I was born into the pre-digital world – at least from a consumer point of view – and receiving the weekly edition of Beano (a comic) was a highlight of the week. Hours were spent sucking in every exploit of Dennis the Menace and his pals before, inevitably, the last page was encountered. And almost every week, in one corner of the page was an advert for X-Ray Spectacles. Boy did I want – nay need – a pair of those. Imagine being able to see through walls! I just looked up the ad before writing this and it does not stand up well to the changed environment:
“Apparently see bones through skin, see through clothes, etc. Amaze and embarrass everyone!”
Talk about the original “perv glasses”: see through clothes? Yikes. But of course, firstly they didn’t work (emphasis on the word “apparently” in the ad) and secondly, this was a pre-digital world where you couldn’t record what you saw through the glasses. But it was also the age of innocence (he says, looking back with a particularly rosy shade of lenses). If anyone had objected, that advert would have been taken out of future editions of the comic book. It wasn’t; it ran for years tickling at the edges of many a child’s imagination and surely disappointing the gullible who managed to say up a few dollars to order them.
The age of innocence died (at the very latest) about a year into the life of the commercial Internet and, more than 30 years later, what you see you can record, and what you can record could end up anywhere either through intent, or by accident (especially with AI sucking up every last bit of learning data).
The latest iterations of smart glasses have launched into a world where innocence is in short supply, and short-lived, so it is no great surprise that the backlash against its cameras is building… and building fast. According to our latest Wearables survey, 17% of consumers who do not own smart glasses cite the camera being “creepy” as a key reason. That was in the Spring and I’m going to bet the number will have doubled in our Fall survey.
The question is: do smart glasses really need cameras? Ignore the use case for video recording and photo taking (which was obviously a very logical fit for Meta with its social media assets) and consider why we have the cameras. A key benefit is, potentially, to understand your surroundings. The camera allows features such as “what is that building I’m looking at” or translation of a document that you are staring at, all without having to admit you don’t know the answer. But the camera also helps with contextual awareness: if the AI knows where you are, then it can help you find things, or make sure you are not wandering in the wrong direction.
Some of these can be solved without a camera. Even the “what is that building” could be answered through a combination of location services and a digital compass, as used by your smartphone. That way, the direction you are looking in, and your location, can be laid onto a detailed map to answer the question. No camera required.
And that’s going to be key I believe to the success of this category. Smart glasses began sans camera, but the camera was key to the device’s success (aka growth) in the past couple of years. But now it’s time to start considering how to shed the camera while still retaining as much of the smarts as possible. That’s not a technological step back; it’s a way to evolve the category for future survival and growth.
That is not to say that camera-laden smart glasses are a doomed category. There’s still a strong market for them if the vendors can suitably prove their privacy, such as through the light that Meta uses to show they are recording. But, just as with the old X-Ray glasses that everyone knew did not really work, there will always be that sliver of doubt that perhaps the smart glasses are recording even though the light is off. The age of innocence is over; the age of distrust is well and truly established.