MechanismArticle
No chip exists that can fit in the stem of a pair of glasses while being both powerful enough and power-efficient enough to process that data locally in real time, so the data has to be sent to a cloud.
Patel explains the technical constraint forcing AR glasses to rely on cloud processing: no sufficiently small, powerful, and efficient chip exists yet. ✦ AI generated
Nilay Patel · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-07-10 · original ↗
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.
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explains mechanism → If you want to build the AR glasses product everyone thinks is the next big thing, you are going to have to invade people's privacy.Nilay Patel · Simon Willison's Weblogextends → To make augmented reality glasses, you need a camera next to your eyes continuously recording everything you see and processing it to overlay information — there is no other way around it.Nilay Patel · Simon Willison's Weblog