Brazilian Canadian product and user experience (UX) designer Marcos Rezende has built a new privacy-focused mobile application with AI.<\/p>\n
Rezende previously worked at Microsoft and spends his days as a senior product designer at Kitchener-Waterloo event marketing platform Hive. He recently launched NearLens on the side to help iPhone users navigate a world where smart glasses with cameras are becoming increasingly present and hard to spot.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rezende\u2019s free iOS app listens for Bluetooth signals associated with camera-equipped eyewear, and tracks matches in real time.<\/p>\n
In an interview with BetaKit, Ottawa-based Rezende said NearLens\u2019 focus is to give its users a signal that they are in the vicinity of camera glasses, such as Ray-Ban Meta, that could be actively recording.<\/p>\n
Rezende\u2019s free iOS app listens for Bluetooth signals associated with camera-equipped eyewear, and tracks matches in real time. As App Developer Magazine put it, NearLens is \u201ca practical response to a growing gap in how smart glasses affect everyday privacy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Camera-equipped smart glasses, and their ability to fairly easily record others without their knowledge, have spurred backlash and present new challenges under Canadian privacy law.<\/p>\n
For his part, Rezende has taken care to ensure that NearLens does not create new privacy concerns of its own. A NearLens post claims the app does not access cameras or microphones, identify wearers, or confirm if glasses are capturing photographs and footage. Rezende said he has done this \u201cto guarantee privacy end-to-end.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rezende shipped the first version of NearLens with the help of AI tools after 328 software commits in two weeks. He said the idea came out of a postgraduate project at Lisbon\u2019s IADE. NearLens has \u201cno backend at all,\u201d does not require accounts, compile analytics, or leverage any third-party software development kits, and runs using on-device AI where available.\u00a0<\/p>\n
RELATED: Google reportedly close to buying Canada\u2019s AdHawk for its eye-tracking smart glasses tech<\/p>\n
Rezende also plans to keep NearLens free. He sees the app as a temporary solution until society determines where it wants to allow these devices, and how it plans to approach them.<\/p>\n
For its part, Meta recently said daily usage of its smart glasses tripled year-over-year. Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the wearable eyewear as \u201cone of the fastest-growing categories of consumer electronics ever.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rezende recently put NearLens to the test in four different locations to get a sense of how common they actually are at the moment. At Ottawa\u2019s TD Place Arena, his app detected 15 signals consistent with camera-equipped smart glasses among 7,000 people over three hours. Whereas at the city\u2019s Meridian Theatres, it returned zero matches.<\/p>\n
A recent Business of Fashion-McKinsey report singled out smart glasses as poised for growth in 2026, when analysts project sales to quadruple thanks to a bevy of sleeker, cheaper options.<\/p>\n
Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Photo by Redd Francisco.<\/p>\n