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It’s a truth universally acknowledged that an art history buff in Rome ought to see the Sistine Chapel. Less acknowledged is that getting there from the Vatican Museum will potentially take longer than Frodo Baggins’ entire journey to Mordor.
Ostensibly, a well-prepared art lover might have a docent or, at the very least, a working audio guide to help pass the roughly two to three hours it takes to meander past countless busts of naked marble men and Greek amphoras. I was not well-prepared. My family’s tickets were purchased at the last minute. I drew the short stick with a solo self-guided tour during one of the last slots of the day.
All I had was a pair of Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, a T-Mobile international data plan, and an iPhone 17 running dangerously low on battery. Imagine my surprise when I actually had a great time.
Twenty-five days ago, I arrived in Italy as a desiccated husk. Technically, vacation had started. Work complete, bags packed, and cat sitters arranged, I should’ve been able to relax. Instead, I spent the roughly eight-hour flight to Rome mulling over my then freshly published Meta Ray-Ban Display review and the minor existential crisis it’d sparked.
In a nutshell, the glasses were an impressive piece of engineering. I felt conflicted about the privacy and cultural questions they raised while using them in my daily life, as well as the genuine opportunities that technology promised. I was curious to see how well the glasses’ live translation feature worked. As soon as I landed in Rome, out came the glasses.
The Belvedere Torso did not count as one of the Renaissance butts. Photo: Victoria Song / The Verge
Ironically, live translation kind of sucked. (Hence why I didn’t mention them in last week’s Optimizer.) I’m sure it would’ve been fine in one-on-one conversations, but that almost never happens when you’re a tourist in a touristy area. Crosstalk is inevitable, public announcements are often garbled, and upon seeing my very not Italian face? Experienced retail and hospitality workers usually gave an obligatory buongiorno and switched to English.
So, I wasn’t expecting much when my audio guide died unceremoniously ten minutes into my journey to the Sistine Chapel. If you’ve seen one naked marble man… do you need to know how the next 20 over the next 1.86 miles are infinitesimally different? Still, Meta had specifically called out using the AI glasses to contextualize art at a museum in my hands-on demo. Here was an opportunity to test it in the wild, far from the guardrails of corporate demos.
It wasn’t perfect. At one particular marble bust, where there was a wisp of LTE, Meta AI told me I was looking at the Belvedere Torso. My signal crapped out before it could explain anything further. Still, I felt relief from my frustration with the Vatican Museum’s labyrinthian layout. And if the Vatican were to one day invest in Wi-Fi (it won’t, for security reasons), I could see this being a less cumbersome audio guide.
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