TL;DR: you now need to pay a $20/month “meta premium” subscription to use a 100% offline feature that runs on your own malware-ridden smartglasses.
If you don’t subscribe, you can use the feature that is already included in the hardware that you already paid for 3 hours each month
The now-paywalled feature boosts the voice of the speaker in front of you, something that even low-end ANC earphones are doing now. 5 minutes of free usage per day is basically nothing.
My mom just caught one of her kids using these to cheat on a final. He had them Bluetoothed to his laptop and it disconnected at some point and she heard “the answer to number 7 is…” But she said he barely got a C on it even while cheating. So since she didn’t know about the glasses until after that student left and another student told her it was the glasses, she just kinda let it go saying “it’s honestly going to be his problem in the future.”
Edit: she couldn’t pin point the kid at the moment, and wasn’t informed who it was until after the kid was gone and the other student told her.
I’m not a teacher, but I dunno if that’s the right response to someone cheating. It is going to be his problem in the future, but as a teacher, isn’t it her job to teach the kid that that’s not OK? Sorta depends on the age, I suppose, but I’d definitely give the kid a 0% instead of a C.
She couldn’t really have done anything considering she didn’t know which kid it was until after they were gone and the other student informed her.
Ahh, that makes a bit more sense I suppose. Innocent until proved guilty and whatnot. I feel like I’d still want to bring them in to confront them about it, to let them know that they didn’t really get away with it. Also, obviously, I’d be banning smart glasses from tests.
Morality and such isn’t really a teacher’s job.
Besides that, “between no kid left behind” and government testing standards that are tied into funding, teaching a turned into a generic lump of shit, and everyone gets to pass.
Excuse me, with how shitty parents are, someone has to step up, or we are all screwed.
Let’s put aside who’s job is what, these kids are going to be building our future too.
It isn’t really an issue of morality imo, it’s a teacher’s job to give grades that reflect the student’s skill level.
Eh, I cheated off my apple watch in highschool, didn’t make me stupider, I didn’t cheat in college becaue I was too scared to get caught lol.
yeah, i tutored a fair amount of pre-med students who had to take economics as a general education class. dullards to the last one (these were the ones who needed a tutor for introductory economics) and every single one tried to pay me to do their homework. i kept their names and about half are now working in medicine, because “that’ll be their problem” turns into “that’ll be the patient’s problem”.
please remind your mother that if y’all keep failing them through, look what happens
I mean, it was a bio 2xxx class so likely a gen ed req. She would’ve failed him if she knew who it was at the time. She told me she was “seeing red”. But like I said, the student was one of the first to finish and leave so it would’ve been difficult to make a case.
something that even low-end ANC earphones are doing
Because God forbid you take the fucking earbuds out of your head when talking to someone.
Maybe its just me, but nowadays every public apace is incredibly noisey.
Every bar and restaurant is blaring music. Vehicular traffic, air conditions, all sorts of other machines are pumping noise in too.
I just went out with some people this weekend and found myself wishing we had, noise-canceling headsets to be able to talk to each other. Kinda makes me want to not go out any more.
They use the fact that they have multiple microphones and some audio processing to isolate the voice of the person from the background noise. Taking your earbuds out would make it harder to hear them, not easier.
In noisy areas (like a bar) it can be the difference between being able to understand the person you’re with and being deafened by the background noise.
It’s all done on your device so it makes zero sense that they would charge a subscription other than as a means of financial extortion to use the hardware that you paid for.
These will identify sad nerds the way taped glasses identify the nerd in old movies.
If I see anyone with meta/snap/etc glasses, I’m going to just assume they’re fucking pathetic assholes.
I don’t know if “taped glasses nerd” was such a negative term in old movies.
And I correlate the Meta glasses more with a “tech creep” and manosphere Musk worship culture.
Like, I’m an introverted nerd. I could be “taped glasses guy” if I wore glasses; hell, my sunglasses are glued. But even if I was a full throated Tech Bro trying to idolize Zuck, I’m way too introverted to wear these out in public because you’d be filming people; thats mortifying to me.
It needs a different kind of personality, I think.
glassholes from googles try years back are basically what meta zuckmusk douches are trying oh so hard to reach now, probably a better option
For sure tech bro types.
But also is WorldStar still a thing? Maybe that all moved to tik tok. I could see posters on those platforms using these to record.
When did these come out? Wow, that was a steep enshitification slope.
That means by simply connecting them to the internet you’re generating around $20/month for Meta. Now how would they do that? :)
So they’re killing their product before it even launches
wait, they’re charging for what the cheapest hearing aid does?
I can’t wait for open source smart glasses
Even if it’s open source, it’s still just a camera for creeps. An open source torment nexus is still a torment nexus.
It’s a camera, like the millions of cameras that are around us every day.
If you’re a creep then it’s a camera for creeps. If you’re not, then there are plenty of legitimate uses providing that all video is kept locally and not uploaded to Meta/Amazon/Google’s servers.
As someone with prosopagnosia (face blindness) these types of glasses would be an incredible assistive technology for myself and others like me, but even I’m aware of the significant privacy concerns and don’t feel the benefit outweighs the societal risks.
I’d love a pair without cameras that have a HUD, though. Being able to pull up weather, camera, directions, etc. right in my field of view without looking away from what I’m working on would be cool af.
Honestly, if they were open source and only talked to my own servers, or were completely local, I’d love an instant replay feature eg. Your cat does something cute, you can clip it, like in a video game, and save that video. Of course, this would munch through battery, so I don’t see it happening any time soon, and I don’t really care to have a camera on my face otherwise.
All that said, the hud functionality is definitely what I’m most interested in. There is the worry of basically having your phone on your face all the time, but there are many times when I want to be using my phone, but it’d be more convenient if I didn’t have to hold it. Eg. Watching a video podcast while doing chores. Reading books in the glasses while laying in a hammock sounds awesome, if it doesn’t cause eye strain.
good! hopefully this will discourage everyone who bought them from using them, so they just sit in a drawer somewhere or get recycled instead of spying on unwitting people, and meta will fail to make back the huge amounts of money they’ve invested in tech that most people don’t want 😌
It’s funny, I would love to some have the novel tech they developed (HUD / display built into glasses since I’m wearing them anyways). The problem, as usual, is corps taking the piss with prices and profit then spying on you and everyone around you non-stop anyways…
I would 100% be open to some HUD glasses delivered with a FOSS OS that works completely offline and/or via your phone (but still offline). But that’s seriously wishful thinking given our corporate and political overlords
If done right, this would be super useful for the visually impaired and other people with other disabilities. But the tech bros would rather have creepy filming spy glasses instead.
Yah, like videos or guides on screen whilst I have my hands full soldering or something seems like a great application.
They’d still have the issue if non consensual “filming” though, unless it was a camera free hud.
I can’t think of anything I would want to have pop up in my view. I have a phone to hand all day, and the notifies me of important things.
Can you think of anything that you actually want so see constantly or so immediately you can’t pull a phone out of your pocket?
As someone with auditory processing disorder, the only thing i want is real-time closed captions of whoever is talking to me.
This, this is a really good answer. Thanks for bringing it up.
I have raging tinnitus, If a model could properly filter out background noise and give me CC I would be super stoked.
I have a phone to hand all day
I’d like to not have a phone in my hand all day.
I already wear glasses, I have a smartwatch. reading shit on the smartwatch is a PITA.
Give me a monocular monochrome screen, directional audio pointed at my ear. I’d be happy.
Give me a high rez screen so I could watch a youtube video on cooking for fixing my car while i’m doing either and I’d be ecstatic.
I think the number of comments below you show the uses of glasses like that. I really think they would a lot of people who are disabled etc. For me they would really help me with some of my memory issues, especially since i’m looking to have a career in a genre of music where’s it’s frowned upon to have sheet notes
And I asked because I am ignorant about some of them. I also think a lot of what has been posted has been looking for a problem, not solving something.
Needing Google maps when walking? Is honestly a terrible reason. Phones, sign posts, smart watches all already solve this.
Someone just posted about closed captions when people are talking to them due to a disability, that’s a really good reason to have some kind of smart glasses.
For your situation, I don’t think smart glasses are really the answer, and are more of a band-aid. The real answer in my mind is using the sheet notes and getting the stigma changed(but I understand that is a lot, lot, lot harder than just getting smart glasses).
Yeah, I also try a lot to break the stigma. But I think a lot of people are ingrained in their ways and tradition and it takes more time or effort to see past it. It would also help to get a type of Shazam for the tune that’s playing to know what sheets to play too.
In any case, fair play to you for recognising there are some uses that could enable people.
Yea breaking stigmas is always the most uphill battle. I know it is not the same, but you see a lot of resistance to better tech in cycling. Things like disc brakes which are just better(outside of the tiny minority of cases) having so much fight against them.
I will say i am pretty opposed to the tech in many normal cases. Especially as it just seems like such a massive privacy nightmare at best. Or just shoe horning in tech for no real reason. I do think that everyone is already so in grossed in tech(I know I am a lot of the time) that they forget to just look around them and take in the world, and I think that smart glasses are that tipping point of going to far for most people.
I am happy to see that some really good use cases have been brought up, I am not all knowing I would in fact call me ignorant about a lot of things as I can only know what I know. But almost every good(even great) reason I have read has been based around improving life and interactions for people with disabilities which I can honestly get behind.
Cycling navigation might be a useful one. I don’t have a phone mount for my bike and worry about the risks of damage if I did mount one.
As someone who has used their phone and had a major accident on it with the phone mounted. I will never go with smart glasses, they were the first thing that I noticed was smashed up. My phone survived(mostly) despite the bike being a complete write off, that will happen when getting hit by a kayak at 50kmh.
I had a Quadlock mount and just their sticker mount on the phone, you can get cases for popular phones though. I now use a Garmin computer for my riding.
Is noone questioning getting hit with a 50kmh kayak while biking? Just me?
Hahaha, in brief. cycling out from my old seaside village, getting to the crest of a very steep hill(just shy of 20%) and get over taken by a pickup on a blind corner, thankfully no traffic coming the other way, but hit the downhill part and it is fast 80kmh speed limit down a country lane with 2 lanes of traffic. I hit about 70kmh, and the pickup is pulling away slowly.
Then the kayak shaped missile launches out of the bed as it hadnt been secured properly. Hits the road in front of me, I try to dodge, but it slides across like it is homing in on me. On the brakes as much as I can be in the small window I had to react and drop some speed before it clobbers the front of my bike. The rest I am sure you can imagine as a bike comes to a sudden stop and I dont.
The thing that keeps me from mounting my phone to my bike is, I’ve read, that the vibration from the bike can damage the camera in the phone.
Also, how do you get hit with a kayak on a bike?
I never had any issues with the vibrations causing damage. Would definitely be something to consider, as I can see the reasoning about it damaging something like the zoom functionality. Mine was on a out front mount so maybe that helped reduce it?
As for the kayak incident, I posted it in replay to someone else, but here is the story:
Hahaha, in brief. cycling out from my old seaside village, getting to the crest of a very steep hill(just shy of 20%) and get over taken by a pickup on a blind corner, thankfully no traffic coming the other way, but hit the downhill part and it is fast 80kmh speed limit down a country lane with 2 lanes of traffic. I hit about 70kmh, and the pickup is pulling away slowly.
Then the kayak shaped missile launches out of the bed as it hadnt been secured properly. Hits the road in front of me, I try to dodge, but it slides across like it is homing in on me. On the brakes as much as I can be in the small window I had to react and drop some speed before it clobbers the front of my bike. The rest I am sure you can imagine as a bike comes to a sudden stop and I dont.
You might not notice your OIS is borked until you go on vacation and suddenly can’t get certain pictures to focus anymore. Excessive vibration and drops can definitely damage it. Though I imagine just a basic rubberized mount would help mitigate that a lot.
I think directions while walking would be better than carrying and looking down at a phone.
How fast do you walk that you need to constantly check? You can also have you phone all out instructions for the next turn.
I’d rather just have that overlay like Google already has for walking instead of pulling out my phone every few intersections or having it loudly announce that I’m a tourist to everyone in earshot.
Dude, you asked for examples of what people might find useful and now you’re just shitting on all of them.
For me, this doesn’t solve anything. This is looking for something to fit tech in.
You can already do this with your phone, and it isn’t like checking your phone whilst walking is going to kill you or someone else (unlike using your phone whilst driving).
You can also use the sign posts around you, my city has more than enough for people walking to get where the need, or at least the rough area.
You can also use headphones for the verbal call outs.
Another alternative would be a smart watch. Loads have maps or bread crumb style maps.
The real answers have been for more disability or accessibility not seeing Google maps constantly while walking.
Yeah, and the dork glasses will most definitely won’t give any weird vibes.
Anyway, on an entirely different topic, have you ever heard the term glasshole?
Unless you’re actively looking for them, the raybans aren’t going to stand out as smart glasses.
Christ, I’m not here to defend meta or the assholes walking around harassing women, I’m saying there is a potential use for AR glasses.
I’d pay good money for glasses that displayed a grey rectangle over real life ads.
Possibly the only reason I could see to invest in them, but I live in a country that isn’t completely plastered in ads(yet).
Following recipes. These days I print them out because it’s a pain constantly washing your hands to check the next step on the phone. But I’m not buying smart glasses just that. My normal glasses are expensive enough already.
This has actually been the one thing I have been using AI for. I tell Gemini I’m going to cook some recipe and walk me through it and then ask questions as I’m going. Most of the time it does a decent job.
For following a recipe, could you not just increase lock timer on your phone? I am also a terrible cook, and a male, so I constantly wash my hands when handling food(I am that meme).
Invariably it’s having to scroll that’s the issue and you don’t want to be cross contaminating via your shiny black mirror.
Real time translation of speech or text, AR such as a guide overlay or wikipedia info box when looking at art, name tags and relationship data on people you interact with, especially if you are face blind or got like 20 different people in a treatment and support team
Yeah, the art example and real time translation are already done with your phone. Having that in your face doesn’t sound appealing or necessary.
For the face blind I can understand and be sympathetic, but for me I wouldn’t want to have cameras on people constantly, or keep a database of people’s information that could be leaked/lost.
Managing a phone while using a wheelchair or other mobility assistance is not the easiest, so the HUD version would be an improvement. AR glasses or HUD glasses are imho some of the most promising hardware for accessability we got now so I really hope they (the glasses) will find a niche outside tech bro or stalking spaces
Yeah that’s a good reason. How do you interact with them them though? Cause if it is hands or voice commands I don’t think I see much benefit over having a phone mounted(things are already expensive and only getting more so).
If it is eye tracking for people who have issues interacting with a phone in other ways then, that would certainly be a huge leap forward for accessibility.
That’s going to be a tough battle. The tech bro douchebags have a pretty tight grip on it at the moment.
Most of the uses for a HUD-IRL do not require personal ownership of the device. Like, the Louvre rented 3DSs to visitors for AR and guided visits for years. Guides and pop up info are appropriate on industrial settings, for personal hobbies it is overkill. Now, name tags and relationship data on people you interact with? weird and creepy. You mean like, for use by healthcare professionals? maybe, still no need to personally own one, and there are gigantic ethical issues to solve by having cameras constantly on during people’s most vulnerable moments. For disability support, IDK, it might have uses, but it is still weird creepy and invasive, due to constant camera on and facial recognition active. You would have to trust 100% on the tech company behind it, and Meta is not exactly the most trustworthy corporation, by far.
Finding ways to make an awful product even worse.
Subscriptions for offline features should be completely illegal. In fact Meta is probably already technically illegal.
If we lived in functional democracies most large multinationals would’ve been split up a long time ago, including Meta.
Instead we live in a grey area of plutocratic corporate dictatorship.
Delete Delete Delete
I got a pair of meta glasses for free…
Still in the damn box. Not touching it.
Put them down next to a turd so that the camera can only see the turd
I think I’d need a Facebook account to do that. Nope.
Non-paywalled: https://archive.ph/vGVor
Complete Article:
Would you pay $20 a month for access to AI hardware you already own? That appears to be one of Meta’s next bets. This week, it quietly announced that your glasses’ Conversation Focus feature will soon be limited to three hours of use per month, unless you pay for a $19.99 Meta One Premium subscription.In a help article, the company insists that it won’t require a subscription to use your glasses, period; it’s merely erecting a “rate limit” for certain AI features. Even premium subscribers will only get 15 hours of Conversation Focus per month under that “rate limit,” it claims.
Problem is, Meta’s rate limit is ridiculous. The Conversation Focus feature, which amplifies the voice of the person you’re speaking to so you can hear better in noisy environments, is not something that should plausibly be rate-limited, because it doesn’t use Meta’s servers. It runs on-device, using the chips inside the glasses that you’ve already purchased. I turned off my internet, and it kept working.
Meta’s description of “rate limits.”
Meta’s description of “rate limits.” Image: MetaHere’s how the company introduced it last year: “[C]onversation focus uses your AI glasses’ open-ear speakers, beamforming technology, and real-time spatial processing to dynamically amplify the voice of the person you’re talking to.”
Not only does it avoid Meta’s servers, but Conversation Focus doesn’t technically require an internet connection at all. I double-checked by turning off my phone’s Wi-Fi and cellular, turning on Airplane Mode, and I was still able to use Conversation Focus just fine by tapping a button on my phone.
Does Meta have some secret licensing deal with another company that costs it money every time a person uses Conversation Focus? Failing that, the rate limit sounds utterly bogus.
Meta is feeling some financial pressure trying to make AI happen, recently laying off around 10 percent of its entire workforce — around 8,000 people — to help offset its AI investment costs. It also recently managed to make three pairs of AI glasses $80 cheaper by nixing the Ray-Ban name. But perhaps ditching the branding isn’t the only way it plans to subsidize that move.
At a time when hardware is getting increasingly expensive, I suppose this isn’t as controversial as Meta quietly beginning to embed a facial recognition upgrade for these glasses in millions of phones, code that it has since quietly removed. Still, I’m filing this under “Meta will ruin its smart glasses by being Meta.”
We asked Meta if it could explain the move and whether the company plans to put other on-device features behind a subscription. Meta did not reply to those questions, but it did reach out to make it even clearer that the subscription is optional. “Most people will use Conversation Focus without hitting the monthly limit. The subscription is for power users who want expanded access and additional benefits like premium device support,” Meta spokesperson Tyler Yee tells The Verge.
“Out of the box, you’ll get core AI features like voice assistant, live translation, look and ask, and more. The subscription simply unlocks more access and more powerful features on your AI glasses. Currently, this only includes expanded access to Conversation Focus and premium device support.”
That “currently” does make it sound like Meta might put more features into a subscription bucket, but it also sounds like a few features will stay out of it.
quietly announced
We’re hitting new lows.
They’ve sold something like 10 million of these things, probably more.
We can do something about it. The same way we shut down google glass, make them socially unacceptable. Ridicule anyone you know who owns a pair, loudly point them out when you see them in public, etc. Bring back “glasshole”.
Source? It took Apple over a year to sell 1 million iPhones originally and there have been 5 million Steam Decks sold total IIRC. I would doubt they have sold 10 million glasses in a few months.
Be careful with that though, last time people with legitimate vision assisting technologies were attacked along with people wearing Google glass.
It’s been more than a few months. Also I am getting offers for meta glasses if I switch internet or cell carriers and shit, so I suspect some of those numbers are coming from wholesale contracts and not direct to customer purchases.
I originally thought that they were only talking about the Display ones not all models total. You are probably right it goes a long way to explaining how they were able to sell 5 million in one year.
Yeah I haven’t been able to verify this claim. Closest I’ve come is about 7 million units sold and that was a year or more ago.
It doesn’t look like this was a year ago, it looks like the 7 million claim is total as of this first quarter of this year. Even still I’m not sure I totally believe that they managed to sell 5 million in the last year.
I think I didn’t make it clear but as of 2025 they sold 7 million units. There’s conflicting information about whether they sold 7 million pairs in 2025 and more in 2023/2024 which could equal 10 million pairs though. But I haven’t found anything yet that says they’ve sold 10 million pairs in plain language.
https://thenextweb.com/news/meta-smart-glasses-privacy-crisis-apple-google-snap
Everything I am seeing says 7 million total globally as of the first quarter of this year. Which is still quite a bit more than I thought they would’ve sold.
I’d really like to try these, to see if they could help with visual impairment, but between the social stigma, and Facebook spyware, I’m reluctant.
Depending on your visual impairment they may not help at all. For instance there are zero models that come with an astigmatism correction strong enough for me to use them.
