The Meta canopies have arrived

It’s happening: People once entered public places with a face computer recording videos on their heads. Only this time, the faceputer is sold by Meta, not Google.

Say hello to Meta Glassholes.

Over the weekend, as buyers enjoyed their first periods of uninterrupted time with the new Meta Quest 3 headset, some began posting videos of themselves interacting with the real world. instead to play games.

Sure, it’s cool to blast low-poly baddies through your walls, but isn’t it more technically impressive that Meta’s new helmet lets you cook a meal, sweep your floors, or enjoy a refined coffee on a beautiful day without ever taking off the helmet. machine? That’s what Quest 3’s low-latency color relay video makes possible.

It didn’t take long for people to start pushing the boundaries, both technological and social. Jay Mayo roamed the New York Comic-Con floor with headphones on, recording clips of aliens along the way.

Kukurio59 filmed himself waiting for an elevator, already one of the most socially awkward spaces humanity has to offer. (They also filmed less public demos.)

And, in the video you already saw at the top of this article, Cix Liv, an XR and AI booster, almost filled Glasshole by walking straight into a San Francisco coffee shop and placing an order, without taking the It’s hard to hide the address of the café.

Here is that video again:

I spoke to Ray Ng, co-owner of Fiddle Fig Cafe, the cafe in question, and he thinks it was just “a stunt for laughs and giggles.” Liv didn’t sit and drink her coffee with the headphones on, Ng says. “They took the trigger off, sat down and that’s it,” he tells me over the phone. It was all over in “maybe 5 minutes”.

But that won’t necessarily stop other attention seekers from following Liv’s lead — they might even encourage each other. “Now I don’t feel bad walking around with the helmet on during Comic Con,” Mayo responded to Liv, after the artist filmed himself walking around New York Comic-Con saw Liv’s coffee video.

Of course, we’ve been through all this before: ten years ago, public opinion turned against Google Glass, with owners of public companies in particular speaking out against the technology. Restaurants, cinemas, casinos, bars and other public establishments have banned headphones altogether: a woman was allegedly attacked because she was wearing Google Glass in San Francisco, and an XR pioneer was attacked in Paris while using a similar device.

But that was ten years ago, and I argued last year that our definition of privacy, our tolerance for public photography, and our resistance to wearable technology have all changed significantly since Google first introduced Glass. Maybe it won’t be such a problem this time? Smartphone cameras everywhere are now the norm, and small businesses often benefit from leverage; Ng agreed with me in naming Fiddle Fig Cafe in this story.

I wonder, though, if Meta was prepared for the Quest 3 to be the glasshole’s headset of choice. Although the company has put a lot of thought into making sure its eyeglass-like Ray-Bans don’t fall into the same trap — issuing privacy explanations and guidelines for using these glasses in public, including proactively letting people know you’re recording – the Quest 3 doesn’t appear to have similar published guidelines.

It’s also a little harder for viewers to know when the Quest 3 is recording. It just emits a white light, slowly, and it’s a light that is already on by default. When I asked my wife if she thought I was recording, she said she had no idea.

Then again, if I saw someone walk into a coffee shop with a bulbous white object on their face with multiple camera slits, I would automatically assume they were recording absolutely everything.

Meta did not respond to a request for comment.