Wearable Computers Should Never Have Cameras
The early inventors of wearables all told me — ‘Don’t put a camera on that thing!’
Over a decade ago, I began reporting on “wearable computing.” Back in the ‘90s and ‘00s, this meant interviewing DIY hardware hackers who’d built their own rigs.
They discovered some pretty cool uses for a head-mounted computer. Often they used their wearable as a form of “extended memory” — they’d jot down notes on the fly and retrieve them when needed, even years later, peering into their tiny eye-level screens. They also liked to engage in ambient, floating text-chat with friends. Wearables, they all told me, could amplify your cognition.
But the one thing nearly everyone told me?
If you put a camera on your wearable computer, it creeps people out.
“In the early days, people had this allergic reaction to the idea that people would be recorded,” as Thad Starner, a wearable pioneer, told me in 2011. It was obvious why. If you had a camera mounted on your head, everyone around you became deeply self-conscious, worried that you were recording something they were doing in private. As a result, Starner’s hand-built, head-mounted wearable generally didn’t have a camera.
Ten years later, every single big tech firm that builds wearable computers has totally and utterly ignored this lesson. They all insist on putting cameras on their devices.
This says an awful lot about their priorities. What it says is:
Big tech firms have no interest in building technology that actually helps you think, which was the original vision of wearable computers. They just want you to wear something that feeds content to their ad-supported social networks.
Is that camera on? Are you recording this?
I thought about this today while reading news of Facebook’s new “Ray-Ban Stories”.
Facebook partnered with Ray-Ban to build a pair of sunglasses that have two front-facing cameras. You can take a photo or a video by touching the frame or by speaking a phrase. To alert other folks nearby to what you’re doing, the glasses make a “snap” sound when you take a picture, and…
