Counting Renaissance butts in Rome with the Meta Ray-Ban Display

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that an art history buff in Rome should visit the Sistine Chapel. What is less recognized is that get there from the Vatican Museum will potentially take longer than Frodo Baggins’ entire journey to Mordor.

Apparently a well-prepared art lover could have a guidebook or, at the very least, a working audio guide to help them while away the roughly two to three hours it takes to wander past countless busts of naked marble men and Greek amphorae. 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 with dangerously low battery. Imagine my surprise when I got a great time.

Twenty-five days ago I arrived in Italy as a withered husk. Technically, the vacation had started. Job done, bags packed and cat sitters organized, I should have been able to relax. Instead, I spent the roughly eight-hour flight to Rome reflecting on my then-recently published review of the Meta Ray-Ban Display and the minor existential crisis it had triggered.

In a nutshell, the glasses were an impressive piece of engineering. I felt conflicted about the privacy and cultural issues they raised when using them in my daily life, as well as the real opportunities the technology promised. I was curious to see how well the glasses’ live translation feature worked. As soon as I arrived in Rome, the glasses came out.

Ironically, the live translation was pretty rubbish. (That’s why I didn’t mention them in last week’s newsletter. Optimizer.) I’m sure this would have been nice in one-on-one conversations, but it almost never happens when you’re a tourist in a tourist area. Crosstalk is inevitable, public announcements are often truncated, and seeing my very not An Italian face? Experienced retail and hospitality workers generally gave a Good morning and I switched to English.

So I wasn’t expecting much when my audio guide unceremoniously died ten minutes into my journey to the Sistine Chapel. If you saw a naked marble man… would you need know how the next 20 over the next 1.86 miles are infinitely different? Yet Meta had specifically called for using AI glasses to contextualize art in a museum in my hands-on demo. It was an opportunity to test it in the great outdoors, far from the guardrails of corporate demos.

It wasn’t perfect. On a particular marble bust, where there was a wisp of LTE, Meta AI told me I was looking at the Belvedere Torso. My signal died before I could explain anything further. Still, I felt relief from my frustration with the labyrinthine layout of the Vatican Museum. And if the Vatican ever invested in Wi-Fi (it won’t, for security reasons), I could imagine it being a less cumbersome audio guide.

When my sister-in-law texted me to ask if I was near the chapel—her tour group left a half hour before I was even allowed in—I was happy to be able to see her message, look up, take a photo of the frescoed ceiling, and send a text. It took three attempts to send it, but 15 minutes later I got a message saying “Oh, you’re not close at all.”

But the real “fun” was taking short videos and recounting my experience which I then sent to a friend back home. Was I speaking to myself in hushed tones, earning the occasional side glance? Yes. At the same time, I kept my phone in my bag. I wasn’t looking at all this capital A art through my phone like all the other tourists standing between me and Michelangelo’s greatest work.

When I finally arrived at the Sistine Chapel, a guard yelled at me as I tried to use my phone’s camera to zoom in on the details. Phones and photos, I learned by tapping a sign, were prohibited in the chapel. Fair enough. However, the guard doesn’t clock that I was wearing 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. It may seem strange to cross an entire ocean and brave an entire maze. just for that. But Michelangelo was one of my mother’s favorite artists, and when I was a rickety kid in art museums, we played counting Renaissance butts. (All things I’d rather die than explain to a grumpy museum guard.)

Part of me chastised myself for engaging in the kind of glass-hole behavior I was worried about in my review. The other part of me was laughing, because I was jet-lagged and, well, I had the butt of an angel. When it was time to leave, I felt satisfied to take off the glasses.

The Sistine Chapel experience, although imperfect, was like a light bulb going on in my head. Although this technology has come a very 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, bulky and heavy. But the flaws don’t matter as much when you wear them for a specific purpose for a limited time.

Move to The edge in the office, I’m afraid to record a video or take photos. New York City’s grid system is also so logical that you barely need AR walking directions. In my neighborhood or in my usual routines, I rarely have questions for Meta AI. But traveling to Italy, where I never knew how to get anywhere, and crossing the street is a deadly game of Frogger? These heads-up walking instructions were a game changer. And, every time I arrived at my destination, they went back into the charging case.

Later, during a tour of the ruins of Pompeii, the glasses came in handy for listening to my guide. Tapping to take a photo is inherently less distracting. Of course, sometimes I had to whip out my phone to truly capture the essence of a stray cat. But it wasn’t lost on me that every time my phone went out, I fell behind the group. Again, after the tour was over, I took off my glasses and felt lighter after doing so.

The key was the freedom to store the glasses.

Meta and other companies in this space often market these devices as general-purpose devices that could replace your phone. And maybe it will be true one day. But TodayI’m struck by how much my cultural qualms were alleviated by tying it to a temporary use case. In Italy, every time I put on the Display glasses, I switch to 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’m 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 to replace my phone?

What if these gadgets don’t work to have inherit the mantle of smartphones, general in their usefulness and general in their appeal? What if we allowed them to become specific, niche devices – “sometimes” gadgets that you maybe rent instead of own? Maybe you rent tourist smart glasses from a travel agency before a trip, or your company provides you with a pair if it’s relevant to your job. Maybe stadiums and concert halls let you rent a pair for an event. Theaters and operas could use them to subtitle foreign works. And when you’re done for the day, you go back to your phone.

This is, of course, a solution that comes with its own set of problems. Long before Meta’s current consumer demand for AI glasses, smart glasses makers turned to business in the wake of the Google Glass crash and fire. We live in advanced capitalism, and this is arguably the most complicated and logistically nightmarish path to profitability. Some of these use cases have been explored before, but the expense, lack of long-term commitment, price, and bulky hardware have never really been considered. And, even if smart glasses were limited to these specific use cases, it would only take a simple nudge to reopen the glass hole 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 need to be a “do-it-all” device.