Buckle Up, the Smart Glasses Backlash Is Coming

Summary

Smart glasses are having a moment right now. At Meta’s Connect conference last month, which is normally reserved for the latest and greatest advancements in VR and XR hardware, the humble Quest was all but forgotten. In its place were not one, not two, but three new pairs of smart glasses, one of which has a display—a first for Meta. That pivot to smart glasses is also apparently dragging Apple in its wake, with reports that the company is deprioritizing an affordable Vision Pro to focus on its own pair (or pairs plural, actually) of specs. The message is clear: smart glasses, as a category, have arrived, and with that big, bold promise of head-worn, AI-clad camera-equipped computers, is also impending (inevitable, I would say) backlash. Exhibit A: a new warning from San Francisco University. As reported by SFGate, the Bay Area college recently issued a campus-wide alert of a man wearing Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses and filming students (women, specifically) while asking them “inappropriate dating questions.” Those videos have already found their way to TikTok, Instagram, and the like. I’m not going to name the account, which San Francisco University, maybe somewhat misguidedly, called out in its warning, but I watched some of the self-described “pickup lines” since they’re still viewable on Instagram, and can confirm they’re indeed inappropriate. Great. If you’re reading this and thinking, “Okay, so what? Social media has been a cesspool since before people were mad about ‘Obamacare.’ Why is this news?” Well, smart glasses, that’s why. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo The fact that San Francisco University bothered to call out the way these videos were recorded (citing the specific name of Meta’s smart glasses and everything) says a lot, and in a lot of ways, that specificity is absolutely fair. As ascendant as smart glasses (or AI glasses, as Meta calls them) have been, there’s a chance that a lot of people may not have them on their radar yet. And the thing is, you should kno...