{"id":838540,"date":"2026-07-31T16:51:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T16:51:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/838540\/"},"modified":"2026-07-31T16:51:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T16:51:12","slug":"to-get-beyond-pervert-glasses-meta-should-remember-the-lessons-of-vr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/838540\/","title":{"rendered":"To Get Beyond \u2018Pervert Glasses,\u2019 Meta Should Remember the Lessons of VR"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in 2016, floods of people were playing Pokemon Go<\/a> in public parks and streets just about everywhere. Meanwhile, VR headsets were tech\u2019s hot product, from the Oculus Rift<\/a> and HTC Vive<\/a> to PlayStation VR<\/a>, Google Daydream<\/a> and Samsung Gear VR<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I remember that year vividly and think about it compared to 2026, a year in which everyone seems dead-set against the rise of \u201cpervert glasses\u201d<\/a> in a world inundated with force-fed AI.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a notable backlash against wearable tech again, a call against smart glasses and those wearing them. I\u2019m having d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu of the Google Glass<\/a> days of 2013 \u2014 but back then, hardly anyone owned a pair.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Not that many people own smart glasses today, either, but the numbers are in the millions<\/a>. It\u2019s more like VR, a product category that has perpetually hovered in the outlier zone, something not quite mainstream that also faced its own metaverse backlash<\/a> several years ago.<\/p>\n

Meta\u2019s seen two waves of public backlash against its wearable products, but to me, the smart glasses pushback shows something more concerning: Meta never learned its own lessons from VR. There are some things VR did very, very right that smart glasses are doing very, very wrong.<\/p>\n

Let me explain.<\/p>\n

\"elton-vr-headsets\"<\/p>\n

Lots of people trying out an Elton John VR experience years ago, myself included.<\/p>\n

Josh Goldman\/CNET<\/p>\n

No way to try them<\/p>\n

For years, VR was not a home product at all. It was a thing to be demoed, tried at a tech conference, a film conference or a location-based ticketed experience. The Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream were seeded all over the place<\/a> for people to experience immersive videos and games. Tribeca and Sundance showcased immersive experiences<\/a> using VR headsets. Venues such as The Void<\/a> built pay-to-try theme park-like experiences. You\u2019d be wowed, for a bit, then go home. And, maybe, consider buying one.<\/p>\n

That was the question: Was VR good enough to be worth buying? But the demos, the experiences, had their own merits. People actually had a chance to test it and figure out their own opinions for themselves.<\/p>\n

Smart glasses<\/a> in 2026 are black boxes. When I wear them around friends, they don\u2019t know whether they\u2019re smart glasses or not. They don\u2019t know if they\u2019re recording. They don\u2019t know if I might see something in my lenses on hidden displays. They make guesses as to what I do with them. They remain a mystery for most of the people I know. Meta might have its retail stores for trying glasses, but the stores are few and far between, and the testing process is strange. And there have been very few<\/a> ways to try out AR or smart glasses in art experiences.<\/p>\n

\"personTrying a location-based VR experience this summer, in a space marked safely and designed deliberately for VR use at Eclipso in New York City.Scott Stein\/CNET<\/p>\n

No designed spaces to safely use them<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been following the promises of augmented reality for years: Someday, we\u2019ll find our neighborhoods transformed<\/a> by overlaid information we\u2019ll see floating in front of us, a merging of the real and virtual. We\u2019ll find our public lives augmented. But that hasn\u2019t happened, although I\u2019ve seen plenty of art experiences and apps showing bits and pieces of it, in Snapchat<\/a>, Pokemon Go, Apple\u2019s various ARKit apps<\/a> and AR Google Maps<\/a>.<\/p>\n

VR had another thing going for it: safe spaces with agreed-upon social contracts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

VR headsets<\/a> you buy for yourself are usually meant to be used at home. Occasionally, you might take them to a cafe or on a plane. But no one uses them while walking around the real world, and those who did for a stunt<\/a> were mocked relentlessly, because it was exactly that: a stunt.<\/p>\n

Location-based VR, which lets you walk around freely and even overlay experiences in mixed reality, is handled carefully. I just saw The Black Mirror Experience<\/a> in New York, which was a ticketed event at The Shed, in a contained area with a zone carefully marked for VR, chaperoned by people who assisted with the headsets, watched people in the experience and helped when issues arose. Another VR experience I tried recently, called Space Explorers: The ISS Experience<\/a>, worked similarly. That\u2019s been how VR has worked in live events for over a decade, and it\u2019s still how it works today.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a term in immersive experience and game design that\u2019s been around for decades: \u201cthe magic circle<\/a>.\u201d It\u2019s the space where, within those boundaries, an agreed-upon world of play exists and is respected as separate from the rest of the world. I\u2019m paraphrasing, but in immersive experiences set in real-world spaces, it\u2019s a critical concept. Coming up with how an experience, and those in it, can respectfully coexist in a real-life space is hard.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Augmented reality still hasn\u2019t solved this problem because augmented reality isn\u2019t a mass-adopted computing platform yet. It might be someday, and plenty of companies such as Snap<\/a>, Apple, Google<\/a> and Meta<\/a> are pursuing AR glasses in an array of forms.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, wearables with cameras and sensors are getting AI slapped on them and being sent out into the world, with no clear sense of how any magic circles or agreed-upon terms of use will work. Meta is just throwing this stuff out there<\/a> and seeing how people will use it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"largeAt a contained Pokemon Go 10th-anniversary event in NY, I was reminded of how deliberate spaces for AR are needed.Scott Stein\/CNET<\/p>\n

Time to build new contracts<\/p>\n

VR experiences \u201care thoughtfully designed as a kind of social contract,\u201d says Ian Hamilton, a friend and peer on the XR beat who previously served as editor-in-chief of UploadVR before running his own newsletter and Good Virtual Reality<\/a> podcast. \u201cYou surrender to an experience you want to have and you can remove yourself from it anytime.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ian sees the odd, unsolved social friction when it comes to smart glasses, including the way they unsettle people who aren\u2019t looped into how they work, as he says it\u2019s why he\u2019s stopped wearing them in public. \u201cI keep using my headsets because the settings in which I wear them are generally private and the experiences I have inside of them are part of a social contract that makes sense to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

I agree with Ian. The sad part about what\u2019s happening right now is that Meta already built a contract around VR through years of work on Oculus and Quest headsets. In the winter, I thought Meta was pivoting too fast<\/a> from VR to smart glasses and AI, and suffering the consequences of immature technology and no bridge between the standards established on Quest and the standards missing in the realm of smart glasses. Now, in a summer where everyone is calling smart glasses \u201cpervert glasses,\u201d and AI companies are begging for oversight<\/a> after years of reckless acceleration, the criticisms are deserved.<\/p>\n

But they\u2019re also unfortunate, because the tech is still in its infancy and its possibilities are still taking shape, with the biggest players, including Google, Samsung<\/a> and Apple<\/a>, yet to enter the market.<\/p>\n

\"VRMeta\u2019s Quest and smart glasses social strategies have been very different. Too different.Scott Stein\/CNET<\/p>\n

Smart glasses and AR glasses promise to bridge the gap between us and the outside world. The reality is that smart glasses don\u2019t actually do much with that relationship yet; they\u2019re mostly placeholders. But we need to solve that relationship before these devices keep flying out into the world, otherwise people feel like they don\u2019t have agency in the relationship. It\u2019d be like wandering into someone\u2019s immersive VR playspace without a headset. And the contracts need to be there<\/a> for both the companies brokering the AI tools as well as the public spaces where they\u2019re being used<\/a>, especially with longer battery life, always-on AI<\/a>, and facial recognition<\/a> likely on the way.<\/p>\n

Cory Doctorow, whose new book on AI<\/a> refers to the difference between centaurs (those who use tech as tools with personal agency) and reverse centaurs (those who are being used as tools by tech), is right about what splits the benefits from the horrors of AI. It\u2019s also what\u2019s making early AI wearables feel so broken as a public device: Not enough people feel a sense of agency when they see them in public. The wearables need to feel like tools, and doorways, not surveillance threats.\u00a0<\/p>\n

My only advice right now: Don\u2019t call strangers perverts. Point your fingers at the tech companies, and hopefully, more thoughtful work on wearable tech will come. The possibilities of assistive wearable tech \u2014 for vision impairment, hearing loss, cognitive decline and more \u2014 and its potential to collapse distances and connect people are fascinating. But right now, too few people have access to the technology, and too much about it remains unclear.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m finding smart glasses easier to wear with each passing month. Meta\u2019s frame designs<\/a> are getting more comfortable and more like regular, everyday glasses. But I\u2019m not finding them any easier to use or manage \u2014 or feeling any more comfortable wearing them in public.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Comparatively, VR wasn\u2019t so bad after all.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Scott\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tScott Stein\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tEditor at Large\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tI started with CNET reviewing laptops in 2009. Now I explore wearable tech, VR\/AR, tablets, gaming and future\/emerging trends in our changing world. Other obsessions include magic, immersive theater, puzzles, board games, cooking, improv and the New York Jets. My background includes an MFA in theater which I apply to thinking about immersive experiences of the future.
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\tSee full bio\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back in 2016, floods of people were playing Pokemon Go in public parks and streets just about everywhere.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":838541,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[49,48,61,260,261,262],"class_list":["post-838540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-virtual-reality","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology","tag-virtual-reality","tag-virtualreality","tag-vr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=838540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838540\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/838541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=838540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=838540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=838540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}