alt Hacker NewsDon't buy AR glasses
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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 wouldn't buy AR glasses, but also feel powerless to prevent myself from being in the reticule of those who do. When you think about what LLMs and facial recognition allow, we're entering a new conception of the public sphere and personal space/human dignity. I think it goes beyond the traditional notion of "privacy" or "public spaces" and closer to questions about moral rights over your likeness and aggregated personal information.
For instance, what if they invented "X-Ray Spex" like there used to be advertised in the back of comic books, that let you see through people's clothes. Do you have an "expectation of privacy" on a subway train against someone seeing you nude, if the technology exists to do it? I feel like similar cultural standards should apply when it comes to triangulating details about your identity from surreptitious recording devices.
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.
Personally, mass adoption of AR is where I squirrel away deep into the mountains and start my Ted years (in spirit, not practice). There's something about having a 'layer' over reality that's just unappealing and spooky. To each their own though.
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?
The only effective defence I can think of is regulation. Not in the USA, I can't see that happening, but the EU could and likely will put up some kind of fight.
I'm not exactly the EUs biggest fan, but at times like this I'm so glad it exists.
I did recently find a great use-case for AR (of a sort). I got these swim goggles and love them:
Being able to see your heart rate, length/set counts, head pitch, and a whole bunch of other metrics in real-time is really helping me improve my swimming. Not affiliated, just a happy customer.
I'm personally looking forward to AR glasses that can block outdoor ads, like billboards, etc.
The only reason I think people shouldn't go for AR glasses is unlike VR, they're still only 1080p-ish in resolution. The resolution of the ar displays is somehow around the 1080p mark with different aspect ratios.
I think this was the same situation last year too.
I love the style of this site. Makes me want to redo my own site like it's an 80s BBS.
I recently bought something that might qualify as AR glasses: a new old stock Google Glass XE-C.
All the original services for it are long-dead so it's immune from the nightmare scenarios in the article. It's pretty decent for heads-up biking directions after vibecoding an app for that (https://github.com/zakwilson/OsmGlass/).
Not to drift to far from the topic, but what the hell is that Temu video, people seriously use this app??
> Pop-up windows were a plague in the 90s and early 2000s, and remained that way until browsers started blocking them by default.
And they've come roaring back, on the wake of the well intended but arguably misguided GDPR specification about cookie notifications. It's now common to see popups on many sites in the exact same style.
Popups are such terrible UX that it forced websites to mostly abandon them, but once people were used to them for another reason, ads were quick to follow. They are usually an ad from the site itself rather than a 3rd party, but that hardly matters.
Even the cookie notifications are rife with dark patterns, making it difficult to get to the option with minimal necessary cookies.
C'mon man. AR glasses and phones can be used the exact same way.
I'd rather read articles on an AR display than a little 6.6 inch screen.
If you don't want ads, the solution is running open source OS's on these things (which is the most likely outcome for people here anyway), not avoiding the hardware entirely.
Im waiting for prices to come down but having experienced AR glasses before, they're a great compromise between VR (too sweaty) and having to use either a larger laptop/ipad.
I forgot to label a test tube the other day and found myself surreptitiously trying to smell the contents so I could tell the solvents apart. AR goggles would've been pretty nice about then. They'd remember which of these are dangerous.
Or when you're putting something back together and you end up with two screws left over.
Or if you want to see your friends' annotations in the book you're reading.
We gave control over the web to third parties. We can have nice things again if we just stop doing that.
>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
Awkward read that seems like a personal issue for the author and it absolutely doesn't apply to the general populace.
I'd welcome AR glasses - it would mean looking at my phone less. The contextual information and HUDs are a net gain.
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.
Man, I love the extra weight and seriousness that font and MS-DOS layout give to the article.
> REAL-WORLD POPUPS? Are you insane?
Indeed.
This is a pointless rant against something that hasn't happened (yet)
They even say "if it becomes mainstream" and then argue as if it has. Total clickbait
Sold! Buying AR glasses before ads get there! :D
I'm holding out for Daemon operative glasses. :)
Also, if you're walking down the street in headgear capable of always-on video capture and face recognition, don't be surprised if people knock (it) off your head.
Can't wait to have "Log in to OneDrive to backup your videos [OK] [Remind Me Later]" in my peripheral vision 18/7 (minus the 6 when we're asleep)...
Buy AR glasses and use them to filter out ads.
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.
I was seriously considering the Xreal Aura after having gotten the 1s ~6 months ago, but I figured that between the uncertainties of Google's support and likely rapid progress in the hardware if the software support materializes, they'd be obsoleted too quickly to be worth it.
I don't find the claim that people will be expected to wear them constantly as having any credibility. The post overall reads as absurd hyperbole to me, on par with AI-bros fawning over how their machine god can exterminate humanity.
mainly before the sponsor come out
This author understands neither AR technology, nor consumer electronics.
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.
I’d go for this type of eyewear solely for the convenience of adjusting my Rx without the annoying annual visits. But there is no chatter about this, everyone concerned about cameras and some sort of contextual reality. Which is fine, just saying…
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Scrolled down to find the Bluesky/Mastodon links, found them both.
Do these people think that you can stop a technology be telling people to not use it?
"Do not buy books from Amazon, go to a library". "Do not use Google Maps, paper maps are perfectly fine". "Do not have Slack on your phone, your boss does not need to be able to message you off-hours".
"Do not use LLMs, they are just bad".
Is this just plain virtue signaling? Can't imagine anyone thinks telling people to not use AR/AI will actually work.
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.
Seems a very ableist pov. Pun not intended.
Counterpoint: I am looking forward to the opportunity to get fully open source, open hardware AR glasses. I anticipate that it will happen as first Meta and Google and big Chinese firms spend the R&D to create the hardware to make it possible, then Chinese knock-offs and discount brands appear, and then someone will start selling a pair through CrowdSupply which are truly open source.
At that point I will be able to have the fun of AR (gaming with paper toys or other papercrafts, displaying characters on a table for my tabletop RPG group, getting directions in a foreign city, identifying plants and insects just by looking at them, seeing where my cats are located through walls via their airtag collars) without any ads, without any data harvesting nor privacy concerns, and even being able to write my own custom apps or firmware mods. It will still be a toy rather than a necessary part of life like a smartphone has become but a fun toy nonetheless.