AR Glasses, Missed Buses, And Uncanny Valleys

Have you ever been in a city, kind of late at night, and you're waiting at a bus stop or a subway platform for your ride home? And maybe you're not 100% familiar with the transportation system and maybe you're a little drunk on top of that.

But you feel like you've been standing there for an awfully long time. And you're getting worried that maybe (you check your watch) the buses stopped running an hour ago. Maybe you're stuck here. It isn't a bad part of town. But it's definitely the part where one would find the sort of bar where you and your friends can afford to drink all night. And that kind of bar can't afford the high rents of a safe neighborhood.

Thank God! A bus is approaching. Is it going near your desired destination? Prrrobably. It's hard to say. It seems to be going South-ish, which at least feels right.

You board the bus. Not because you're sure it's the right move, but because you don't want to be in a hopeless situation later on, wishing that you'd boarded this thing on impulse when you had the chance.

Now hold on to that thought while you take a look at SPECS, the pair of augmented-reality glasses introduced by Snap today:

Umm…

Well, maybe they look better when they're actually being worn. Here's Snap's CEO, Evan Spiegel, while he was being interviewed by CNBC:

... ......

Oh, no…and check them out from the side:

I'm struggling for something positive to say. I suppose if you squint a little, Spiegel looks a little like Stevie Wonder in them.

…And who, on this planet, is cooler than Stevie Wonder?

But I need to be blunt and report that the first celebrity who came to mind was this guy:

Although Charles Nelson Reilly possessed an undeniable je ne sais quoi, I don't think the visual connection will help Snap move more of these. Certainly not at $2195.

Yes, I'm taking some time out of my Wednesday afternoon to have some fun at Snap's expense. True AR glasses that function untethered are a moonshot project. Before we get to the good stuff, there needs to be first-generation hardware, and first-gen hardware is never pretty.

But glasses become part of the user interface through which the rest of the world interacts with you. If a pair of AR glasses are this ugly…can we even call them a functioning product?

(Also: I know nothing about SPECS software. The phrase "artificial intelligence" plays throughout the press materials. Well, I should hope that this AI can use the cameras and sensors to detect situations where the SPECS are in obvious peril. There is no way in hell that these things are staying on your face if the wearer looks down even slightly. The displays should therefore turn black and show the warning "LOOK STRAIGHT AHEAD" (accompanied by a visual level) when the wearer is using the lavatory. Otherwise, that's $2195 you're not getting back, and if you could, you wouldn't want it back anyway.)

For that matter, even if they're compact and pretty: will this type of device ever deliver enough practical value that I would wear it even if I hated every one of the frames styles being offered? The last time I shopped for new frames, it took me weeks to find a shop that didn't sell variants of the same three or four styles, each of which I absolutely hated.

Both the Vision Pro and Google Glass earned a lot of flak for making the wearer look goofy. Viz:

Looking at this photo, yeah, I look a little goofy (fine: "goofier") wearing these. But it isn't nearly as bad as I thought. People who talked to me could see both of my eyes, unobstructed. There was just this little prism-looking thing at the end of a plastic stalk that was about the size of the cap from a Sharpie.

Even if we set that aside, Google Glass and the Vision Pro (plus similar goggles) have a key advantage over something like SPECS: they are clearly what they are. The person speaking to you notes the presence, then moves on. They'll move on if you're wearing a pair of AI glasses, too; they look enough like normal (albeit Buddy Holly-style) glasses that even if the person knows it contains a couple of cameras, their brain won't be distracted by the puzzle, overmuch.

SPECS has an Uncanny Valley problem. It's trying to pass as a normal pair of glasses. But it absolutely cannot pull it off. It is not realistic (or kind) to wear something like this and then expect the people you interact with to not be thinking "What the hell is the deal with those?" with such intensity that within a moment, you hear the cooling fans inside their heads spin up.

Progress is progress. Eventually, improvements in battery and display tech will allow for a pair of AR glasses that permit something like a normal interaction with a fellow member of humanity.

And when that day comes…well, we can finally start thinking about whether there's any point to this idea at all. Snap and Google and Apple and all of these other companies are working so very hard to develop AR as a viable and practical platform for computing, or even just as a new surface for interaction. Annnd it's entirely possible that it just isn't.

I suppose I should admit that I don't get the point of this type of display-glasses, full stop. Not yet, anyway.

I see a space for display glasses as a type of portable monitor/workspace (where putting them on and taking them off is akin to opening and closing the screen on a laptop). I see a space for "Apple Watch"-style ones, where there's a modest little display that lights up from time to time with a useful piece of info, or a widget, or a UI for a quick task.

SPECS – full AR with hand-tracking, with all of the physical, social, and functional problems that this form creates – feels like the result of a lot of good questions that nobody on the design team pursued to any satisfactory answers. I don't see the point.

But there's a bus approaching, and tech CEOs can see that it's already half-full of other tech CEOs, resplendent in their own black knit pullovers, and what if this is going to be the only opportunity they'll have, and at least this bus is going in some kind of a forward direction…and forward is good, right?

…right?