The smart glasses from Facebook’s parent company are useless.

For the past few years, I’ve resisted the siren call of the Apple Watch, a device designed to somehow keep me more connected to the Internet than I already am, unfortunately. I removed my Fitbit, rejecting the step count data collector and hourly calls to get up and walk. And while my trials with virtual reality headsets like Meta’s Quest and Apple’s Vision Pro have been impressive, I’ve found no real use for these products, which isolate me for long periods of time and freak out my dog.

I don’t wear glasses either. Not only is my vision excellent, but through occasional visits to the eye doctor, I’ve learned that I’ll probably need reading glasses—nothing more—in a decade or two. I consider myself extremely lucky. Sunglasses don’t do much for me either, although once or twice a year I wear them at my wife’s insistence.

This is a long way of saying that I have little interest in glasses, that I feel strange wearing them for fashion when others need them to see the world, and that Big Tech’s attempts to commercialize “smart glasses” do nothing for me. I beg you, please don’t make me wear Mark Zuckerberg’s ugly glasses.

Wait, what’s going on?

Well, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has spent years trying to develop a pair of mainstream consumer glasses equipped with augmented reality technology. First, Meta partnered with European eyewear company EssilorLuxottica to produce Ray-Bans with built-in speakers, cameras and microphone. But oddly enough, they don’t have any AR capabilities. Now Meta – without Ray-Ban’s help this time – has announced its true AR smart glasses, called Orion, and let some journalists and tech reviewers test them.

What is augmented reality again?

While virtual reality is a fully immersive computer view on your eyes, augmented reality places computerized overlays on your physical environment. Remember Hot Dog Guy from Snapchat? It was a taste of augmented reality. Will Meta’s augmented reality put the baby photos of long-lost high school classmates in virtual frames on the walls of your home? Is this the metaverse they warned us about?

The Origin glasses can make calls, take photos, play videos and games, and connect to a wristband that lets you click on different items as they appear in your field of vision. (Yes, that’s another thing to wear.) The idea is that it’s a smartphone strapped to your face, giving you the power of modern mobile internet without having to put your smartphone in your poached.

Have I never seen smart glasses before?

Yes. It’s the same general concept that led Google to market Google Glass ten years ago. (These devices were discontinued in 2015, rebranded as enterprise products aimed at factory workers in 2017, and then permanently phased out in 2023.)

Google Glass failed because it was expensive, useless, unwanted and, frankly, super ugly. “Glass, and other similar objects, will not always be ugly and distracting,” Mat Honan wrote in Wired in 2013, in a retrospective of a year of wearing the device. “At some point it will be invisibly indistinguishable from a pair of glasses or sunglasses.”

But that prediction hasn’t come true – at least not yet. The Snap glasses are truly horrifying, like something you’d wear as part of a half-assed Andy Warhol costume on Halloween. Meta’s Ray-Ban line at least attempts to appear fashionable, an ideal that its Orion devices may have abandoned. But if you don’t like the signature look of Ray-Bans, too bad. And they don’t offer AR, just multimedia features, so what’s the point really? Amazon Echo Frames, glasses that bring the magic of your Alexa device directly to your face, are perhaps the hottest smart glasses I’ve seen – and I’m defining fashion here simply as: it doesn’t look like you have material on your face.

Searching the web for early reviews of the Orion device, I was happy to see Verge’s Alex Heath, Business Insider’s Peter Kafka, CNET’s Scott Stein, and Stratechery newsletter editor Ben Thompson sacrificing their face on the altar of SpongeBob cosplay, which is the commitment needed to try any of these things. “I tried them and they are very cool!” Kafka writes that this is the first eye technology he can imagine purchasing. “They don’t make you look cool – you look like someone wearing technology on their face – but the ideas and engineering behind them are really fascinating.”

Stein puts it this way: “The glasses certainly don’t look like everyday objects, but they at least come close to something you might see someone wearing,” he writes. “On me, they kind of come across as super, super thick, arty frames.”

In an interview with The Verge, Zuckerberg hinted that he may have known his new glasses were weird, telling Heath that future Orion models could be half as thick as today. “I think we aspire to build things that look really good,” Zuckerberg said. Does Zuckerberg know what looks good? We’re absolutely not so sure.

How are the reviews?

Early reviews of the Orion glasses are glowing. Shareholders seem happy with the news: Meta stock rose 1 percent before the end of Wednesday’s session. But it’s a weird pseudo-release because you can’t actually buy these products. These are just prototypes that you might try at CES or another electronics convention. Rather, it’s a reapproach to the company’s metaverse projects, which once meant something very different and centered around virtual reality rather than augmented reality.

Wait. I can’t even buy these horrible glasses?

No, mainly because they are too expensive to produce at the moment. Meta told the Verge that they cost around $10,000 per pair, because the lenses in current prototypes are made with expensive silicon carbide. The next iteration of these glasses, expected in the coming years, the company claims, will not be made with this material and, in exchange, will sport a higher resolution.

Yet even in the distant future, when Orion is ready, nothing will make me want to wear these things.

The wearable technology market is emerging as a set of definitive surveillance devices intended to transmit the last vestiges of our personal data – that is, the physical world – to the Big Tech conglomerates of Silicon Valley.

Gadget geeks always want to have the latest and greatest silicon-filled garbage, coughing up unknown thousands of dollars to do so. But I won’t do anything like that unless Slate begs me to, which I admit could certainly happen.

I contribute enough to the information economy through my tweets, Instagram photos, and public writings, all available for tech companies to scoop up and buy from intermediaries. To let more blood flow, I would have to let Meta, Snap, or Amazon latch onto my optic nerves, insert Elon Musk’s Neuralink chip into my brain, and condemn my physical environment to the evils of the Internet. There would be icons on my kitchen table, auto-playing videos in my bathroom, and pop-up Chewy ads during my morning walks with my dog.

But the worst thing, perhaps, would be that I would seem irredeemable. badger.