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Eddy Xu is a 17-year-old at Columbia University who just changed the game for chess hustlers everywhere after building the ultimate chess cheating device. Using the Meta x Ray-Ban Smart Glasses, Eddy was able to fashion the glasses so they will always play the perfect engine moves aka flawless chess.
Sharing a screenshot of the chess cheating device in action on X, he has already picked up the attention of the Chess.com account who first replied “uh oh” but followed that up with “this is INSANELY cool, amazing work.” Eddy Xu would later add that he built these modded AI chess glasses at Teen Hacks LI along with Caden Li.
Here are the screenshots that seemingly have set the chess world on fire as they attempt to come to grips with the ramifications of what this might mean in the long run:
built ai chess glasses that allow you to play perfect engine moves without the opponent knowing pic.twitter.com/3V2C6MsZHm
— Eddy Xu (@eddybuild) January 12, 2025
In response to someone asking him how he was able to “convert the board state from real life to digital,” Eddue Xu said they “use multiple models, first detect corners and normalize every image. Then a normal object detection model.”
As an owner of two pairs of the Meta Smart Glasses, the most glaring error I can see people making when evaluating these glasses is thinking that bottom right screen which shows the perfect engine moves is what the player is seeing. That is certainly not the case because the Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses don’t have a screen on the lens.
If anything, this is relaying what he is seeing onto his phone or an external screen of some sort and the information is then being piped back to them through the speakers within the glasses. But they would have to add their own microscopic screen on the lens in order for the person wearing the glasses to see wha tis being shown in the images above.
That said, there are rumors that the next model of Meta Smart Glasses will have some sort of internal screen for the person wearing them to see.
Of course, some people in the chess community are up in arms about this instead of just appreciating this for the technological achievement that it is:
Having @chesscom and @FIDE_chess in aggressive denial of the problem, there is 1 thing left to save chess, developing strong new generation anticheating system
Doing already with my small but fantastic prof team, some help would be welcomed thoughhttps://t.co/AoJ2kABn3G— Vladimir Kramnik (@VBkramnik) January 13, 2025
Is this the future of chess hustling in Washington Square Park? Likely not. Having lived near Washington Square Park for the better part of a decade it would look wildly out of place if many of the players suddenly started wearing fancy glasses. But stranger things have happened…