Blunda: glasses that close their eyes

Camera glasses look like glasses, so nobody in the room can tell whether they are recording. The usual answer is a small light switched by the glasses' own software, which people have shown can be covered with tape and which European privacy regulators have said is not enough on its own. Venues respond by banning the glasses outright.

Blunda splits the problem into two jobs. A permission switch sits flush in the arm behind the hinge, with three positions. Forward, the camera may work. One click back, the camera has no electricity. A second click back, the microphones lose power too. It is a hardware cut: the glasses' processor can read the switch but has no wiring that could change it.

A shutter that shows activity sits behind a sealed window at the corner of the frame: a thin white leaf that is closed whenever the camera is idle and sweeps aside only during a capture. A red ring around the lens lights for exactly as long as the camera sensor has power: solid for video, a single flash for a photo, dark otherwise.

The rule that makes it trustworthy: the shutter's actuator is powered only through the permission switch, and only while the camera sensor itself is powered. The ring runs on that same supply and has no control line. So white means no light reaches the camera; with the switch back the shutter cannot even be opened; and an open lens is only ever seen next to a lit red ring. If power is lost for any reason, the shutter closes by itself.

You don't have to trust the software. Look at it.

Bromander Global AB is looking for a glasses maker or design partner to take this concept further. We can share our detailed concept study, covering the design reasoning, a failure-mode analysis and a proposed test plan. It was written with AI assistance and has not yet been checked by an engineer or a prototype.