Meta Wayfarer G2s. TCL Nxtwear Gs. RayNeo Air 3s. With so many smart glasses flooding the marketplace, it can be next to impossible to tell whose spectacles are watching back. And with facial recognition capabilities on the horizon, there’s a compelling argument to be made for less-than-passive resistance to the sleazy new devices.
Enter Yves Jeanrenaud, the chair of sociology and gender studies at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich who moonlights as a hobbyist software developer. His first app is Nearby Glasses, a free and open source program for detecting smart glasses in your vicinity.
According to the projects’ Github page, the app won’t pinpoint the exact user or their precise location, but it should give you a “good chance to spot that smart glasses wearing person.” Outdoors, the app works within 32 to 50 feet; indoors in crowds, that drops to 10 to 32 feet — enough range to identify a person wearing smart glasses in your vicinity.
In an email, Jeanrenaud told Futurism that while his academic work on gender dynamics made him wary of smart glasses from the start, much of his revulsion came down to plain old common sense.
“Covert recording is a lot about power. So, I was worried from the very beginning when Meta announced they were going to revive the Google Glass idea,” Jeanrenaud said. “That might be influenced by my study subject very well, but it might as well be influenced by every report and story I read on digital abuse and hate speech in the last twenty to thirty years.”
Jeanrenaud says he’s been tinkering around with various programming languages for a few decades, but caveats that he “never headed for a study program or an IT career. “Regardless, it was enough to come up with a working proof-of-concept.”
Nearby Glasses works by flagging Bluetooth SIG assigned numbers, unique alphanumeric codes identifying devices based on their brand. Assigned numbers are mandatory for devices utilizing Bluetooth, meaning that gear made by companies like Luxottica Group SpA — the firm manufacturing Meta’s Ray-Ban Smart Glasses — is at least somewhat identifiable for anyone who knows where to look.
There are limitations to this method of detection. For starters, as the codes are mapped to the companies themselves, one could receive a false-positive if the manufacturer also makes other electronic products. Meta, for example, also makes VR headsets, and it’s possible the app will misidentify those as smart glasses (though that particular error should be rather obvious.)
“If you can’t see someone wearing an Oculus Rift around you and there are no buildings where they could hide, chances are good that it’s smart glasses instead,” Jeanrenaud wrote on the app’s Github page. While it’s also possible to detect the product name if someone ever initiates Bluetooth pairing in public, “it’s rare we will see that in the field.”
For the time being, Nearby Glasses is still in its early days. It’s only available on Android devices, and though it has worked in tests, Jeanrenaud has “no knowledge so far of people using the app on the streets.”
“It’s still very imperfect,” Jeanrenaud told Futurism. “It took me about four hours for the first prototype and about eight more for the first viable release.”
Still, Nearby Glasses is a fascinating glimpse at the grassroots pushback against big tech’s smart glasses rollout: the kind of scrappy solution that emerges when even the most basic regulations seem like a fantasy.
More on smart glasses: A Man Bought Meta’s AI Glasses, and Ended Up Wandering the Desert Searching for Aliens to Abduct Him