I was in Athens recently, climbing the steps up to the Acropolis with a human guide walking me through the history of the Parthenon. He was good. But somewhere on those steps it hit me: I don’t need him. I need glasses.
Not metaphorical glasses. Actual ones. The kind Meta and a handful of others are already building, where the lenses are a screen and the audio comes straight through the frames. No earbuds, no phone in your hand, no guide checking his watch. Just you, the ruins, and everything you could possibly want to know about them.
Here’s what I keep imagining.
You walk up to a tour kiosk near the entrance. Instead of a person, they hand you a pair of glasses and take a $500 deposit, fully refundable the moment you return them. You put them on and the whole experience comes alive. The lenses are shaded against the Greek sun, progressive, so when a cloud rolls over they lighten on their own. They scan your retina and adjust to your exact prescription, so even if you normally wear glasses, these just become your glasses for the day.
Then your guide appears. Not on a screen. In front of you. An augmented avatar standing on the terrace, looking and moving like a real person, pointing at the columns and telling you what you’re seeing. She can stand on top of the Parthenon itself. She can perch on a broken column and say, “Look at this section here, this is where it was destroyed, and here’s why.” The overlay can go anywhere. That’s the magic of it. The guide isn’t stuck next to you. She lives inside the world you’re looking at.
And it talks back. You say, “Hey Albert, what does this faded carving mean?” and it tells you, because it holds all the knowledge there is. It learns your name and how you like it pronounced. It translates instantly into your language, in your dialect, in a way that actually sounds like home.
You can even choose who your guide is. Say you love hearing Barack Obama speak, and he reminds you of where you come from. With his permission, his likeness and his voice could be the one walking you through the ruins. That part won’t be common, because a person’s likeness belongs to them. But anyone who grants it could be your guide.
When the tour ends, you walk back, hand over the glasses, and your $500 lands back with you automatically. No credit card. No Apple Pay. Just credits, tied to you, that move on their own. Eventually the device disappears too, and something on you, or in you, simply carries the balance.
I’m genuinely surprised this isn’t reality yet. Every piece of it exists in some early form right now. The glasses, the avatars, the translation, the knowledge. It just hasn’t been stitched together and handed to a tourist in Athens.
It will be. And when it is, all of it will run on AI so quietly that no one will think twice about it, the same way nobody marvels at the internet anymore. It became the air we breathe somewhere around 2002. This is next.
I can’t wait to put those glasses on.