The piracy thing is just stupid, but they do have a point about the red recording light. Anything that lights up (or beeps) in a darkened theater is annoying and discourteous to your fellow theater patrons. Either turn the device off or find a way to disable the light.
I guess when weāre going around with yer actual implants for improved hearing, vision (which just happen to be able to record) then weāll just be banned from cinemas and museums etc outright. No wonder the Borg were grumpy.
Night Vision? Really? Are they going to militarize everything?
Infrared strobe lights for all!
Why is this even noteworthy? Unless your head is under a hood, using Glass in a theater would be jerkish, as would any face-high sources of light.
Wonāt somebody please think of the hypothetical sight-impaired user who has not yet been offended against??
Letās start working on the assistive-tech applications then. Even without the glasses themselves we can write use cases, functional specs, design proposals. And by the time weāre done (this stuff takes time), AR glasses of various kinds will be almost dirt-cheap.
I can see for example an application with speech recognition for hearing-impaired persons, providing text data for dialogues. The same can be used with added machine translation, for hearing users, possibly with text-recognition and translation overlay. The non-asshole theaters then could even provide the subtitles in a bazillion languages as a wireless streaming service. I would love annotation of the actors/characters to not lose track of who is who because suboptimal face recog capability sucks spheres in both social settings and watching movies.
The future is here. Trying to stop it is futile. Better resource allocation is in making it better.
ā¦e.g. a small square of electrical tape over the LED!
Itās not using Glass that is being banned. Itās posessing and wearing it. And thatās much easier for someone who wears glasses to do if itās integrated into their glasses, which makes putting the device away much more difficultā¦
So what? Just paint over the camera with nail polish and remove it later. Problem solved and the glasses are still fully functional.
Thanks for giving it some meaningful context.
I still file this under āOh noes, most privileged people in the world feel oppressed!ā, but at least youāve made me feel a bit bad for it.
My favorite take on the horribly oppressed users of Google Glass comes from the Daily Show.
That might be a valid suggestion, if 1) this wasnāt pretty likely to cause damage to a very expensive piece of equipment, and 2) if the cinemas actually cared about the usefulness of the camera, which they obviously donāt, because the way the device is built makes it almost useless for actually pirating movies.
Dear UK cinemas:
On the one hand, wearing anything with a light in a theatre is rude.
On the other hand, this is one more reason to skip the theatre and watch the movie at home, a month later, on my giant, inexpensive, 3D flatscreen.
File this under: not my problem. If you want to watch a movie with prescription lenses attached to Google Glass then there is a solution. It may damage the Google Glass, but it still allows a person with glasses to see the film. You canāt claim disability discrimination as long as this option exists. And if you value your $1500 Google Glass more than the ability to see the film, then perhaps you will bring a normal set of glasses to the film instead.
Edit: and just to be clear, think about what you are arguing. You are saying that if you attach an expensive piece of equipment to something you need for a disability, then your expensive piece of equipment canāt be discriminated against because that would in turn discriminate against your disability. Iām raising the BS flag on this one.
Next thing you know, the cinema suffers a drone strike 
Iām not on the market for pirated movies (I think the only two Iāve seen was Rambo killing people with Arabic subtitles and Lara Croft with a fight with a multi-armed goddess edited out because it came from Malaysia) but I assumed that most piracy was an inside job, with the pirates procuring a copy of the film from a cinema or elsewhere on the supply chain.
Thereās a perfectly good solution without damaging the Google Glass as well, and thatās to not have a silly restriction like this. The chances of pirates using Glass to steal movies are practically nil, when there are so many other methods that will create a much better end result. Even aside from the storage restrictions, and the whole eyepiece lighting up when you are recordingā¦ just think for a moment of what it would be like trying to hold your head perfectly still and pointed at the exact same direction, with your hand up by your ear (to hold down the ākeep recordingā button) for the entire length of a movie! Every little unconscious or involuntary movement by the wearer would cause the picture to swing around.
What Iām actually arguing is that if a person with a disability has arrived at your business, turning them away or forcing them to do without something they need for their disability simply because you have an irrational fear of a piece of equipment isnāt a very good option. And offering to damage that equipment in order to satisfy your irrational fear is NOT an option!
