You'll soon - totally unnecessarily - be able to pay for your shopping with your sunglasses

Remember when we all used to pay for things using actual, physical money? Coins and notes? What a faff. You’d lose coins, notes would blow away – it was a palaver of the highest order.

Then came credit and debit cards – the saviour? All your money on one piece of plastic? They would have been great if you didn’t have to remember your pin and type it in every single goddamn time. What a waste of everyone’s time.

Really, it was contactless cards that ushered in the new era of easy payment we’re currently enjoying, but even they have their problems – you expect me to reach into my pocket and pull out my wallet before paying for anything? Who do you think I am, some sort of time-merchant? Doctor Who?

Thankfully, you can now pay with your watch, which is already on your wrist and so really, you don’t have to make any sort of effort to buy stuff nowadays. Finally.

But what if you don’t own a smart watch? Well, Visa have come up with a solution: pay with your sunglasses instead. They’re trialing a nifty pair of shades that to everyone else, look like a normal pair of sunnies, but they hide a special secret. They have a little NFC chip on one of the arms that links to your Visa account and enables you to carry out contactless payments willy nilly.

Really, you don’t even have to take them off – simply bow towards the receiver and that Haribo will be yours to keep. Might look a bit weird, mind, but whatever – it’s all part of Visa’s plan to transfer the contactless capability to more everyday items. Unfortunately it’s just in the prototype stages at the moment, so no pricing information is available, but surely they can’t be that expensive.

Either way: