I've been wearing smartwatches and fitness trackers around my wrist for years, but I’d never worn an Oura Ring before. I hadn’t considered myself much of a “ring guy,” but I admittedly wasn’t a watch guy before I started wearing an Apple Watch. Now I can’t go a day without it. After wearing my Oura Ring Generation 3 for more than two months, I can almost say the same thing about the tiny sleep monitor that currently lives on my finger at all times.
As a sleep tracker, the Oura Ring 3 is remarkable. As a fitness tracker, it’s not bad, could be better. As a piece of wearable tech, it’s comfortable to wear constantly and consistently, even in bed.
Let’s get straight to it. Does the Oura Ring do enough to replace a smartwatch? No. I think it serves an entirely separate function. To answer the trickier question of “Is an Oura Ring right for you?” it depends on what you’re looking for in a wearable health tracker.
If you want extensive amounts of data about your sleep and daily health tracking, as well as an accurate step counter, yes, it is. Want all that in a package that doesn’t look techy whatsoever? An even better reason to choose one. If you want a completely smart device that will show you texts, calls, and reminders and, most important, tell you what time it is, buy a watch.
My Oura Ring journey began like any other—with a sizing kit. After you choose your make and model, Oura will send you a box of ring sizers ranging from sizes 6 to 13. They recommend you wear the smart ring on your index finger, but—due to a Little League–related accident in my youth—I’ve found it most comfortable to wear on the middle finger of my non-dominant (left) hand. Indecision frequently haunts me, so I was initially worried that my chosen size (11) would be too tight or too loose, but after weeks of everyday wear, I can safely say I don’t think about it too much anymore.
Once your device (it feels strange to call something this small a “device”) arrives, it’s time to download the app. The setup process is pretty easy and the onboarding is gradual. Certain data, like stress levels, resilience, long-term trends, and reports tabs, are inaccessible on day one. To start, I primarily relied on the ring for sleep and restfulness data. In this way, the Oura Ring puts its best foot forward.
Oura offers several style and finish options for your ring. You can opt for Heritage, the original design with a raised plateau segment, or the fully rounded Horizon. Each has a selection of metal finishes to choose from. In terms of tech, the rings are all identical. No plus or pro offerings, just one ring to rule them all. Each Gen 3 has three sensors on the inside of the ring that use biometrics to track daily functions, including heart rate and blood-oxygen levels.
About a month into my time with the ring, I went on a family vacation and multiple people asked me if my Horizon Oura Ring was a wedding ring or an engagement band. That’s how slick it is. It’s that normal looking. The fact that it’s so high-tech and looks like any other SGD450 ring made it easy to incorporate Oura into my daily routine.
Since you are supposed to wear it all the time yet it’s also an electronic device, one of my first questions was “When will I charge my Oura Ring?” The answer: during showers. The ring itself is waterproof up to 330 feet; that means swimming is no problem, and the same goes for doing the dishes, washing your hands, etc. This is meant to monitor you at all times, remember? That makes it a great choice for swimmers who want to track their workouts.
Every morning, I wake up to see how I slept and to confirm the previous day’s activities, then I slip my ring off to shower and back on before I start my day. It ends up fading into the background of my busy life. Sometimes I’ll check the app to see my daily stress levels, but generally I only think about my Oura Ring in the morning and at night.
While heart rate and blood-oxygen sensing are the newest features of the Oura Ring (only available on the Gen 3), sleep tracking is the most impressive feature, and it has only improved with each iteration. This is where the form, factor, and function fully align to accomplish something a smartwatch has yet to do: provide accurate, seamless data about my sleep health.
At first, I felt the insights were a bit obvious. But I soon realised that I trusted the data, since it reflected how I was actually feeling in the form of a score. Now I wake up each day, ready for my scores to tell me how I slept, not the other way around. Even knowing simple information, like when exactly I fell asleep and precisely how many sleep minutes I get per night, feels like a breakthrough in understanding my body. And that’s just scratching the surface.
The main thing I gravitate toward is the scores. Each morning, once the ring determines I’m fully awake, I will get scores from 0 (typically above 50 if I slept at all) to 100 that rate both my sleep and my readiness for the day. I cannot emphasise how much I love these stupid numbers. Seeing a high readiness score can reinforce a feeling that I’m going to have a good day, while a lower sleep score is an excellent validation of why I feel like shit. In fact, this is where the sleep tab of the app truly comes into play. Broken-down stats on REM and deep-sleep time, or my overall sleep efficiency, allow me to quickly compare each night’s sleep with my norm.
Eventually, the app will start providing a Resilience rating. Mine currently reads “solid,” but with proper self-care, I can raise that to “exceptional” over time. This aspect is actually quite vague and difficult to engage with, but another Oura Ring wearer I spoke to called it her favourite feature. To each their own.
The health data is impressively accurate for a device like this, but it’s not perfect, especially the further your health is from the baseline of what’s expected. An example: I was born with a congenital heart condition, a bicuspid aortic valve, so I have a very strange-sounding heartbeat. My heart also has to pump twice as much as most people’s to produce the same blood flow. The point is, I already have a reason to be suspicious of how accurately the Oura Ring can monitor my heart health, confirmed by its rating of my “cardiovascular age” as thirteen years older than I am. Do I have the heart of a man in his early forties? Maybe, but I’m sure plenty of forty-year-olds have stronger hearts than I do.
The issue is, if I were unaware of my condition, this would be concerning. And everything that the Oura app can recommend is general, lowest-common-denominator health advice. Eating fruit and working out won’t actually do anything substantial for my cardiovascular readings. This is all to say, you are probably never going to get life-saving data from this thing. The most it can do is help you get better sleep and exercise more, which can admittedly feel life-changing.
In terms of general health tracking, like daytime stress and heart-rate data, the Oura Ring and app are very comprehensive. It’s easy to get lost in the sauce, and every week I swear either I’m gaining access to new features or the app is being updated. The amount of information here can be a little overwhelming.
When tracking my activities and exercise, the Oura Ring 3 has advantages and downsides compared with the smartwatches I’ve used. As a pedometer, it’s more accurate at tracking my steps and daily calorie burn than my smartwatch. It also provides way more data than I’ve ever gotten from my Apple Watch, but it’s worth mentioning that I don’t subscribe to Apple Fitness+. For this review, I received Oura’s subscription to test out all of the ring’s features, but there will be more on how that works later. Just know that for now, I was very impressed by the amount of fitness data provided. But when it comes to workout tracking and recognition, the ring lags.
This is one of my favourite features of the Apple Watch. When I start an elliptical workout or a bike ride or even a long walk, it will accurately identify it 95 percent of the time and ask me if I want to record the workout. As a result, I always have digital records of all my workouts on my phone, fully automated. Its tech wasn’t always this accurate, but Apple has invested a lot of time and money into it. I can’t say the same for Oura, unfortunately.
For starters, having to open the app to retroactively confirm and log my workouts is one more step than I’m used to taking. Beyond that, I found the functionality often lacking. Once, my Oura Ring correctly identified a forty-minute elliptical workout. More commonly, though, it will misidentify it as (maybe?) a walk, as it does most non-running workouts. Most days, I have to confirm four or five walks in my exercise log, meaning the ring doesn’t know the difference between a trek to the subway and a short hike.
Up front, an Oura Ring will cost you from approximately SGD450 before tax, depending on which style and finish you choose. The newer Horizon models will generally run you slightly more than the OG Heritage design, and fancier finishes like Brushed Titanium, Gold, and Rose Gold will add to the price tag. While that’s not nothing, I live in a city where a cup of coffee rarely costs less than five bucks. Four or five hundred dollars for something you will use every day is reasonable compared with, well, the state of everything else.
What really irks me is the subscription model that’s tacked on to that. After an included free month of fully featured access, Oura begins charging SGD9 per month for access to in-depth sleep insights, heart-rate monitoring, body-temperature readings, blood-oxygen readings—pretty much everything you would use it for.
It isn’t so much the cost that frustrates me (it’s fairly affordable compared with direct alternatives like Apple Fitness+) but rather the dread of that payment hanging over my head every month until I want to stop using the device—all to use its basic functions. What baffles me is how fundamentally useless the Oura Ring 3 is without a subscription. It just feels like another company trying to bleed its users dry when we’ve just invested hundreds of dollars in a product. You’ll have barely unlocked access to all the features after one month of use, making the free month feel like even more of a “lite” version of the true experience than is advertised. A free year would’ve at least been a compromise.
I really, really like the Oura Ring Horizon Gen 3. I like how it looks and how much of a conversation starter it has proved to be. Most of all, I like how it’s confirmed something I’ve always known but never had the data to prove: I get a pretty healthy amount of sleep. My bedtime is way more consistent than I expected. Even a small insight like this has started to change how I think about my sleep and, by extension, my mood and energy levels.
Even as an Apple Watch user for several years, I’ve found a way to slot the Oura Ring into my life and teach me something new about myself. That’s something I can’t say about most products I try. If I ever take this thing off, it’s either because I’m taking a shower or my subscription has finally lapsed.
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At Esquire, we’ve been testing and reviewing the latest and greatest products for decades. We do hands-on testing with every gadget and piece of gear we review. From portable monitors to phone cameras, we’ve tested the best products—and some not-so-great ones for good measure.
To review this Oura Ring, I tried it out for many weeks before even sitting down to start writing. Plus, I spoke with other Esquire staff members about their past and current experiences with the product to get the fullest picture possible.
Originally published on Esquire US
Just when I thought we'd hit capacity on mid-tier consumer headphones, Sonos made its long-awaited entrance. We've already got classic brands like Apple, Beats, Bose, Marshall, and Sony. We've got luxury plays from Bowers & Wilkins, Bang & Olufsen, and most recently Dyson. Consumer headphones are a multibillion-dollar industry (Statista values it at SGD24 billion globally), so there's a lot of money to be made off our active-noise-cancelling obsession, and there have been a lot of shitty attempts to enter the market.
So, did Sonos do it right? Do the brand-new Sonos Ace headphones move me in any way? Surprisingly, yes. After a couple months of testing, I think these are some of the best headphones available. At SGD699, they're good for music listening and travel, but they're best in class for at-home TV watching.
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One thing: Sonos Audio Swap. Everything else that's great about these headphones—active noise cancellation, spatial audio, lossless streaming—other headphones do just as well. Audio Swap establishes these as TV-watching headphones, a category where they face little to no competition.
When you have a Sonos soundbar, Audio Swap uses the HDMI connection to pull hi-fi sound from the TV and share it with the headphones via Bluetooth. (Currently, this is only available with the Sonos Arc, but the brand is promising compatibility with lesser soundbars as soon as possible.) For flat living, it's great. My girlfriend and I are both guilty of holding unpredictable late-night movie-watching hours long after the other has gone to sleep.
Normally, there are two options. 1) Movie watcher tells sleeper to wear earplugs and get over it. 2) Movie watcher respectfully turns the sound down so low that the dialogue is impossible to hear. Sonos Audio Swap is the fix we've both craved. The Dolby Atmos spatial audio makes it feel as if you're listening on a proper surround-sound system, but it's all within your own head.
Full transparency, though: This is not a new concept. You can already stream TV audio to a pair of spatial audio-equipped headphones with Apple TV 4K and a pair of AirPods Max. The difference is that the Sonos home-entertainment ecosystem takes it up a notch.
See, since Sonos is already deep into home audio, the Ace has been built into that infrastructure. The most obvious example is in the TrueCinema technology. At the time of this writing, the software is still being worked on for a consumer rollout, but I got a little taste at an exclusive Sonos media event. TrueCinema will use the room-mapping capabilities of the Sonos soundbar to determine what your movie-watching experience sounds like in various positions around the room.
Then it shares that information with the headphones, so when you're sitting on your sofa, the audio sounds exactly the same as when it's coming from your soundbar. And if you walk around the room, the spatial audio centre doesn't move with you, so you get a different listening experience. Sonos is trying to replicate what it sounds like to watch TV without headphones while wearing headphones. An ambitious goal that I think will pay off big.
Yes, they're amazing for travel, music, podcast or audiobook listening, and everything else. But pretty much all the headphones in this price range are. When you're comparing any of these models, you have to dig deep to find differences.
As for me, I split the category into two (a bit arbitrary) subcategories: music headphones and podcast/audiobook headphones. Bose and Sony are podcast/audiobook headphones, because they have the best active noise cancellation. So is Bowers & Wilkins, because its bright house sound is good for dialogue. All-rounders like Bang & Olufsen, Apple, and the Sonos Ace are music headphones. (Beats are in their own bass-heavy category.)
The best compliment I can give the Sonos Ace is that they're the best competitor to the AirPods Max, which I love. The sound is full, from bottom to top. On the low end, you get deep bass and those rich low-mids that make you feel the music. In the middle, it's true to life. On the high end, you get crisp treble and vocals that cut through the rest of it. As expected, Sonos hit all the notes it needed to.
And how do they stack up to the AirPods Max in terms of usability? About the same. They connect quickly, and the Sonos app lets you play with EQ settings. They look good in either white or black. The headband is sturdy, with stainless-steel interior components, and smooth when adjusting. The case is fine. To be nitpicky, I think the recycled plastic feels a bit cheap. But the case itself is sturdy, slim, and great for travel.
Speaking of travel, that's where I think these would overtake the AirPods Max for me. They're ever so slightly lighter but feel just as substantial. The case is hard and about the size of a book, so it's easy to slip into a crowded carry-on without worrying about damaging the headphones. But the biggest win is that Sonos includes a USB-C-to-3.5mm jack in the case. That means no dongles or stupid pretravel purchases. From day one, you're good to go with in-flight entertainment.
If you've already got a Sonos home audio system, or have grand ambitions to get a Sonos home audio system, buy a pair. If you're a frequent flyer who's always wanted a pair of headphones with a better travel case and an included 3.5mm adaptor, buy a pair.
The music performance is great, but it's not miles better than the other options out there. What I can say for a fact is that Sonos Ace headphones are the best home entertainment headphones on the market. If you can drop the money on both these and the Arc soundbar, there's not a better home audio setup available. If you're not interested in sitting at home watching TV through your headphones, maybe play the field.
PRO: Easily the best headphones for watching TV and movies
CON: For music, podcasts, or audiobooks it's not clear cut—on-par with AirPods, in my opinion
Originally published on Esquire US
"It's absolutely false to think that we in democratic countries have it any different to China," insists Frederic Lemieux. "The only difference is that China is open about what it does and we have a more layered, subtle approach. Governments say they’re not bad but the fact is that they have access to everything if they want it. Frankly, it's hard to grasp the scope of the surveillance apparatus today."
Lemieux is a professor at Georgetown University, US, specialising in information technology, and he uses a virtual private network. He avoids Zoom and social media; has "privacy settings through the roof". Lemieux is only "friends" online with people he’s met several times in person. He watches what he says in emails, won’t wear a smartwatch. And he is not remotely paranoid.
Just look, he says, at the mobile surveillance spyware Pegasus—technically illegal in the US. And yet the FBI has just been caught out. They are forced to cancel its arrangement with a government contractor that used the tool on its behalf. It’s the latest instance of an abuse of power. And the data breaches that underscore it are uncovered somewhere around the world every few months. Many more, one can only assume, are not. "So am I hopeful of some correction to this surveillance culture?" says Lemieux. "No."
Perhaps this culture has been a long-time coming. After all, the idea of systematic surveillance is not new. The Panopticon was the name given to an ideal prison devised by philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1787. In it, every prisoner would—as an encouragement to improved behaviour—be observable without ever knowing if they were being observed. It would, as Bentham put it, create a "sense of invisible omniscience". And, he added, more darkly: "Ideal perfection would require that each person should actually be in that predicament, during every instant of time. This being impossible, the next thing to be wished for is, that, at every instant, seeing reason to believe as much, and not being able to satisfy himself to the contrary, he should conceive himself to be so."
In Bentham's time, this was no more than a thought experiment. Today the situation is very different. As the tech entrepreneur Maciej Ceglowski put it to a US Senate committee in 2019, "Until recently, even people living in a police state could count on the fact that the authorities didn’t have enough equipment or manpower to observe everyone, everywhere". Now, it seems, it looks as though they "enjoyed more freedom from monitoring then than we do living in a free society today."
It’s easy to see why. The aforementioned spyware, with advanced processing power, can now collate, save and analyse truly awesome quantities of data. Increasingly prevalent CCTV has morphed into often erratic facial-recognition technology and biometrics. That includes the unevidenced idea that people’s emotional state can be read through their physical appearance. Drones have provided 'eyes in the sky'. These digital currencies—actively promoted in many nations as a stepping stone to doing away with cash—will allow the tracking of all financial transactions. So-called 'smart cities'—the UN recognised Singapore as a world-leading example—see the mass deployment of intrusive sensors to monitor its citizenry. Supposedly with the intention of improving the urban environment. And there's ever more wearable tech, RFID tags, GPS dots and the growing Internet of Things to provide anyone sufficiently well-resourced with a detailed picture of what once was considered private.
“But then we have also become largely indifferent to matters of privacy,” stresses sociologist Dr Gary Armstrong, co-author of The Maximum Surveillance Society. “Generation Facebook/ Tik-Tok / Instagram have a different perception of privacy than my generation—over 60s—and think nothing of self- revelation and self-promotion. As it stands the state knows less about me than, say, supermarket chains do.”
How so? Invariably because the greatest tool in the snoop’s armoury is, as Lemieux puts it, "our own complicity". We let Alexa listen and Ring Video doorbells watch. We sign up for loyalty schemes. Given that 86 per cent of the growing world’s population owns a smartphone, we willingly allow the means of our own monitoring. David Lyon, director of the Surveillance Studies Centre and professor of sociology and law at Queen’s University, Ontario, argues that while CCTV might remain the most powerful symbol of surveillance, to still think of it as the most powerful means of surveillance is way out of date. That's the gadget in our own pocket. Our self-imposed, frantically upgraded, style-conscious ankle monitors. He calls the result 'dataveillance', our supervision and assessment through a melding of state and corporate interests.
"And that’s been mutating and accelerating at a rapid rate," he says. Lyon cites a recent case in Canada. A user of the ordering app from a Tim Hortons put in a "freedom of information" request about its function. He discovers that, even when he thought he had disabled it, the app continued to track his movements. It even recorded when he visited one of the company’s competitors.
What he still didn’t grasp, however, was "the other uses that data was undoubtedly put to. His data was sold to and among other corporations and institutions in what has become a globally-significant economic system," says Lyon. "It's not just about being tracked but analysed, and then treated according to the profile then created and from which all kinds of judgments are made—by employers, healthcare providers, banks, insurers, law enforcement. The thing is that most people just don’t get that this is even happening."
Small wonder then that when the public reaction to surveillance is discussed it is, at best, rather muted. As Lyon puts it, "we've become seduced [through our smartphones] by the idea of the world organised around our needs, living in a very consumerist society in which efficiency, convenience and comfort have been elevated into core values"—"luxury surveillance" as it has been dubbed. And even if we give it some thought, our rationalisations justifying our acceptance of surveillance tend to be misguided, adds Juan Lindau, professor of political science at Colorado College, US, and author of Surveillance and the Vanishing Individual.
People dismiss the encroachment of surveillance because "they have nothing to hide"—"but it's a bullshit notion that they wouldn't mind if every detail of their life was out there for all to see," Lindau notes. Or they say they're too irrelevant to be of interest—"but if you ever do anything of even remote political consequence then you’re immediately not irrelevant to the state," he adds. Or there's the argument that any one personal revelation is now merely lost in a giant sea of revelations and so doesn't matter.
"But its evil brilliance... is that tech gives the veneer of distance and [us the sense of] anonymity that is entirely fictitious," he says. "It is not impersonal. We spend our lives now interacting with machines that observe all, that never forget and never forgive, such that the delineation between our inner and outer selves is [breaking down] by stealth."
It's also because thinking seriously about the boundaries for surveillance is relatively new. Before the seismic revelations of Edward Snowden, much concern about surveillance was dismissed as so much conspiracy thinking, argues Professor Peter Fussey, an expert in criminology at the University of Essex, UK. That, and because much of the surveillance apparatus is, governments so often argue, for our own safety. That's the line Myanmar has taken in the junta’s crackdown on protests. Or for more effective, worryingly "proactive", increasingly militarised crime prevention.
That's concerning. As Armstrong argues, we're well on our way to systems that look for the potentially suspicious or merely inappropriate. "Doing that requires a database of both known and potential offenders. And such schemes are always sold on the benefits of apprehending these known offenders," he says. "But these schemes are expansionist and soon develop databases of 'people of interest' too".
But it's also concerning when national emergencies are used to bring in more surveillance. We see subsequent spikes in favour of its expansion. A TNS poll conducted in 2014—three years after 9/11, but also not long after Snowden—found that 71 per cent of respondents thought the government should prioritise reducing the public threat "even if this erodes people's right to privacy".
"The idea that surveillance is for our own safety holds water, but only up to a point. Surveillance doesn't inherently make us safer. And that’s aside from the misplaced assumption that surveillance always works, as many cases of misidentification suggest," says Fussey. (He also an independent human rights observer of London’s Metropolitan Police while it trialled facial recognition technology from 2020.)
"The problem with people being suddenly more accepting of surveillance after, say, a terrorist attack is that the powers then given [to the machinery of state] don't tend to be rolled back later," he adds. "And then there is the fact that if we keep creating these tools that can be used for surveillance—even if that's not their intended use—they will be. There is simply just so much evidence for their misuse."
Furthermore, the expanding means of surveillance—from gait recognition to remote heartbeat analysis—are developed at such a pace that campaigners and legislators can barely keep up. It says something concerning that a hugely powerful business like Amazon has been entirely open in its ambition to create tech products with what it calls "ambient intelligence". They are always there in the background harvesting your life.
There's mission creep to contend with as well. If it wasn't bad enough the state and commerce wanting to watch us, remote working has encouraged a culture of surveillance among employers too. There was a boom in monitoring software. Tech used to map the behaviour, mood, eye movement, location, online activity and productivity of often oblivious workers. The American attorney Zephyr Teachout has predicted the coming of "surveillance wages". This is where each worker’s pay is constantly changing according to that worker's perceived alignment with their employer's expectations. Data would be used for hiring and firing decisions.
Could a new ad-free business model be devised for the web, disincentivising data collection? Could the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation be adopted beyond its borders? Even as Facebook obtusely moaned about how it and other regulations "may be costly to comply with and may delay or impede the development of new products, increase our costs, require significant management time and subject us to remedies that may harm our business".
Is there scope for a rebalancing of the interests of the surveillance industrial complex and individuals' rights? This segment makes billions from monetising data flows, with China and US the leading exporters of surveillance tech. Surely the transparency and accountability necessary for the relationship between state and citizen to function requires it? And yet, right down to how certain parts of your smartphones algorithms work, all is opaque, and getting more so.
"We have to have a much clearer sense of how surveillance will be used, whether it's legitimate and the necessary limits on its use," implores Fussey. "We're invited to think that the technology is just too complicated, but actually the standards we need to protect—standards in international law—are basic. The problem is who enforces those standards. We need the right policies, programmes and oversight."
"My concern is that so much surveillance now isn't just about watching where you go and what you do but what information you consume and what thoughts you express," adds Lemieux. "Surveillance can now be used to gauge opinion and so influence opinion too. It's not just about watching us through data but manipulating us through data."
Indeed, the instruments of surveillance only look set to get more invasive, more clever, more wily and devious. The tide might be turning. Lindau argues that after a long period of being "promiscuous with sharing our information", some of us are waking up. With low download rates for various government-driven tracking apps during Covid, the pandemic opened the doors to data collection and tracking on a scale that would have been imaginable just a few years before. Some cities— Portland, Oregon, for example—have banned the use of facial recognition in their stores and restaurants. And there’s a growing academic interest in surveillance overreach too.
And yet the more a surveillance mindset is applied, the more ordinary it seems. "Citizens are allowing greater and greater intrusion, to the point where the distinction between public and private has really broken down at this juncture," suggests Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of The Rise of Digital Repression. "The smartphone has normalised surveillance but it's a slippery slope. You continue to push at the boundaries and surveillance just becomes more and more acceptable. And there are no concerns about this because there is no political will [to make changes]. And there's no political will because nobody seems to care about it. We're seeing a greater level of omni-surveillance made possible and that needs more push-back."
In fact, we're moving towards TIA or Total Information Awareness. "The goal to know everything about everyone in real-time," as Lindau explains. "And so far all that has limited that most totalitarian of ambitions has been the tools."
The really bad news? The tools are coming. The AI Global Surveillance Index suggests that at least 75 out of 176 countries, many being liberal democracies, use AI for automated surveillance purposes. "All considerations we have about surveillance get put on steroids with AI," Lindau says. The French government, for example, has passed a law allowing the use of AI in mass video surveillance at next year’s summer Olympics in Paris. For AI to work, the data must flow. Your data. Everybody's data. "The ease with which AI will be able to amass and process information, combined with facial recognition, well, that’s ominous," he says.
He cites by way of example his recent experience of returning home from a holiday in Norway. Passing through the notoriously aggressive and prying US Immigration, he expected the typical barrage of questions. Instead, he was just asked to look into a small camera. That was it. Lindau asked if they wanted the usual details about where he had been and for how long and why. No, they said casually, we already know that.
I don't quite know how to feel about the new Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses. Especially when they run on AI. We get it, it's the whole handsfree, first-person POV experience ("Hey Meta, share this photo I took with just my literal face"). The convenience is clearly purposed for content creation, livestreaming and all that jazz. Allowing users to preview social media comments in real-time, even audibly, the ambitious eyewear also doubles as a pair of headphones and takes phone calls. Perhaps Meta thinks we aren't glued enough to our phones as it is.
In partnership with EssilorLuxottica, the first generation—called "Ray-Ban Stories" because why bother hiding what they're really for—was launched in September 2021. They came in three styles (wayfarer, round and meteor), one colour (the very exciting black in shiny or matte) and two transitions options (the just as exciting grey and brown).
The second iteration now streamlined and lighter, boasts up to 150 frame and lens design combinations. More importantly, first-hand reviews are actually calling them comfortable. Water resistance clocks in at an IPX4 rating, should you consider skinny dipping.
The biggest change, though, would undoubtedly be replacing the 5MP camera with an ultra-wide 12MP one. Capable of recording 1080p videos from a prior 780p in 60-second stints, the default mode is—surprise, surprise—now portrait rather than landscape. It also went from one microphone, which apparently wasn't much good in strong breeze, to a whopping five, including one on the nose bridge for a true 360 audio capture.
There's a marked difference in the listening experience too, via a 50 percent maximum volume increase and better directional output. Meaning you can continue discreetly enjoying the K-pop band you pretend not to like, unless you're standing in proximity within a silent room.
For privacy, which was a priority Meta strangely felt the need to emphasize, a blinking white light goes off when the device is recording. Minimizing the creep factor is something to appreciate when photo and video functions are easily activated by touchpads on the glasses' stems. Interestingly, this became the reason why certain frame colour options such as beige were removed as they were less obvious to see when the LED was turned on.
Operating on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 processor and eight times more internal storage at 32GB, the glasses allegedly last up to four hours of active use and come with a nifty sunglass charging case …which take approximately 75 minutes to full charge.
Besides taking your annoying voice commands, the integrated Meta AI is slated for an update next year to enable interaction with AR surroundings. Augmented reality is an intriguing direction to head in, when gadgets like Google Glass and Bose Frames never really took off. It begs the question why, when it didn't gain much traction two years ago, are they pitching a new version now?
Does the company know something we don't about the near future that produces this unfounded confidence in consumer demand? Will there be another pandemic where we will all be forced indoors to see the resurgence of virtual reality, NFTs and cryptocurrency? In other words, will the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses finally be cool? And will I ever get to answering these speculative questions as opposed to simply throwing them out there? I guess some things we'll never know.
Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses are up for preorder now on Ray-Ban / Meta and on sale 17 October from USD299.
Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) conference occurred early this morning. And while the event is geared towards developers on the latest software releases, there were a few hardware announcements as well. Plus, it doesn't hurt for the rest of us non-developers to be privy to what the tech brand has on its upcoming slate. Here are some takeaways from the keynote:
Throwing its hat into the mixed reality ring, Apple introduces the Vision Pro headset. This was the keystone's marquee piece that can do all the things you can do on your iPhone—answer calls; FaceTime; open e-mails; watch movies, browse the Internet... but in a mixed-reality landscape. It's Apple's answer to spatial computing, where apps come alive in your own personal space. Alas, it looks like you look like you're going snowboarding and given the external two-hour battery life, this device is clearly meant for indoors. There's also the issue of the price tag (US$3,499!) that many might baulk at. May the Vision Pro do what previous mixed reality predecessors (Google Glass; Oculus) have failed to do: be relevant.
Next year, Apple Watch users can expect an upgrade for its iWatch. Users can expect updates to their Apple Watch experience like being able to add widgets to their smart stack; new apps; more utility with the digital crown, which showcases various widgets and new full-screen displays. The software update has your health covered, thanks to a focus on your mental well-being, determining if there's a safe distance between your screen and your eyes and getting you to spend time under the sun.
The MacBook Air has always come in 13" for the longest time because it needed to live up to the lightness of the 'Air' part of its name. The 15" promises to remain lightweight while giving you a bigger display to work off from. Weighing slightly over 1.3kg and comes with an M2 chipset, the 15" MacBook Air is due to launch on 13 June.
With a new MacBook Air on the way, why not a new OS update? Named after California's famed wine country, users can expect a bunch of upgraded features like the Game Mode function. This directs processing power to your games on the CPU and GPU of your Mac and lowers your background tasks' usage. Expect reduced latency with your wireless accessories, consistent frame rates and better responsiveness.
Gone are the flying toasters and forever-extending pipes from hell but the OS update grants you a more contemplative feel with the screensaver mode. There are new slow-motion screensavers depicting places of grandeur that aren't your drab office space.
Video conferencing will take on a more intuitive approach. Its Presenter Overlay keeps the spotlight on you with your screen framed next to you on a separate layer; this allows you to move in front of your content. Move You can move, walk, and talk in front of your content. If you want to look like a disembodied floating head, you can use the small overlay to appear in a movable bubble over your shared screen. Move yourself around the screen and make a spooky moaning sound during your presentation. Go on. Do it. Be the life of the office.
Another OS update, this time for your iPhone and it'll affect your phone, FaceTime and Messages apps. Calling for Siri will be twice as fast... when the update drops the 'Hey' from 'Hey, Siri'. The update will add more personality to your iPhone as you can customise your contact posters using either photos or Memoji. Call your friends and let them see you want yourself to be seen.
Live transcription in real-time for phone voicemails is also on the cards. As well as, this cool feature that allows you to share contacts, music or other shared activities with another iPhone user when the two of you bump your iPhones or Apple Watches together.
For more information on WWDC 2023, check out the Apple website.
