The rain was falling slowly, like someone who knows how to linger. Rainwater flowing down the window split in no particular direction, then merged again, trailing across the glass with the persistence of someone's gaze. That gaze now felt not like a simple illusion but like something being recorded and stored.
I was sitting in an unlit room. Darkness had not fully arrived, nor was there any light remaining — an ambiguous hour. Within that ambiguity, the feeling grew that invisible things were coming into sharper focus.
My hand held a smartphone, but the screen was off. My face reflected faintly on that black screen. Yet that reflection no longer felt like a simple reflection — it felt uncannily like a part of another 'me' already collected and analyzed.
After gazing at it for a moment, I murmured in a very small voice.
"Is this… something I am seeing. Or… am I also being seen."
The scene inside the subway is always the same. People sit close but don't look at each other.
Someone is smiling, someone is scrolling through a screen expressionlessly, someone has earphones in and is bowing their head deeply. Everyone is looking "somewhere," but that "somewhere" is never each other. And now that "somewhere" holds more information than the reality right before one's eyes.
I suddenly lift my gaze and look at the person across from me. And I imagine.
That this person is wearing perfectly ordinary glasses. That they are looking at me through transparent lenses. But those lenses are not a simple tool aiding vision — they are a device interpreting and categorizing me.
And within that gaze, the message I just read, the search history I haven't deleted, even the emotion I want to hide — all of it is surfacing. Even patterns and desires I haven't consciously recognized myself are being displayed together.
"You… stayed up late last night."
That person speaks. I cannot say anything. They have never seen my day — how do they know? No, perhaps the age when saying "they've never seen it" no longer holds has arrived.
At that moment I realize. That I am no longer "me" but have become a collection of real-time-updating information. And that information was explaining me before I could explain myself.
When night came, the rain grew a little heavier. The lights outside the window on the way home from work blur and sway, dissolved in water. I lean back on the sofa and put on a movie.
Spider-Man: Far From Home.
This is also why Huawei's AI Private View controversy gives people an instinctive sense of discomfort. It goes beyond simple concern about information leakage. The more fundamental fear is an existential sense of crisis — that one's own gaze itself may no longer be one's own alone. Smart glasses promise us a wider field of vision. They approach like "magic glasses" that help us understand information faster and make more precise judgments. But as the sweet price for this, we end up transferring to the system a portion of our own gaze, attention, and unique authority to interpret the world.
The problem is not the technology itself but the "way of seeing" technology intervenes in. The moment we stop asking not just what we are looking at but who is determining that visual experience, humans may already be living not in raw reality but inside a finely designed interface. Because technology that has seized our field of vision under the pretext of convenience is already becoming our only window through which to view the world.
Ultimately, the true hero of the smart glasses era will not be the one wearing better glasses, but the one who endlessly doubts the truth beyond the glasses and protects their own gaze to the end.
The room is still dark. The smartphone screen is off. I slowly gaze at that screen. This small machine knows my face, remembers my voice, records my day. And now it may be creating a "me" I don't know about, and the world may be judging me based on that "me."
I turn on the screen. After hesitating briefly, I turn it off again. Because the moment I turn it on, I feel like I will begin to be recorded again.
The rain has completely stopped. But water marks still remain on the window. As if a once-passed gaze never completely disappears. And that gaze now feels like traces of data remaining everywhere.
The era of smart glasses.
We will see more. We will know more accurately. And we will judge more quickly. But in exchange, we will be more exposed. We will be more easily interpreted, and more frequently misunderstood. And someday, even what we didn't say may be recorded as "intent."
And at some moment, we may find ourselves asking this. Whether this is me looking at the world, or the world analyzing me.
Before that question, not simple anxiety but an inexplicable chill seeps in.
