The reality is to make augmented reality glasses, you need to put a camera next to your eyes that is continuously recording everything you see and processing that to put information over it. There is not another way around it. And there's certainly not a chip that can fit in the stem of a glasses that is both powerful enough and power miserly enough to do that in real time. You have to send that data to a cloud. You gotta do it. [...] Or you can build something the size of a Vision Pro with a ✦ AI generated
Patel concludes that the cloud-dependent architecture required for mainstream AR glasses inherently means invading users' privacy.
Nilay Patel: And it means if you want to build the product that everyone thinks is the next thing, you are going to have to invade people's privacy.
explains mechanism · 2
Patel explains the technical constraint forcing AR glasses to rely on cloud processing: no sufficiently small, powerful, and efficient chip exists yet.
Nilay Patel: And there's certainly not a chip that can fit in the stem of a glasses that is both powerful enough and power miserly enough to do that in real time. You have to send that data to a cloud. You gotta do it.
extends · 1
Patel frames today's design space as a binary: small cloud-reliant glasses, or large, battery-tethered headsets like the Vision Pro.
Nilay Patel: Or you can build something the size of a Vision Pro with a battery pack that lives somewhere else. Those are the current choices in this world.
provides context · 1
Patel raises a serious counter-argument that the privacy costs of AR glasses may be too great to justify building the product, suggesting it should be halted.
Nilay Patel: And maybe you shouldn't. Like, there's an incredible argument for, nope, you shouldn't do that. Nope, the trade-offs required to make this product are so high at a societal level that we should stop it.
supports · 1
Nilay Patel argues that AR glasses fundamentally require constant visual capture and processing near the eyes — there's no workaround.
Nilay Patel: The reality is to make augmented reality glasses, you need to put a camera next to your eyes that is continuously recording everything you see and processing that to put information over it. There is not another way around it.
extends · 1