Thread by @KyleSamani

0/ Rayban Stories

What, who, how, when, where, why

A thread

(Before getting into crypto, I started a company that built software for Google Glass (GG)in healthcare... I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a while!)

Only tangentially relevant to crypto

1/ What are FB’s long term goals?

Pretty obvious actually: build the metaverse

They have been investing in VR (Oculus) and AR for many years, with powering the Metaverse being the overarching goal

2/ FB stated that this will be the first of a series of products

The primary purpose of this launch is to get real world feedback

How do people use it?
What do they like / not like?
How do social norms evolve when someone wears camera glasses?

Etc

3/ Building smart glasses is *hard*. After leaving that industry in 2015, I thought that we would finally get there by 2020. 5 years felt like the right amount of time

Nope

Why is it so hard?

4/ People do not like putting stuff on their face. The human face is very sensitive. No one wears glasses because they want to. They wear glasses because a) they need to see/read/drive, or b) because it hurts their eyes because the sun is too bright

5/ The human face has more nerves than almost any other part of the human body. So it is particularly sensitive, and it is especially sensitive to weight

If something is even a few grams too heavy, you will notice and take them off. For ears, and for nose

6/ The other constraints are heat dissipation, and battery

If you did video streaming on GG, you could feel the side of the glasses get hot… again the human face is sensitive, and heat on the side of your head does not feel good

7/ Believe it or not, for having a screen, the optics/screen technologies are pretty much there today (GG’s screen sucked but new optic tech is better now).

8/ The problem with putting a screen on glasses is that you need more compute to render the stuff on the screen, which creates more heat, and consumes more battery

And remember, batteries are heavy, and weight is bad

9/ Unless there is some breakthrough in chip power and performance, am honestly somewhat skeptical that you can put a full computer with a screen on your face, comfortably

But what if you don’t have to put a full computer on your face?

10/ There have been rumors floating for quite sometime that Apple’s rumored Glasses will leverage your iPhone as the primary computer, and just have camera + AR + optics built into the frame

11/ This certainly makes sense. The constraint will be latency. IIRC The human eye can perceive latency <25ms… so if you’re going to depend on a wireless connection, it has to be super fast and never drop frames

12/ Anyhoo, there are other problems besides tech

The most important of which is, what are the glasses actually useful for? This is actually the most important problem, and it’s not really clear what the answers are

13/ If you want to take pictures, camera glasses sound like a great solution!

Turns out this is ~90% wrong

What?!

14/ The biggest problem is that you don’t have a view finder, so you don’t actually know what you’re taking a picture of

FOV is a *huge* problem. Sometimes you want a wide FOV. Sometimes you want narrow.

Also, hard to gauge how zoomed the picture will be without a viewfinder

15/ Your eyes move relative to your head, but the camera glasses can't move like your eyes

People rarely actually look *perfectly* straight forward all of the time

So with camera glasses, you get pics where the main subject is off center both horizontally and vertically

16/ My base case is that most people will try the camera because it’s cool, will be unhappy with their first 10-30 pictures for the reasons above, and give up on them

This happened with GG, and with Snap’s Spectacles

17/ Now, let’s get beyond taking pictures/videos

What else are smart glasses good for?

This is… not clear

18/ You do two things with computers: input information, and consume information

Most info consumption is text (email, iMessage, articles, Reddit, etc)

Or images (IG)

Or videos (TikTok, YT, Twitch)

None of those things are obviously better in 3d space overlaid on reality

19/ And most information input is keyboard, for typing. Again, probably not better in AR glasses

20/ What glasses do unlock is a new input: the POV camera!

So the question is, what new apps can you unlock with that as the primary input

And the obvious answer is AR, but it’s unclear what specifically

21/ Sci-Fi movies have shown Wikipedia-like info overlays on places and things. Or realtime navigation/guidance

But these use cases aren’t 10x better than the status quo IMO

22/ Remember, people *do not want to put stuff on their face*

The utility from the glasses has to be good enough to overcome that friction. And that friction is non-trivial

23/ If you look at smart glasses today, 99% of it is enterprise, for very specific workflows for people who work with their hands. This will continue to be the case for a while I think, because there are still so many problems in tech and use case as outlined above

24/ Anyways, I’m still excited to see FB run this experiment, and I’ll get a pair and probably post some pics from Solana’s Breakpoint event in Lisbon in early November! Hope to see you there!

And as always, feedback welcome!

{fin}