X-Ray glasses could augment my look at the phenomenon of ‘ledzeppeling’

Stranger things have happened

Photo © 2025 Puneeth Shetty | https://unsplash.com/fr/@puneeth2

Artificial Intelligence is boring.

No doubt you are as truly sick of the whole thing as I am. So what if a meteor is going to hit the Earth, maybe, in 15 years from now? AI will have killed us off long before then, and there is bugger all that any of us can do about that either.

So this week I thought I’d write about something else. Not AI.

Such as… er… AR. Yes, that’s it. You may have forgotten in all the recent excitement with the latest tech bubble but AR stands for Augmented Reality and it used to be the Next Big Thing. Then it became the Last Big Thing.

To be honest I had forgotten completely about AR, despite having written about it almost weekly what seems like a very long time ago. Then I read a press release this week for a new set of augmented reality spectacles in Rayban frames from a company called MICROOLED. No need to show you what they look like: they look like a pair of specs. If you’re not sure, look in a mirror.

The name MICROOLED is great value as it forces you to read it two or three times out loud before you can work out what it’s supposed to be. Obviously it is the words ‘micro’ and the display tech ‘OLED’ rolled into one, but it is impossible not to want to pronounce it “Mike ruled”. Just like the way the word ‘miniseries’ is supposed to mean ‘mini-series’ but reads like “miseries” stuttered with an extra syllable.

I feel inspired to devise my own AR glasses with an equally mispronouncable name. I was thinking of using AR to create X-Ray specs (or should I say “spex”) for a new generation and sell them from small ads in the back pages of comics websites. All those Gen-Zs and youngers will be rushing to send me their postal orders (inc P&P) so they can ogle their Mums’ friends in the nip.

I’d call them ‘ID Rayban Ogling OLED’ spex. Or iDROOLED for short.

I wonder if either AR or X-Ray spex, or AI for that matter (not that I am going to write about it this week) or indeed any intelligence at all went into the design of recharging sockets on public transport. Yes, I have been travelling quite a bit recently and it has been a bit of a bugbear this week. Much more than AI, which I am bored with, as I said earlier, and have already forgotten about completely and won’t be writing about.

While delighted that even modern buses seem to have recharging points next to the seats, I remain disappointed by the train offerings. For some reason, train seating designers thought it would be best not to put the socket in front of the passenger. It struck them that a much better idea would be to locate the socket so that the plug rubs against your ankle or thigh; or to hide them under the seat or armrest and angle them downwards so that a heavy plug falls out with a clunk to the floor every time the carriage jolts.

Here in Yurp, we have laws that insist all smartphones and tablets should employ USB-C connectors for recharging. Brilliant, I thought as I headed on a long journey northward this month, all my devices are USB-C and thus I only need to cart along one simple USB-C cable. For the first time ever, I was able to leave all the other cables at home!

I slid open the panel covering the recharging points and encountered this:

I say USB-C, you say tomato