In the Reality Lab
June 10, 2026 at 04:30PM“Come test wearable tech in Midtown!” Max Callimanopulos joins a few dozen Craigslist respondents for four hours of testing wearable technology prototypes for Meta, playing a series of boring videogames while his temperature, heart rate, and muscle movements are recorded for use by the company. “So far,” Callimanopulos writes of AI-powered wearable tech, “the pins, glasses, and pendants launched at us have been unwieldy, redundant, and irredeemably unsexy.” They also seem to accomplish very little, save for closing the distance between our bodies and the digital world.
At first, the games were amusing. I felt like a dog, chasing virtual balls around the screen. Ka-ching! But it quickly became boring. I stopped caring whether or not I found my target, and let the cursor hang there listlessly. I imagined my data points, flowing into the wires trailing from my arm, becoming confused and erratic. Somewhere, I thought, was a researcher, or perhaps an AI agent, who would translate these infinitesimal adjustments of my muscles and ligaments into trackable, monetizable patterns. There was something unsettling about the precision of these readings. Having long since absorbed my attention span and digital habits into its global archive of human behavior, Meta was now determined to collect these last, individual, trifling details: the flick of my finger, the turn of my wrist, the places my eyes lingered on the screen. I let my hand drop. I stopped chasing the ball. I hoped they would conclude that the appeal of wearable tech declines dramatically after the first half hour of use.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/06/10/meta-neural-band-wearable-tech-prototype/
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