Smart glasses with built-in cameras are becoming more common, but there’s still one big question: How do you know when someone is recording you?
HTC thinks it has an answer.
I recently tried the new HTC Vive Eagle smart glasses, and the feature that stood out most had nothing to do with AI. It was a simple privacy safeguard: If you cover the recording light, the glasses automatically stop recording.
I tested it myself. I started recording video, covered the LED, and almost immediately heard, “Capture has stopped.”
There’s another interesting option. With the right setting enabled, someone nearby can say “stop filming,” and the glasses will stop recording. That gives people around the wearer a little more control than they typically have with camera-equipped glasses.
The Vive Eagle glasses start at $500 and pack a lot of technology into a fairly lightweight frame. There’s a camera, microphones, speakers and two physical buttons, including one you can customize for quick access to AI features. Charging is handled through a magnetic connector on the side.
Beyond taking photos and videos, listening to music and making calls, the glasses can translate more than 90 languages, identify objects you’re looking at, suggest recipes, summarize meetings, read text out loud and livestream to YouTube.
That last part, reading text aloud, could also make glasses like these useful as an accessibility tool for people with impaired vision.
HTC says it has also built privacy protections into how your data is handled. AI requests are de-identified, content on the glasses is encrypted, and photos and videos sync to your phone by default rather than automatically going to the cloud.
After trying them, the privacy features are what I found most interesting. Cameras on our faces are likely to become much more common as smart glasses add better AI, displays and other capabilities. The technology is moving quickly, but getting people comfortable with being around it may be the bigger challenge.
The Vive Eagle shows that privacy doesn’t have to be an afterthought.