Sony side eyes strangers for kicks

Researchers at the University of Washington have fitted cameras inside a pair of Sony WF-1000XM3 earbuds, producing something they're calling VueBuds: a prototype that uses computer vision and a large language model to answer questions about your surroundings. Which is, essentially, Ray-Ban Meta glasses, but jammed into your ear canals instead of sitting on your nose.

The timing is pointed. Bloomberg reported this week that Apple is in the late stages of developing camera-equipped AirPods for exactly the same purpose: navigation, contextual reminders, ambient awareness. The whole package.

The researchers' version makes some sensible compromises to keep the battery alive. Low-resolution, black-and-white cameras. Less data, less drain, and theoretically fewer privacy nightmares when someone inevitably reverse-engineers the thing. Response times are apparently comparable to the Ray-Bans, which is faint praise, but not nothing.

The harder problem is one no spec sheet fixes: AI vision on wearables is still, in practice, a bit rubbish. Slow, wrong, cloud-dependent, and liable to fail the moment your 4G signal gets politely strangled by a car park. Stuffing the cameras somewhere smaller and less visible doesn't change that. It just makes the disappointment more intimate.