i finally caught the squirrel on video and it only cost me my dignity

Noodle has caught three squirrels this year, which is to say she has chased three squirrels with total commitment and a success rate of zero. For two years I missed every single one of these events on camera, because the phone lives in my pocket and squirrels do not wait. Last week, mid-zoomies at the park, I tapped the arm of my sunglasses, said "record video," and got the whole failed hunt in sixty seconds from my exact eye level.

Noodle looked magnificent. The squirrel looked bored. Everyone who has seen the video has asked why I was wearing sunglasses at 7am in October, and I have been dying to tell someone.

the honest bit, with receipts

Here's the confession part: these are a camera on your face, and I knew that, and I bought them anyway, and the first week I felt like I was wearing a secret. The fix was cheap and weird: I just tell people. "They're the camera glasses, there's a little light when it's recording." Every person has reacted with one raised eyebrow and then total acceptance, usually followed by "can you get one for my hands-free thing," which is dog people for you.

what it actually does, a list

They look like actual Wayfarers, which is the entire trick. Fifty grams, about five grams heavier than regular Wayfarers, camera tucked into the corners so discreetly that my dentist did not notice. I bought the shiny black with dark lenses, and they read as regular sunglasses, not as a gadget. This matters more than any spec, because a camera-glasses you feel self-conscious in is a camera-glasses in a drawer.

The camera is good and the framing is a slot machine. Photos come out at 12 megapixels, video at 60 seconds max, and the quality is genuinely better than I expected, with nice color and surprisingly steady footage. But everything shoots a little fish-eyed and wider than what your eye saw, and the center of the photo lands left of where you're looking. I have a whole technique now where I aim slightly right of the thing. Sometimes I overshoot into a bush. It's charming, eventually.

The speakers are the part that converted me. Little open-ear speakers sit just in front of your ears and aim sound in, and they're shockingly good: music and podcasts on walks, no earbuds, no sealed-off world. I hear traffic, I hear "hey, watch this" from the park, and Noodle gets my full attention instead of the AirPods treatment. There's almost no bleed either, which I verified by asking my friend at a normal volume if she could hear my podcast. She could not.

Calls work embarrassingly well. There are five microphones hiding in the frame, and on a windy walk I took a call and my mom did not know I was outside, which is the highest compliment a mic array can receive. Voice commands, the "Hey Meta" stuff, picked my contacts correctly even when I mumbled. I do narrate commands out loud on public sidewalks now. I have made peace with how that looks.

Battery is a real thing to plan around. The glasses run about four hours normally, but a two and a half hour walk with nonstop podcasting drained mine to fifteen percent. The charging case is a lovely tan leather box that holds eight full charges, so the practical rhythm is: wear them, drop them in the case at night, forget about it. The case charges over USB-C and I top it up on Sundays next to everything else in the little charging pile by the kitchen outlet.

The privacy thing, which I take seriously and you should too. A small white light pulses when recording, and it's visible up close but easy to miss across a park. My personal rules, for what they're worth: I take them off indoors at other people's homes, I don't record strangers as the subject of anything, and if a friend asks, I show them the light and the off switch. The world already decided how it feels about camera glasses once, and it did not go well, and the etiquette is still being written. I'd rather be the person who explains the glasses than the person who gets asked about them.

The AI is a promising work in progress. You can ask it to look at something and tell you what it is, and it identified my neighbor's hydrangea correctly and my cactus situation incorrectly, twice, with confidence. It's the same feeling as using any early voice assistant: half magic, half confident nonsense. I keep asking anyway, mostly because the answer arrives in my ear while my hands are full of dog.

tangent: my dad and the two-photo rule

My dad carried an actual camera on family trips in the nineties, film economy, and he had a rule: two photos of a thing, no more, because each click cost real money the moment you got the film developed. I grew up inside that discipline, which is why I take eleven photos of one latte now and feel vaguely ill about it. The glasses split the difference in a way I like. They capture the boring middle of things, the walk itself, the unremarkable Tuesday park, because it costs nothing. Last week I got a video of Noodle sneezing three times in a row at a leaf. Two-photo dad would have missed it. Probably.

Anyway, moving on before I get misty about a leaf, which is genuinely one sneeze away from happening.

the soft landing

The walks are better now: podcasts in my ears that aren't plugged in, a camera that catches the squirrel era of Noodle's life, and my hands free for the leash and the coffee. They're a niche gadget, and I know it, and for my niche, dog walks and podcasts and small evidences, they're the right one.

I keep meaning to try the livestream thing for a park walk with the group chat watching, and I keep chickening out, because

The squirrel video has four views. It's perfect.

• ava 🕶️