* I've been toying with the idea of some type of headmount display, an SBC with battery pack in my bib pockets, and a twiddler 3 or tiny bluetooth keyboard for input in my hand. With the amount of microsd storage and SBC computational power out now for small sums, it's tempting.
Shout out to Steve Mann and Thad Starner for inspiring young me with their work on this stuff. As a little country bumpkin I didn't think I'd ever live to see this type of tech.
Fun fact: Steve Mann is responsible for HDR video and smart watches
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5903ff66e4fcb573ba3b2...
However, they work fantastically as a _dumb_ external display on any computer with USB-C DP-alt output. Tested on MacOS, Linux and Windows 7. My glasses with the firmware revision from ~November 2022 works without issue on M1 MBPs, 2018 Dell XPS and the SteamDeck. Prior firmware revisions had several issues with misrepresenting their capabilities to the host system causing unstable framerates so older reviews which mention this may no longer be applicable.
Best usecase I've found is for watching films on a plane or in bed. You can comfortably lay flat, staring at the ceiling without the cable getting in the way. But there is an amount of reflection on the screen when used in bright places which can be annoying.
I got mine cheaper imported from Japan. If you're in the UK do not bother trying to get them from EE.
Field of View: 46°
The resolution isn’t quite high enough for fine text details and unlike VR goggles, glasses aren’t as secured to your head so it shakes more. Again, making focusing on text harder.
That said, they’re good enough for use in a pinch (eg. on a plane, I tried this). They prove the tech is around the corner. They work, they do what they’re advertised, they just need to refine a bit. 1-2 years if people keep buying them and the proper version would be made I suspect. But they work today if you’re really into it.
Surprising, but I actually like the oculus screen sharing, in terms of ability to focus and read the screen. The headset is too heavy and resolution too small, but I like the experience. The NReal is slightly worse in some regards, and slightly better in others.
Edit: they have 2 modes. One is as a USBC monitor, and the other is where your computer (via an app) projects virtual monitors that you see when spinning your head via accelerometer. Mode 1 is good, mode 2 is glitchy. I couldn’t use mode 2 for anything real.
That's all to say, I think anyone who implements a pretty good version of this with modern tech will usher in glasses as the new compute form factor. Which, paradoxically, is why I think Apple may be the last to do this. Good AR tech will absolutely destroy the iPhone... either they'll do it when they think they are ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED they can successfully cannibalize their own product, OR somehow the iPhone proves to start becoming an unsuccessful business on its own right. I think those two things are pretty unlikely; far likelier for META to keep their nose to the grindstone and perhaps, just perhaps, knock something out of the park.
Apple also famously tries not to release products first, waiting until they can deliver something that fits well into their ethos. How well they succeed at that is an open question, and whether it's a wise approach is an open question, but it's their approach.
I'm not sure Apple can deliver another home run, but so far they've delivered more than anyone else I can think of, so I wouldn't bet against them either.
Maybe that's too obvious, don't know. The when is maybe more interesting. The matrix dropped in 2000 (useful milestone for the usage of cellphones) but Uber only started to hockey stick around 2014. So finger in the air analogous reasoning suggests AR glasses maybe 10 years from now, with saturation maybe 20 years from now (marked by our now 20 years older parents owning a pair and being glued to tiktok)
With all this chatGPT hype of late maybe we really will all be rocking JARVIS style glasses come 20 years from now
Shame about the PR backlash, all I ever got from anyone was curiosity and a desire to try it out, which makes me think that the PR backlash was partly manufactured by trumping up an unrepresentative sample. It's not like these things were recording video constantly (though a query-able augmented memory made via transcription/abstraction of always-on video would be awesome).
We are all extremely aware that everything we do can end up on the internet and potentially damage us.
As others have pointed out in this thread people want full pass through wide field of vision AR and that’s not going to happen soon enough.
I feel like the breakout application won’t be the home consumer but rather some industrial use. Augmented reality could easily level up an entry level assistant faster by visualizing the task they need to do. Disassembling and repairing equipment you’re unfamiliar with would be easier when the overlay tells you what bolt to turn on which widget.
The Apple II paid for development of the Mac, the iPhone cannibalized the iPod.
It’s sometimes a pain to have them trail behind on features that aren’t just perfect to their taste (a touch enabled laptop is long overdue for instance…), but in areas where they’re expected to just be one player among others it stays a healthy stance.
In the meantime, the Quest2 will continue to be the no-brained choice for those who want to dip their toe in the field.
I mean, iPhone didn't have 3G or the ability to run third-party apps at launch, but nobody could credibly claim it was only 90% baked in 2007.
IMHO this would be good news for Meta which has spent years figuring out how to ship this technology in a $400 consumer-level unit.
Apple's entry would validate the market, and make it more obvious what a good deal the Quest actually is (from a pure hardware POV — the quality of the software deal remains in argument).
Oculus will prove to be of significant value to Meta in the coming years, beyond VR.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/30/meta-acquires-luxexcel-a-s...
But, AR is generally now meant to mean see through displays. Where as MR is cameras capturing and then reprojecting images to the display inside a light proof case.
In terms of software they basically have the same requirements, in terms of hardware, the screens don't exist yet, and the batteries don't either.
What I'm trying to say is that Apple introducing such an expensive unit will make people take another look at the Quest as an option to see what the XR fuss is about. $400 is impulse buy territory for a lot of people who might be willing to try out the technology, while $3k isn't.
I didn’t even realize that Apple had an AR device that was anywhere near release. This article and its main source read like clickbait.
The AR product that Apple have apparently put on hold is more like Google glass - where fundamentally is it a pair of glasses that you can see through, but with the AR component somehow projected into your field of view too. So you're basically looking at the real world with pop-up information, virtual labels on things, maybe Pokemon skooting around too.
Mixed Reality (MR) is essentially a synonym for AR, but sometimes described as having the virtual elements interact with the real world rather than just being superimposed on top. The term appears to originate from Microsoft’s marketing for their HoloLens product and it’s just kind of stuck.
It seems like in practice it’s usually a matter of preference but you should read closer because sometimes they’re trying to distinguish some product feature from “regular” AR.
I think of VR as something that has no real world view, the entire thing is digital. So Meta's headsets are VR, Google Glass/Microsoft Hololens is AR.
Naturally there is some overlap, I think the ultimate set would be something that can do both, but as it stands now I don't really think it's possible to do both well.
It just means AR where the device recognises real objects. So if you pick up a a book, you can have a version of it in AR. So there’s interactions between the AR and the real world and vice versa.
That’s my impression.
I don't need to augment reality, I just want to maybe read things on the fly.
I think the issue with a Google-glass style device is that you can see just as much info on a watch. We already have watches and are socially familiar with them, and watches are out of the face when not needed.
What info could you need that isn’t accessible by a watch? Especially considering a watch can be a simple touchscreen but a glasses UI is…?
The NReal Air is pretty cool, and it’s just glasses with a screen, but is it compelling enough for the price tag? Especially an apple price tag? It’s just a “head mounted monitor”. The problem is that moving around makes it shake and hard to focus on, and it requires a cable to get data and power. Apple probably could make it wireless with Apple Watch internals, but then it wouldn’t be able to stream graphics very well.
My imagined concept of glass display is to be able to read while I'm hiking/walking, a 80x24 that can be hacked would have been perfect. I don't need my hand to hold anything, and probably scroll using eyeball movements.
If they still can’t get an Apple Watch to smoothly and consistently stay connected to an iPhone, AR is pretty much DoA unless they want to run the whole package on the glasses.
Anyway Apple can make something uncool to something fine. See Apple Pencil gen1.
Magic Leap pivoted to enterprise and the US military just paused the Hololens project. The market is not clamoring for this stuff and industry has not convinced anyone in 10+ years of trying.
Phone-based AR is both more vivid and more accessible and still hasn't really caught on at all. Word Lens and Pokemon Go were so long ago at this point and there's been no major followup.
That isn’t a particular damnation because it’s a very particular use case that has super tough requirements.
I think phone-based AR is completely different from face-mounted fwiw and phone-based has no reason to catch on because I’d you have to hold a phone, the UX is extra terrible. I do agree that the experiences aren’t ready yet for facemounted either, however.
1. Leak of new Apple Glass!
2. It's coming next year with a price of $(1500-3000).random()! Analysts say this puts it into the high-end market segment.
3. Rumours suggest the Apple Glass has as many pixels per eye as (most expensive monitor on consumer market) and is powered by a (current generation plus two) processor.
4. Apple has [delayed, cancelled, updated] their plans for Apple Glass, delaying the release by a year.
At this point, I'm starting to suspect details of this thing are just the NDA equivalent of a Trap Street.
Apple generally isn't on the cutting edge of things. Apple's primary positioning is to take something that's proven and make it not suck. There was Internet on phones before the iPhone. There was a time when you had to tell your OS if your Wifi was WEP, WPA or WPA2. There were MP3 players befofe the iPod.
AR/VR is much more difficult than people expected, there are fundamental issues, on the optical side (lenses, projection, depth, fov) and on the 6DOF tracking side (latency, robustness, occlusion handling.
Once all of that is really working, then we cal talk about batteries, weight, design, software.
I am not convinced that AR/VR is something that will replace screens any time soon.
It is a good reminder that technology improvement is not a given and not magical, it is pushed by hard work and quite often the results are not there.
In the 60s many people were convinced that flying cars, domestic robots and spaceships were only a few decades away.
A huge one is around FTL travel and communication. Any weird idea for this gets attention basically because people want it to be true. You'll often find defenses like "well, people once said it was impossible to [get to space,fly,go to the Moon]", which is a specious argument and (deliberately) ignores all the very real problems.
Another is putting a lot of weight in fiction. This applies to the FTL issue too (eg Star Trek, Star Wars) but goes well beyond it. There are a whole bunch of literary devices that make for an interesting read eg teleportation, telepathy, telekinesis, levitation, (unaided) flying, any form of magic and space flight working like flight in an atmosphere.
VAR has a big latency problem to contend with. Even AR does but in this case it's just rendering latency. But that's still significant.
Oh, I think they are.
But they want the SF movie AR glasses. Aka regular glasses just with a ton of extra tech.
What I mean by this is that AR glasses look a lot like the next major OS.
Mainframes - minicomputers - workstations - PCs - laptops - tables - smartphones - (minor impact compared to rest) smartwatches/wireless headphones/earbuds - ... - AR glasses.
I suspect we're a very far way away from that.
The verge's homepage has become entirely unusable. I'm not sure what's up with it but it's a total mess, you gotta scroll for days to see any stories. they appear to be hiding the fact that they've dropped half their staff by filling the gap with twitter feeds.
I've gone back to just using rss to find stories there
But at the same time I am kinda glad not to see another half baked AR come out, especially from someone like Apple (or Google) that has a big enough name that many will know about it.
And since Apple is very consistent to wall-gardening everything it can, its usefulness would be limited hard to Apple-only ecosystem as much as possible, which means basically useless expensive product for most of humanity (sorry for this jab but it reflects how Apple does its business, monetarily successful or not)
Google sees the potential, they been adding a lot of AR features to their mobile apps, like Maps. Lens is also getting pretty good.
the problem is, making compelling software requires another generational leap in object detection. We need to be able to do good object segmentation to allow things to hide behind real objects.
Not only that, but we need room understanding, like this is a table, and its this way up. That mug is over there and is the wrong way round. That stuff is a long way off, even if you ignore the battery power constraints.
Right now AR is very limited in what it can do because it can only understand the virtual objects the creators of the app have put in, the world is just arbitrary low resolution meshes.
Querying the world would be such a big step. Even just being able to persist annotations on specific objects would be so handy. (And yes I know paper notes and blutack exist, but data can be synced and queried in different ways)
What's that Killer App you ask?
Learn an instrument (guitar, bass, keyboard, drums etc.) with AR. I surely don't need to spell out the what/how/why right? Are you kicking yourself now for not thinking of it?
I guess it is time to sell my Apple stock.
PS. If you didn't need me to spell out the above and have the technical chops and connections, I have the music industry connections (music instructors and real rock stars) and a background as a PM for global products - let's talk.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34432848
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34425553
Apple will (and was always going to) launch this new product line whenever the necessary technology, user experience, and manufacturing dependencies allow them to execute on their 1.0 vision. In the meantime, they continue to develop the platform in plain sight: https://www.apple.com/augmented-reality/
