There are suddenly lots of smart glasses in the world, and it feels like companies are throwing spaghetti at the wall trying to sell them. As someone who’s now tested a lot of these devices, it feels like I’ve already seen the full spectrum of marketing, too. Some smart glasses, like Xreal’s, offer immersion via a big virtual screen for movies and games. Others, like Even Realities’, offer increased productivity (you’ll never miss another email ever again!). But a lot of smart glasses, more than you’d expect, are leaning on one thing in particular. I’m talking about the past decade’s gadget holy grail: ambient computing.
Ambient computing, for those who have been blissfully unaware of tech buzzwords, promises a world where gadgets fade into the background. Think voice assistants like Alexa or Google Assistant, or Humane’s defunct and laughably off-base wearable, the Ai Pin. They often promise a lot of things, but one of the biggest promises they make is freeing us from our phones—more specifically, unshackling us from apps and the distraction/doomscrolling they beget. According to major players like Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, smart glasses are the next warrior in that noble crusade.
In Bosworth’s annual end-of-year missive, the tech exec opined on Meta’s trajectory, which (to no one’s surprise) included a heavy dose of smart glasses talk. Here’s what he wrote:
“It’s not a coincidence that the first device to ship with the Meta Neural Band was also our first pair of display glasses. This is another hardware advance that’s changing the way people interact with computers in a fundamental way. Until now digital life has always existed on screens that take you away from the world around you. You need to choose between one and the other, and as time goes on this is a choice people feel less happy making.
Display glasses are a major step toward a time when we don’t have to make this choice anywhere near as often.”
In one way, that all sounds pretty nice. I, like lots of others, yearn to be more in the moment and less trapped by my phone’s vortex of notifications, and if there’s a solution out there to make that happen that isn’t downgrading to a flip phone from 2004, I’m all ears. In another way, though, I’m here to tell you that Bosworth’s claim is—how should I put this—a complete and utter pipedream.
As I mentioned previously, I’ve tried a lot of this year’s entrants into the smart glasses coliseum, many of which have screens, and I’ve had a lot of observations as a result of my sampling. I’ve been intrigued. I’ve been frustrated. I’ve been surprised. Hell, I’ve even been charmed once or twice. One thing I have never once been is less distracted, however.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the logic that Bosworth and other makers of smart glasses are putting down; phone bad, so less phone good. But freeing yourself from distraction isn’t so straightforward. If screens are a problem, like Bosworth and others would seem to suggest, then gluing one to your eyeball seems like an odd antidote. I actually have glued one to my eyeballs quite a few times this year and can corroborate; it’s not quite the ambient computer we’ve been waiting for.
Something happens when you put a screen that close to your body, and I don’t think I like what that something is. While notifications are technically more discreet, they also feel more insidious. Meta’s Ray-Ban Display, as an example, uses a heads-up display (HUD) to stream things like texts, Instagram messages, and other alerts in the periphery of your vision. While they’re most likely abundantly clear to you, they’re often almost imperceptible to people looking from the outside in.
It’s this veil of being discrete that makes the Meta Ray-Ban Display dangerous in a way. It feels more like a way to check your phone without someone noticing than a way to wean yourself off of phones and their mesmerizing screens for good. And while we’re talking about averting one’s gaze to a device instead of the world or a human sitting across from you, the nature of displays in smart glasses also brings up an entirely different problem—eye contact.
When you’re looking at a screen inside a lens, you are (just like with a phone) not looking at the world in front of you. It breaks concentration, and it breaks eye contact. It also breaks your connection with the world in much the same way any device would. In fact, some waveguides (the technical term for the tiny screens inside smart glasses lenses) are so obvious and bright that they actually prevent outsiders from seeing the wearer’s eyes. If eyes are the window to the soul, then smart glasses can be a one-way mirror inside a police department. It doesn’t take a detective to figure out that walking around this way isn’t bringing anyone closer together.
And you know what? I’m not convinced that smart glasses even have to do that to be useful or fun. It’s okay for them to be another gadget; in fact, some people might want that. What I don’t like, however, is any suggestion that they’re anything but that—another screen for your head. Maybe I’ll wind up with egg on my face, and some combination of hardware and delicately refined software will crack the code on ambient computing once and for all, but for now, you can color me highly skeptical. I’ll say it once, and I’ll say it a thousand times: you can’t fix a screen with a screen, no matter how many billions of dollars Meta or Google spend trying.
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