My favorite purchase of 2026 was my pair of Xreal One Pro glasses, which I use as an external display while traveling or on the couch at home. These are not AR glasses; the category doesn’t yet have a well known, accurate, catchy name (Screen-in glasses? Facially mounted display? Spatial glasses?)
I agree with the article that AR glasses are not a great future, but I think [ e-display eyewear / screen spectacles / whatever we call them ] that are dumb and just display what you feed them, are great!
I feel like you could retroactively apply this line of argumentation to smartphones: "don't buy a smartphone"
But the truth is, there's too much utility in technology. If AR can do useful things that smartphones cannot, we're going to end up with mass proliferation of AR, regardless of what parasitic technologies accompany it.
Maybe it is time to reconsider buying a smartphone. Just speaking for myself, I'm tired of how easy it is to get distracted by technology nowadays (I wrote a bit about this on my blog[1]). Plus, we're seeing various (albeit small) movements towards dumb phones and phone bricking. Hyper-mobile, general-purpose tech like smartphones/AR is a recipe for distraction. The value of it is real, but at a certain point it just becomes a way to avoid having any moment of quiet contemplation.
But smartphones started in a very different time. Our point of reference were PCs and laptops, where we were the owner and could do pretty much anything we want. They took a lot of that away with smartphones, but because smartphones started in the in-between times, they (at least Android) still have side-loading, the possibility of installing browsers with ad blockers, heck even the source code in the form of AOSP, etc.
You can be sure that almost twenty years later, they will use a new device type as an excuse to lock things further down. Remote attestation, no side-loading, no or little browser competition, etc. This has kind of already happened with smart watches, where there is no AOSP-equivalent, virtually no models with unlockable bootloaders, etc.
AR glasses will be the next venue to further trample on your rights. The difference compared to smart watches is that they could potentially replace smartphones.
All this is without taking into account the grave privacy violation AR glasses are to other people. Yes, phones can also make photos and film, but it is much more visible.
I think there’s good reason to wind back smartphones too. Finding some way to keep the good utility and stripping out the evil attention sucking parts.
Am I really the only one who opened the website saw the video first before reading anything and ended up wanting that those glasses exist as shown in that video?
>All this leads me to ask, what actual incentive (aside from short term conveniences) would I have to buy an AR device?
There was a time, at least for myself and a lot of people in the AR wave, where we were trying to make computing integrated into everyday life such that they kind of disappear.
The idea was that genuinely we could have “spatial” computing where there really was very little difference between the digital and the physical because we could build a digital twin of the real world
The only way you can do this reliably is to have a constant stream of data from fixed and egocentric sensors which have context about the world around you to give you more information to make your life easier and more integrated.
This was in a time where we were the surveillance web was just starting to really ramp up around the 2010s
Of course, the massive government corporate surveillance state dashed any hopes of being able to do any of this with human dignity.
We did used to dream of a better world, not naiively I and others have been writing about the risks and dangers of all these things while still pushing them forward.
Short of an overhaul of human society, I don’t see the kind of technological future that we all wanted happening
I still use my xreal glasses from time to time but the social ecosystem doesn’t exist to actually make progress. Maybe in another half century
How many wearing those will be unwittingly participating in yet another (Niantic) Pokemon Go AI mapping experiment?
Niantic Spatial mapped over 30 billion real-world images and street scans from millions of players visiting public parks, sidewalks, murals, statues, and general urban landmarks featuring over 1 million distinct mapped locations including many government and military installations.
That video is a piece of art. I actually love the "Clear the area" animation on the street, the red arrow plowing through before the traffic and the virtual fences on the sidewalk. But we will probably get the ads and the shittification before that.
This is such a pedestrian take. If you don't want HYPER-REALITY to predicted the future you don't have to.
The same people who say don't buy AR glasses because they will turn your whole world into the internet, are the same people MAKING that happen.
You don't want your phone to be out all the time? Build the infostructure for labeling priority notifications, and allowing them permanent access to your field of vision also allows you to hide the phone and low priority communications almost all the time.
Email used to be really disruptive to my focus, everyone expected fast response. Slack didn't just add to our disruptions, for many of us it allowed us to drastically scale back the time spent on lower priority communication like email.
I agree with the article that AR glasses are not a great future, but I think [ e-display eyewear / screen spectacles / whatever we call them ] that are dumb and just display what you feed them, are great!
But the truth is, there's too much utility in technology. If AR can do useful things that smartphones cannot, we're going to end up with mass proliferation of AR, regardless of what parasitic technologies accompany it.
[1] https://bdvorak.com/blog/tech-is-disrespectful/
You can be sure that almost twenty years later, they will use a new device type as an excuse to lock things further down. Remote attestation, no side-loading, no or little browser competition, etc. This has kind of already happened with smart watches, where there is no AOSP-equivalent, virtually no models with unlockable bootloaders, etc.
AR glasses will be the next venue to further trample on your rights. The difference compared to smart watches is that they could potentially replace smartphones.
All this is without taking into account the grave privacy violation AR glasses are to other people. Yes, phones can also make photos and film, but it is much more visible.
Great turn or phrase. (And/or, great company name. Probably both :)
The idea of always on 6 dof tracked advertisements that show up all the time is a bad product that consumers would not buy.
The author writes as if web browsers, Windows, Android, and iOS have ads built into them popping them up randomly when that is nowhere near the case.
There was a time, at least for myself and a lot of people in the AR wave, where we were trying to make computing integrated into everyday life such that they kind of disappear.
The idea was that genuinely we could have “spatial” computing where there really was very little difference between the digital and the physical because we could build a digital twin of the real world
The only way you can do this reliably is to have a constant stream of data from fixed and egocentric sensors which have context about the world around you to give you more information to make your life easier and more integrated.
This was in a time where we were the surveillance web was just starting to really ramp up around the 2010s
Of course, the massive government corporate surveillance state dashed any hopes of being able to do any of this with human dignity.
We did used to dream of a better world, not naiively I and others have been writing about the risks and dangers of all these things while still pushing them forward.
Short of an overhaul of human society, I don’t see the kind of technological future that we all wanted happening
I still use my xreal glasses from time to time but the social ecosystem doesn’t exist to actually make progress. Maybe in another half century
Niantic Spatial mapped over 30 billion real-world images and street scans from millions of players visiting public parks, sidewalks, murals, statues, and general urban landmarks featuring over 1 million distinct mapped locations including many government and military installations.
The same people who say don't buy AR glasses because they will turn your whole world into the internet, are the same people MAKING that happen.
You don't want your phone to be out all the time? Build the infostructure for labeling priority notifications, and allowing them permanent access to your field of vision also allows you to hide the phone and low priority communications almost all the time.
Email used to be really disruptive to my focus, everyone expected fast response. Slack didn't just add to our disruptions, for many of us it allowed us to drastically scale back the time spent on lower priority communication like email.