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It’s a truth universally acknowledged that an art history buff in Rome ought to see the Sistine Chapel. Less acknowledged is that getting there from the Vatican Museum will potentially take longer than Frodo Baggins’ entire journey to Mordor.
Ostensibly, a well-prepared art lover might have a docent or, at the very least, a working audio guide to help pass the roughly two to three hours it takes to meander past countless busts of naked marble men and Greek amphoras. I was not well-prepared. My family’s tickets were purchased at the last minute. I drew the short stick with a solo self-guided tour during one of the last slots of the day.
All I had was a pair of Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, a T-Mobile international data plan, and an iPhone 17 running dangerously low on battery. Imagine my surprise when I actually had a great time.
Twenty-five days ago, I arrived in Italy as a desiccated husk. Technically, vacation had started. Work complete, bags packed, and cat sitters arranged, I should’ve been able to relax. Instead, I spent the roughly eight-hour flight to Rome mulling over my then freshly published Meta Ray-Ban Display review and the minor existential crisis it’d sparked.
In a nutshell, the glasses were an impressive piece of engineering. I felt conflicted about the privacy and cultural questions they raised while using them in my daily life, as well as the genuine opportunities that technology promised. I was curious to see how well the glasses’ live translation feature worked. As soon as I landed in Rome, out came the glasses.
The Belvedere Torso did not count as one of the Renaissance butts. Photo: Victoria Song / The Verge
Ironically, live translation kind of sucked. (Hence why I didn’t mention them in last week’s Optimizer.) I’m sure it would’ve been fine in one-on-one conversations, but that almost never happens when you’re a tourist in a touristy area. Crosstalk is inevitable, public announcements are often garbled, and upon seeing my very not Italian face? Experienced retail and hospitality workers usually gave an obligatory buongiorno and switched to English.
So, I wasn’t expecting much when my audio guide died unceremoniously ten minutes into my journey to the Sistine Chapel. If you’ve seen one naked marble man… do you need to know how the next 20 over the next 1.86 miles are infinitesimally different? Still, Meta had specifically called out using the AI glasses to contextualize art at a museum in my hands-on demo. Here was an opportunity to test it in the wild, far from the guardrails of corporate demos.
It wasn’t perfect. At one particular marble bust, where there was a wisp of LTE, Meta AI told me I was looking at the Belvedere Torso. My signal crapped out before it could explain anything further. Still, I felt relief from my frustration with the Vatican Museum’s labyrinthian layout. And if the Vatican were to one day invest in Wi-Fi (it won’t, for security reasons), I could see this being a less cumbersome audio guide.
When my sister-in-law texted to ask if I was close to the chapel — her tour group departed a half hour before I was even let in — I was happy that I could see her message, look up, snap a photo of the frescoed ceiling, and send a text. It took three tries to send, but 15 minutes later, I got a text back reading “Oh, you’re not close at all.”
But the real “fun” was taking short videos and narrating my experience that I later sent to a friend back home. Was I talking to myself under my breath, earning the occasional side eye? Yes. At the same time, I kept my phone in my bag. I wasn’t viewing all this capital A art through my phone like every other tourist standing between me and Michelangelo’s greatest work.
When I finally made it to the Sistine Chapel, a guard yelled at me as I tried to use my phone camera to zoom in on details. Phones and photos, I learned as he tapped a sign, were banned in the chapel. Fair enough. Still, the guard didn’t clock that I was wearing the Meta glasses. Craning my neck back, I spent 10 minutes using the glasses to zoom in and count as many expertly painted cherub butts as I could find. It might seem odd to travel across an entire ocean and brave an entire maze just for that. But, Michelangelo was one of my mom’s favorite artists, and when I was a bratty kid at art museums, we made a game of counting Renaissance butts. (All things I’d rather die than explain to a grumpy museum guard.)
A part of me scolded myself for engaging in the kind of glasshole behavior I fretted about in my review. The other part of me laughed, because I was jetlagged and, well, angel butts. When it was time to leave, I felt satisfied taking the glasses off.
The Sistine Chapel experiment, although flawed, was like a light bulb turning on in my head. While this tech has come a long, long way, smart glasses often don’t make sense to wear all day, every day. Battery life is too short. The glasses are too big, clunky, and heavy. But the flaws don’t matter quite as much when you’re wearing them for a specific purpose for a limited time.
Commuting to The Verge office, I feel creepy recording video or taking photos. New York City’s grid system is also so logical, you hardly need AR walking directions. In my neighborhood or going about my usual routines, I rarely have questions I’d ask Meta AI. But traveling in Italy, where I never knew how to get anywhere, and crossing the street is a deadly game of Frogger? Those heads-up walking directions were a game-changer. And, whenever I’d arrived at a destination, back into the charging case they went.
Later, on a tour of the Pompeii ruins, the glasses came in handy while listening to my docent. Tapping your fingers to take a photo is inherently less distracting. Sure, sometimes I’d have to pull out my phone to really capture the essence of a stray cat. But it wasn’t lost on me that whenever my phone came out, I’d fall behind the group. Again, once the tour was over, I took the glasses off and felt lighter for having done so.
The key was the freedom to put the glasses away.
In Italy, wearing the glasses was reserved for Tourist Mode and public places. That felt more natural and less creepy than using these in daily life. Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Meta, and other companies in this space, often market these devices as general-purpose devices that could replace your phone. And maybe that’ll be true one day. But today, I’m struck by how whatever cultural qualms I had were alleviated by tying them to a temporary use case. In Italy, whenever I put on the Display glasses, I entered Tourist Mode. When I took them off, I was me again. It didn’t matter if things were imperfect, partly because it was just one of many travel tools I had in my arsenal.
Now that I’ve returned home, I feel pressure to use the glasses whether it makes sense or not. Partly for work, partly because why have them if I’m not going to try and replace my phone?
But what if these gadgets didn’t have to inherit the mantle of smartphones, general in their purpose and mass market in their appeal? What if we allowed them to be specific, niche devices — ‘sometimes’ gadgets that you perhaps rent instead of own? Maybe you rent Tourist Smart Glasses from a travel agency before a trip, or your company provides a pair if it’s relevant to your job. Maybe stadiums and concert venues allow you to rent a pair for an event. Theaters and opera houses could use them for subtitling foreign works. And when you’re done for the day, you go back to your phone.
This, of course, is a solution with its own set of problems. Long before Meta’s current consumer push for AI glasses, smart glasses makers pivoted to enterprise in the wake of Google Glass crashing and burning. We live in late-stage capitalism, and this is arguably the more complicated, logistically nightmarish route to profitability. Some of these use cases have already been explored, and the expense, lack of long-term commitment, price, and bulky hardware never quite added up. And, even if smart glasses were limited to these use-specific cases, it only takes one tech-savvy jerk to reopen the glasshole and privacy debate.
Still, it’s not lost on me that the most positive experience I’ve had with smart glasses was when they didn’t have to be a “do everything” device.
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