I am simply saying "hey, this piece of tech failed due to perceived X, whilst most of the civilized world sits in front of a work laptop that for all intents and purposes could be doing exactly the same."