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Help Us Bring Productivity Enhancing Smart Glasses to Market

Hey everyone! For around the last two years, my cofounder and I have been working on our own startup, trying to help people improve their focus and stop procrastinating. We've developed the Auctify Specs, a pair of smart glasses designed to track your productivity throughout the day and give you real time feedback to help you stay on task when you get distracted. They can detect your activity using computer vision and blood oximetry, and implement proven psychological methodologies to keep you motivated and focused on achieving your goals. Today I'm excited to announce that our Indiegogo campaign has finally launched! Check out our campaign page to read all about our product and see Specs in action, and if you'd like to support us! We'd also appreciate any feedback you have to give us :) https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-first-productivity-boosting-smart-glasses#/

Dksense 6y ago
Sounds good! All the best.
- Dksense 6y ago
  Thank you.
madamelic 6y ago
This is a privacy nightmare, having a camera you don't control on your glasses. Imagine all of the things you don't want public, now watch all of those things become public from streaming it all to a closed source app of unknown security practices
- muzani 6y ago
  Sure, but my phone runs Android, which probably feeds everything to Google anyway, which includes position, voice, camera, every message I send. I probably bring my phone around more than my glasses.
  - madamelic 6y ago
    Are you filming yourself in the bathroom, taking pictures of your credit card, taking pictures of confidential work documents, taking videos of meetings and then sending them all to an unknown person every day all day? Also Android is open-source, gives more controls and isn't taking constant video of your life without your consent of where that media is going, how it is stored or for how long.
    - muzani 6y ago
      I take pictures of personal identification because it's a legal requirement to hail a car (now that taxis are going extinct). I need it to use ewallets, contact tracing, all these things that are legal requirements because of COVID. I'm fine with the government having this, but not with this going in the hands of Google, Xiaomi, etc. I take photos of passwords sometimes, when there's no way to copy paste them from a protected computer. We've had meetings early in the morning on Skype, which sometimes I drop in and Bluetooth in my car. We write meeting minutes and email them. Gmail is blocked by the company, but some of the consultants use it. Word is used to write them and now it syncs to a cloud. I can leave my phone on the table and nothing prevents Xiaomi from secretly recording it. These are all questionable security practices. Our main competitors are tech giants, not some guys raising money on Indiegogo, and one of the clearance requirements is blocking Google Drive on computers. Open source is great and all, but it's still easy to obscure. WhatsApp stores "no messages on their servers" but I don't buy that it's not reading my messages and giving "analytics" to Facebook. Glasses, I can take off.
Someone1234 6y ago
Unethical product. Large companies will be the primary purchaser for this product, and will use it to "enforce" productivity metrics where employees get dinged for literally glancing away for mere seconds. This is like an Amazon Warehouse handset but now using "computer vision, blood oximetry, and psychological methodologies" to monitor employees. Even if you aren't marketing it that way now, you have absolutely no control over the market competitors once this has been proven viable (or if you get purchased).
- giantg2 6y ago
  Using this mindset, we should ban all knife sales, processed foods, and cars. Just because some people abuse a product doesn't make the product itself unethical. The product adopts and amplifies the ethics of the user.
muzani 6y ago
I'm skeptical that this isn't just an overpriced RescueTime. But what I'd love to see is detection of pupil dilation over the day.
matt_s 6y ago
The website doesn't describe what specifically the glasses do to improve focus. It doesn't state there is a camera so if I have to tap something in an app that says I started task X, and veer off track and start browsing HN, how do the glasses help? I'll guess that everything happens in the companion app and the glasses are just a couple sensors/mic/speakers. Isn't forcing the user to check their phone to check their "productivity" counterproductive? Phones are the biggest distraction people have. What happens when the frame design you chose falls out of fashion like when people like "frameless" glasses or something else?

Dksense 6y ago

Sounds good! All the best.

Dksense 6y ago
Thank you.

madamelic 6y ago

This is a privacy nightmare, having a camera you don't control on your glasses. Imagine all of the things you don't want public, now watch all of those things become public from streaming it all to a closed source app of unknown security practices

muzani 6y ago
Sure, but my phone runs Android, which probably feeds everything to Google anyway, which includes position, voice, camera, every message I send. I probably bring my phone around more than my glasses.
- madamelic 6y ago
  Are you filming yourself in the bathroom, taking pictures of your credit card, taking pictures of confidential work documents, taking videos of meetings and then sending them all to an unknown person every day all day? Also Android is open-source, gives more controls and isn't taking constant video of your life without your consent of where that media is going, how it is stored or for how long.
  - muzani 6y ago
    I take pictures of personal identification because it's a legal requirement to hail a car (now that taxis are going extinct). I need it to use ewallets, contact tracing, all these things that are legal requirements because of COVID. I'm fine with the government having this, but not with this going in the hands of Google, Xiaomi, etc. I take photos of passwords sometimes, when there's no way to copy paste them from a protected computer. We've had meetings early in the morning on Skype, which sometimes I drop in and Bluetooth in my car. We write meeting minutes and email them. Gmail is blocked by the company, but some of the consultants use it. Word is used to write them and now it syncs to a cloud. I can leave my phone on the table and nothing prevents Xiaomi from secretly recording it. These are all questionable security practices. Our main competitors are tech giants, not some guys raising money on Indiegogo, and one of the clearance requirements is blocking Google Drive on computers. Open source is great and all, but it's still easy to obscure. WhatsApp stores "no messages on their servers" but I don't buy that it's not reading my messages and giving "analytics" to Facebook. Glasses, I can take off.

Someone1234 6y ago

Unethical product. Large companies will be the primary purchaser for this product, and will use it to "enforce" productivity metrics where employees get dinged for literally glancing away for mere seconds. This is like an Amazon Warehouse handset but now using "computer vision, blood oximetry, and psychological methodologies" to monitor employees. Even if you aren't marketing it that way now, you have absolutely no control over the market competitors once this has been proven viable (or if you get purchased).

giantg2 6y ago
Using this mindset, we should ban all knife sales, processed foods, and cars. Just because some people abuse a product doesn't make the product itself unethical. The product adopts and amplifies the ethics of the user.

muzani 6y ago

I'm skeptical that this isn't just an overpriced RescueTime. But what I'd love to see is detection of pupil dilation over the day.

matt_s 6y ago

The website doesn't describe what specifically the glasses do to improve focus. It doesn't state there is a camera so if I have to tap something in an app that says I started task X, and veer off track and start browsing HN, how do the glasses help? I'll guess that everything happens in the companion app and the glasses are just a couple sensors/mic/speakers. Isn't forcing the user to check their phone to check their "productivity" counterproductive? Phones are the biggest distraction people have. What happens when the frame design you chose falls out of fashion like when people like "frameless" glasses or something else?