They have to pivot this soon enough to a cheap at-home AR thingy.
VR headsets are getting smaller at least:
https://en.shiftall.net/products/meganex
I would suspect Apple will never release something that isn’t as small as that.
The average, casual user isn't going to do that on a regular basis. It's not something you can do with kids around if you need to keep an eye on them, unlike a book or a TV show or even a game on your phone or laptop.
Fundamentally, immersion is a selling point to a very specific audience, and a major drawback to everyone else.
For someone who played college-level cricket, this is a dream come true for me and the sensation of hitting the ball in the middle of the bat is mind blowing.
But, here's the kicker. In real world, If I had play 120 pitches (baseball equivalent), I'd have to wait for 4 hours. In VR it could be done in 30 minutes.
I've already lost 7 pounds and feel energetic.
I can't imagine how playing sports, music, concerts in the next 5 years is going to be in VR accelerating the skill-mastery process.
People who diss VR is the same kind who diss AI. Mixed Reality / AI will enhance productivity of everyone leaving the luddites far behind
But what if that's what I want? I want VR so I can experience totally different worlds fully as if I was there. I can do that safely from my living room.
I want AR so I can live the cyberpunk dream of seeing data and other extra info overlaid on top of my normal vision while out in public.
I don't think either concept is flawed, they just have different purposes for different times and places.
Flat games feel quite immersive already. And others can easily be nearby and watch.
> It's not something you can do with kids around
Whenever I played multiplayer Quest 2 games 99% of the voices were kids/young teenagers. Apparently it doesn't need parents to care, the kids in up their bedrooms is good enough.
If anything the problem is that good VR isn't cheaper than it already is, to hit the market for parents to buy it for their kids. The current selection of games on Oculus store is basically glorified Android games. But PC/Steam VR games I've tried like Half Life Alyx were mind-blowing.
Maybe when $2000+ PC VR setups finally mainstreams adult nerds will care. I highly doubt that's reliant on AR.
So? Plenty of successful products aren’t for the average, casual user. HOTAS controllers aren’t for instance. So what? Not everything is universal adoption or nothing. Also, predictions about the “average, casual user” will want tend to be…unreliable. Trends driven by the kind of non-average, non-casual users that tend to be early adopters can shift this in surprising ways.
You really don't. People who haven't played VR don't seem to understand how easy it is to lose yourself. Your brain quickly adjusts to the lack of peripheral vision, bad graphics, low contrast, etc. and you quickly find yourself leaning on things that aren't really there or hitting walls because you forgot that you've wandered off.
In the era of remote working how insane would it be if you could just carry a set of glasses and have infinite monitor space anywhere you go ? And once people are using it 8 hours a day for work - the stigma around using it for fun goes away.
It's not too different from having Google driving instructions. You don't immerse yourself in them. But when driving it would be nice not to move your eyes to the small phone screen but instead see it though your VR lenses while at the same time seeing the road ahead through it. Keep your eyes on the road, but also get alerts and instructions without having to let your eyes off the road.
It’s not as simple as picking up your phone, or … well, it’s not as simple as putting on glasses.
The main problem is that the current VR device form factor is so intimidating for most people that they won’t even bother putting it on to try it. Instead, they’ll just make a lot of bad assumptions about a product that they haven’t actually tried yet for a good amount of time
You can’t even pick up a beer while playing a game. That’s a deal breaker.
Immersion isn’t really the problem in that case, the experience just needs to be distracting since your primary goal is to sweat. VR fitness is the killer app.
Sounds perfect for a flight.
So I can help answer the question of why it looks this way? Optics :)
Technical details are in the patent for the cardboard version from 2017:
But, form factor and weight are just some of the things that influence customer experience.
Apple’s other efforts, such as retinal authentication and automatic, motor-driven pupil distance adjustment remove other points of friction that interfere with enjoyment.
Apple identifies many rough edges in HW and SW that hold back a category.
Then it makes difficult compromises, sanding down a combination of them enough to meet release consideration.
All companies working in the XR/AR/VR/ghost-in-the-snowcrash-shell-gargoyle space need to do in order to develop something widely accessible/affordable, mass-producible and mass-market adoptable while operating within the constraints of currently viable, high yield, low loss rate fabrication feasible tech is.... shoot for wearable display glasses that are in the product line's slimmest tier simply sunshade size, and at the beefiest, a ski-gogglesque form factor. They do this by stopping trying to jam everything and the GPU-plated kitchen sink into the headset.
Restrict design scope of the HUD-glasses to a binocular retina-or-better-resolution MEMS-based display, and maybe a few small, lightweight multispectral sensors and an accelerometer for environment mapping and multi-axis positioning.
Everything else can be connected via a clipped on snagsafe/magsafe cable from a waist, upper arm or torso wearable primary device unit encompassing main battery, SoC, storage, etc; and this could feasibly be the user's next-gen upgrade smartphone.
Plenty of people would though if it would work well. It doesn't though. And sticking your phone in front of something really isn't going to work imho. But I would definitely wear them outside as interim solution, not the entire day, but normally I walk to places (4-10 km/day) and a lot of that is boring and spent thinking of on my phone or both. I would wear them there.
The TCL RayNeo X2 looks pretty ok, however, i'm not sure what it really does. It says it will send out to devs soon, so it means there are apps and the reviews during CES don't look bad, but there is no pricing, specs etc. At least not that I could find.
There's no leaks or concepts of what they're actually doing with the AR ones as far as I know though so not a clue what they look like. If anyone can get those right it will be Apple with their ability to do high performance tiny compute.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-01-08/when-w...
It's expected to be released before WWDC.
According to the article, an AR/VR headset has been an R&D project at Apple since at least 2015.
There is only so much magic one can squeeze out from optical trickery. Especially at a price point like this.
I find it much more likely that they will use external facing screens that recreate the appearance of the wearers face to onlookers and so reduce the perceived anti-social nature of opaque goggles.
I’m not sure if I’d like to walk around the streets wearing them though - would be incredibly annoying to other people and a risk of being stolen.
The hard part of AR is the shared experience part. It's close to creating a cross-platform MMO game.
In my mind, AR glasses will make the world as shitty as most clickbait webpages. Ads EEEEEEVVVVEEERRRYYYWWWWHHHEEERRRREEE. Notifications all the time. Virtual billboards trying to grab your attention.
I can't think of the obvious use cases, except for virtual monitors, that are all that compelling.
Map navigation? Ok, well, it's not that bad now in non-VR
Info on people in your view? Maybe, but if think protecting your privacy is bad now you'll need much less of it for that to actually work.
Virtual pets running around your room? Seems 15 minutes of wow and then done. Plus the hard part of designing them to interact with your environment vs a pre-designed environment.
Games? Same problem as above, they have to adapt to the actual world vs current games where designers can design and build levels and worlds. So 1 or 2 Pokemon Go type of games and then you'll go back to playing PS6 or VR.
Porn? Same problem. The 3D video won't match your sofa, chair, living room, bed.
Virtual UI? People are already complaining that screens in cars are not as good as knobs. do I really want to have to put on my glasses to adjust my knobless stove?
All that said, I'd probably have made similar arguments against smartphones and been just as wrong :P
If AR can’t solve this, then you won’t have to worry. It’s a fundamental function.
Current AR workflows have tons of moving parts, are harder to test, and have all kinds of unreliable points of failure that are difficult to overcome (like finding a flat plane to use as an anchor and then hoping your content doesn’t show up backwards or upside down). It’ll improve over time for sure, that’s clear, but the current tools are not as easy to use as they probably should be.
All photos appear to show AR overlaid on the world in front of the user, while the design of the headset is like a teleprompter mirror so you're looking at the world directly, with ghost of AR reflected at angle from phone above.
1. The dork factor is still in play here. I don't see this being popular by any means, so there needs to be a killer app.
2. I need to see a nice AR game like Pokemon GO integrated with this. I imagine that's the first/best killer app.
The number of people from young kids to grandmas running around in groups was _insanely_ cool to see. I'm sad there simply wasn't enough content to keep it up the drive. I wanted to do missions/dungeon crawls/talk to NPCs etc.
This would have made the go experience 100x more fun... can you imagine a Charizard standing on top of my local mall?! omg. All of us using our captures to take over an objective.
We're nearly there.
This is where I think Glass got it wrong. They made it feel exclusive when they should've been giving them away.
Waving a stick around and shouting fireball while wearing a goofy headset is, at present, still unacceptable.
A lot of infrastructure and data would be needed before it reaches a critical mass and mass adoption follows. The more people using it, the more data there is in the system, the more people want to use it.
Another really great feature would be captions for conversations going on around you - a big help for the hearing impaired, and maybe even helpful to ordinary people to keep better track of the conversation flow.
Looks interesting. Has anyone here tried it?
Is it more than a premium version of Google Cardboard? I can't tell. The "Technical Specs" mention "optical lenses" but otherwise mention no hardware details--well, other than the bring-your-own items (iPhone, Airpods, Apple Watch)...
The cardboard is a VR device where you could only see your phones display.
This uses a peppers ghost setup to let you see the real world , and the phones screen is used to overlay holograms in the space in front of you.
If you’ve ever been to DisneyLand or any place that has hologram ghosts etc, this is essentially the same principle.
Cardboard is VR, not AR.
Use ARKit/ARCore for tracking.
A few lines of code and you are all set.
On the upside it disabused me of the idea that AR was any closer to ready at a relatively low consumer price point.
Per typical AR product, the preview videos were wildly better quality than the actual experience.
Spectator mode was also an incredible idea.
Kudos to HoloKit's design team!
We'll know they're onto something if people are messing with these in Dolores Park when the weather turns nice in April.
Which brings me to the biggest issue; input. Speech is often awful as input, especially when in public or noisy environments (no, airpods pro don't filter out noise nearly well enough). It's ok for casual things like checking the weather or replying 'yeah thanks' to an email, but for actual work, speech sucks. Now most people won't be doing that anyway, so who cares? I care and I know many other people I know do; even as the input for phones, so that's a large enough group to warrant experimentation. I experimented with a one hand chording keyboard and it works well; it doesn't take a lot of time to learn, it is quite fast, especially mixed with speech input (create long text with speech and fix it with the chording keyboard for instance) and it seems perfect for AR; if only the the little joystick and a few buttons makes a massive difference over the clunky speech/pointing interfaces. I just wish there were more options; the one that's there (Twiddler) is too expensive.
I'm now trying to work with a split keyboard as input, but the problem really is that those have no pointer. Otherwise it's really quite great (if you don't care how it looks of course, but it's early days), because if you touch type, it's not slower than when you are sat down, almost immediately after trying it (they are qwerty).
While there are many companies experimenting with input for AR/VR, and I have tried all publicly available demos/releases of such input, it's all clunky and slow. Touchscreen and speech are faster, but nothing beats a keyboard and a mouse; I think a lot more research could be spent on that, but as most people will be using devices (including computers with keyboards and mice) for consumption only, there is no financial incentive?
Congratulations to the team. If and when they release an Android version I'll buy one straight away.
Juding by the comments they should perhaps market this more for home use and less for out in public. Still, I think this has the potential to be definitely very fun and possibly very useful.
It looks like they have much better software than we had at launch, though.
The experience for phone-based headsets is really pretty good. The issue is that it’s a really hard sell for consumers at that price point for seemingly a piece of plastic, and the price point is necessary for the optics unless you have massive volume. The other issue is of course the bulky form factor.
They never got a real foothold on games, though.
This would allow using a [PI/Whatever] to interact with the systems avail to the OBD, slurp that and display onto the HUD-film on the windscreen...
With the ability to display HUD info in even the most analog of vehicles...
(I havent figured out how to make the HUD cheap or safe based on this comment - but in higher-end options, flex OLED film layers on the glass... or a small projector which simply projects onto a semi-opaque area in the lower-center section of the vehicle, with a simple device, pico projector (with a BRIGHT light) onto a smei-opaque sticker above the dash.
Full screen HUD integration is cool, but expensive.
but we have all the tools and resources to make this happen....
Just make sure that Apple 'iWindscreen/shield' never makes it into the wild....
run the PI in the machine, and track your bullshit in a new way (as tied in with vid cams...)
but thats just me and my what ifs...
Hope it does well, but I can't really look into it until they open the SDK. The "curated partners" thing doesn't inspire much confidence.
Ultimately this is very google cardboard like and passive so $129 is quite expensive.
I built a fun toy like this in the early 2000’s for $10 using foam board and a $5 sheet of teleprompter glass.
Ultimately anything like this has failed to capture the market because people just don’t want to have their phones out of reach and/or risk their battery using the camera/tracking.
Is it supposed to run existing iphone AR apps too?
I think they have this shape since it’s quite simple optics to have the iPhone screen be a “reflection” on the glasses while you can still see straight out through it. Kinda like looking out a window at night and seeing both your reflection and the outside at once.
