But Meta is reportedly considering audio-only smart glasses that don’t use cameras. And if anyone can navigate this privacy minefield, it might be Apple. Privacy is core to Apple’s marketing. And it’s easy to imagine how its rumoured new product could skate around the privacy concerns.
Assuming the reporting is correct, the AirPods cameras won’t let you take pictures or video like a regular camera. And Apple could – theoretically – process all of the camera’s visual information on your on your phone without sending it to the cloud or saving it afterward.
So if we set the privacy concerns aside for a moment (and to be clear I’m not saying we should) what might this new world look like?
I see two ways to look at it. One is positive. Cameras in your AirPods could let you interact with all kinds of information about your physical environment without ever touching or looking at a screen.
You could ask questions about things you’re looking at, open your fridge and get recipe ideas based on the ingredients you have without typing them in, or get navigational directions based on what’s in your field of vision. And it would unlock new, far less intrusive ways to control devices, like hand gestures.
Maybe you don’t want to do any of that stuff, but think of it this way. Right now, there’s an extremely limited number of computing tasks you can accomplish without staring at a big glass rectangle.
Don’t throw away your phone just yet
“Apple would not embed technology like this unless they had very credible use cases in mind,” says Ben Wood, chief analyst at the tech industry market research firm FDM CSS Insight, and a noted expert on wearable tech. “It’s almost limited by our imagination – what people will be able to do with these devices.”
This surrounds what I think is one of the more interesting promises about AI. At its most successful, AI would let us talk to computers the way you would talk to a person who can operate your device on your behalf.
More like this:
• The unsettling world of the ‘TikTok Farlands’
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• Wired headphone sales are booming. What’s with the Bluetooth backlash?
And Apple is already launching a revamped, AI version of Siri which takes baby steps in that direction.
It all means you could move through the world, doing things with your devices, without taking your eyes off what is around you. In an era where screen time continues to be a persistent worry for some, this could be a very welcome change.
But here’s a potentially grimmer vision of what may come. The tech industry is heavily invested in screens. Apple, for example, is a company that makes almost all its money selling products with screens on them.
If screenless devices go mainstream, then it could just be another way to get us to interact with technology more often. We all could start at screens just as much as we do now, and then have new screen-free technology for those moments when need your eyes for something else, like when you’re walking around.
“I’m a firm believer that the smartphone is going absolutely nowhere, it’s part of the fabric of society,” says Wood. “But I think there is a desire, by the tech industry and by some users, to lift our heads.”
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