Mechanism◆Article

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 argues that AR glasses fundamentally require constant visual capture and processing near the eyes — there's no workaround. ✦ AI generated

Nilay Patel · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-07-10 · original ↗

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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.

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✳ augmented reality glasses

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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.Nilay Patel · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 65%

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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 Weblog