New device categories face a lot of hurdles when they’re starting out, but one of the most pressing obstacles is figuring out what the hell to even do with them. Meta’s answer to that very complex and important question? Hide-and-seek, apparently.
In a blog post detailing new apps in the pipeline for its Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses and the Meta Ray-Ban Display, the company showed off potential new capabilities being developed via its Wearables Device Access Toolkit—an SDK program for developers interested in building apps that use the camera and speakers in Meta’s smart glasses, but not the Meta Ray-Ban Display’s screen quite yet.
Among those groundbreaking new capabilities are apps like plant identification, a time-lapse app that records you drawing, an app that watches you study, and… a hide-and-seek app that records you playing with your kids? I’m going to assume none of these are going to send anyone rushing out to their nearest Ray-Ban retailer to buy a pair of $800 smart glasses, but this is just where we’re at right now.
To be fair, nestled in its showcase of some pretty underwhelming apps are potentially useful ones, though the most compelling examples all have to do with accessibility. For example, one integration from an app called Aira offers “real-time visual interpretation with AI glasses by connecting its service for vision-impaired users directly to the user’s point of view.” In practice, that means using the glasses’ camera feed to provide guidance to people with low vision via interpreters who are able to see the wearer’s surroundings in real-time. Similarly, another developer, OOrion, is working on an app for object and text recognition that could use the glasses’ camera to help those with vision impairments make sense of their surroundings.
Whether people with any kind of physical impairment want to use Meta’s smart glasses is another question altogether, especially since it’s reportedly zeroing in on accessibility as a way to justify using facial recognition.
For right now, it would appear that Meta’s smart glasses have a bit of an Apple Watch issue—new hardware with some potential that doesn’t quite have a clear goal yet. Obviously, Meta is working on its relative lack of apps, but there’s no guarantee that either developers or Meta can solve the issue. Maybe smart glasses will stumble backwards into their “killer app” like the Apple Watch did with health tracking, but if hide-and-seek is any indication, we’re a ways off from any kind of “eureka” moment.
