I always get laughed at when voicing this, but I was one of the (admittedly ridiculous-looking) people who tried out the Google Glass when it came out. It was, in many ways, a bad product, but if you could abstract away from how goofy it looked or how bad the battery life was, it was kinda awesome. I tried hard for a couple weeks to use it exclusively, and granted that back then my phone wasn't as much an appendage as it is now, but I found the experience of going back to my phone deeply disappointing. It made me aware, in a way I thought impossible, of just how much I strain my neck all day long to look at the phone, for instance. Calling my wife on Hangout and having her see what I'm seeing and picking groceries together while she was at work was a very neat experience... to have map overlay as I drove on my glasses, too, was awesome.
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 famously cannibalizes their existing products deliberately, so I don't think that's what's holding them back. It's also strongly possible that Apple's eventual product will require an iPhone to function, so cannibalization might not even be an issue.
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.
Yep big believer that just as mobile was the huge step change in interaction vs the PC, widespread AR glasses will be next.
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
Cannibalization is a non-issue when the product requires you to have an iphone as well, which depending on form factor and price point could be reasonable.
Yeah the most likely form factor would be keeping all processing in the phone and keeping the glasses as a "thin client" of sorts. Wireless connection. And make the batteries part of the form factor (eg part of headband/strap to balance weight of glasses). A sort of AirPlay (ARPlay?).
The bluetooth headphone / earbud analgy makes sense. The glasses are simply the camera; the iPhone does the heavy lift and dials out as needed.
I'm guessing you'll need more power on the phone than for simple music streaming since the graphics, even if mostly processed remotely, are going to be more intensive and mutable in the same way that a 4k youtube vid uses more Mbps than soundcloud mumble-rap.
Yeah, I have one of the Explorer models, it was also great to be able to wink to take a picture - it made it much easier to capture fleeting moments than pulling a phone out, especially when I didn't have hands free. It was also super easy to check emails/texts and decide if I needed to pull out my phone, which ironically made them less disruptive.
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).
I, too, was a Glasshole for a bit but I really didn’t try to “normalize” wearing them in everyday life. They weren’t quite ready for that and the software was pretty limited at the time - but they were interesting none the less.
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.
Same here. Was flown out to Google to pick them up. It was an awesome product, for hardly any of my use cases. But I could see where certain industries or applications they would excel at.
They are just a bit glossier alternative to dealers and vuzix though which have been in this market for ages. There's nothing special about the Enterprise glass compared to those except the sightly cooler looking design.
Apple is probably like "let's just wait this out and let Zuck take all the heat and pain of getting this figured out. By that time he'll be out of money and we'll look like the heroes for fixing everything. If we go in too early with even a 90% baked product we have nothing to gain."
I respect Apple for having restraint and not shipping products they don’t believe in.
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.
It was good enough and getting notifications on your watch so you don’t have to pull out your phone is probably the top reason people get an Apple Watch. That’s the reason I wear mine. Only thing that was flawed with the first version is that it wasn’t waterproof.
>It was good enough and getting notifications on your watch so you don’t have to pull out your phone is probably the top reason people get an Apple Watch. That’s the reason I wear mine.
That's the reason I bought mine and is also the reason I stopped wearing it 2 years later in favor of my old Timex and Casio combo. Now I'm mentally and emotionally way more at ease, plus, those watches look cooler.
Having access to notifications on my writs and being always connected felt cool and novel in the beginning, now it feels like hell.
I'm curious if there's other people who also upgraded to a dumb watch?
I went from Apple Watch/Fitbit to Casios and mechanical watches, too. I remember when Microsoft Band first came out their commercial was showing people checking notifications in many scenarios, including with friends and family. I was like, yuck, I absolutely don't want to be distracted in these situations. A truly smart watch should actually do the opposite: block notifications when it can tell you're with family.
lol, no. It means I switch between the two depending on occasion and mood. The Casio is my daily driver to the office and the Timex is my outdoor/workout watch.
I think Apple Watch was a far safer bet. Wrist watches have been a thing for a long time. It's pretty clear that people would enjoy even basic functionality on their wrist.
I think the difference is that mixed reality is assuming you will mostly stay in one place with defined boundaries, and the device doesn't take in a lot of spatial information about where you are. But it has video pass through so you are aware of your surroundings. Augmented reality is similar, but it is more like trying to illustrate on the world around you (put an object on the real table in front of you). AR is draw on your environment as you move around. MR is like VR with pass through.
I think the distinction they have is helpful. They call it mixed reality because when people say AR, they assume virtual stuff overlaid on the actual real world stuff (like with glasses). Quest Pro isn't that, you don't look at the real world through lenses, you are looking at what the camera feed of the real world in front of you displayed on the "screen".
Technology like VR can, if someone figures out a way to make it useful, take over the world by storm. It’s a sure bet that for any such technology Apple has projects going on, just to make sure they aren’t caught by surprise.
Mark has unlimited money. Meta is incredibly profitable and that’s not changing anytime soon. No reason for me to think mark will do anything but continue to double down on a platform that makes them unbeholden to anyone.
* 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
I've had a pair of these since September 2022 and tried them on quite a few things. The 45* viewing angle is not really a problem, because it's not for VR and VR support is _very_ limited (currently just specific Android devices or with CloudXR on specific GPUs with USB-C DP-alt output). The device support for AR functionality is better but there aren't any killer apps. Although there was a recent tech demo of them being used for live captioning real life.[0]
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.
Given these are AR, when you're using them on an airplane to simulate a big monitor, how does that fit into the constrained physical world you're in where there's a seat two feet in front of your face?
I thank you for your sacrifice. I thank everyone who buys half baked AR/VR gear as early adopters, proving there's a market while at the same time parting with large amounts of cash for disappointment. I'm not ready to invest anything in this space but I want it to succeed.
If these can realistically and without eye strain produce a giant virtual monitor when connected to a MacBook Pro, I’ll buy these very quickly. What are you going to use them for?
It worked. I got them about an hour ago, plugged them in and they immediately worked as a mirrored monitor. I decided to run Nebula, which attempted upgrade, upgrade failed on step 2. Running nebula again didn't prompt for upgrading again, neither after reinstall. I searched around online and found a link to this page which when used in chrome allowed me to install/patch the latest.
Since then, I've run it in triple monitor mode, and normal mode, both as an extra monitor and as a mirror. Some odd things I noticed, if you dont have it situated on your nose correctly, the corners can be fuzzy. Also, I played a game with the settings turned all the way up and the framerate in the glasses was better than the m2's laptop screen itself, which was odd, considering I can run multiple games at the same time with browser tabs etc no problem, so the glasses are doing something apple isn't. one button on the right side turns off the display so you can see in front of you, another button does nothing that I can tell. the audio is very quiet, and seems to come from in your head near your ears.
some things I dont like are that these glasses sit a bit in front of your face, so there is some light bleed, which considering how bright these are means nothing since they're transparent for no reason at all. You will have a hard time seeing whats behind the brightness when your display is turned on. I stood in front of a 70 inch TV at full brightness, and what I see in the glasses is the same as what I see at 5 feet of distance.
One note about nebula, there is some jitter, like the movement of typing. Luckily there is a setting that allowed me to anchor the zero point of where my head is because when I first ran it I was sitting upward, and once the virtual screens launched, I leaned back in my chair and the monitors didnt follow my head. A way to 'pin' the displays would be cool if you want to be in static mode or gyro mode.
By the comments other people left, I thought the experience would be lackluster, and the first 5 seconds having it on were fairly underwhelming, but these are pretty great. I can code in them just fine, play games just fine, virtual monitors just fine, everything they said they'd be has been fine. I want to try the realtime subtitles next, since I have a relative who can't hear for shit and this would be a gamechanger, though they'd have a hard time seeing through the display unless they were in bright daylight.
Oh, also it was shipped in the box itself, like a retail box you'd buy headphones in, with a label slapped on it. The box is well made to withstand a ginger toss by a delivery driver on to the concrete. Prepare yourself though, the parts are anchored to the box and everything comes flying out if you dont start off from the goal of just trying to disassemble the whole box. I assumed the initial flap you open will let you remove things, but each step and removal of each object requires you disassemble some other part of the packaging. Best just take the whole box apart.
Ah yes, I had my finger above the buy button yesterday but I need to get a new phone to use it on the go which I am holding off on. Please write down your experience; it really looks pretty great from the reviews. No batteries in the glasses are great as well.
I hope they work for you. They did not for me, unfortunately. The text was too fuzzy to not give me a headache and something about it gave me motion sickness.
Yea. It’s doable, but I found that I needed to scale the UI to read comfortably. For normal UI elements, I mostly knew what the buttons did and didn’t need to read them, but its like using a TV as a computer monitor… its just far enough away that everything felt too small.
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.
For anyone who doesn’t want to read the article, Apple has apparently been working on an AR device that is separate from the mixed reality headset that is slated to be announced this year. Aside from this piece, all the previous news was centered on the mixed reality headset which may confuse people
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.
Mixed reality here means VR goggles like Oculus. You're looking at a screen inside some closed-to-the-outside-world goggles. What makes it "mixed" reality as opposed to VR is that the goggles may have an outward facing camera used such that what you see on the screen combines this camera view with some VR aspects. This isn't something that you are going to be walking down the road wearing though - it's basically a 3-D gaming headset in terms of looks.
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.
It is a bit funny that people have come to call Video-See-Through (VST) devices MixedReality (MR) and Optical-See-Through (OST) devices AugmentedReality (AR) when Microsoft introduced the term MixedReality for Hololens only to differentiate their Hololens (which is Optical-See-Through) from other AR devices.
Augmented Reality (AR) takes an image of the real world around you (or just the real world itself through a transparent screen) and superimposes images onto it. You could be looking at a very real tree in front of you and see a virtual squirrel on it, or your actual wall and a virtual TV to help you see if it will look good there. Or just a list of your text messages in the corner of your vision. Whatever.
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.
Imo the difference is how they display their images. The mixed reality headset tends to be a VR headset where its “AR” mode is just a camera passthrough to an LCD screen. AR headsets tend to beam specific images directly to the human eye
I think of AR (Augmented Reality) as something unobtrusive like glasses where you can see the real world just fine and digital content can be overlayed, maybe like a fancy Heads-Up Display in a car.
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.
My impression is mixed reality is a made up marketing thing. By Magic Leap in particular I think, I remember them pushing the idea.
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.
The report says that Apple's $3,000 mixed reality headset is still planned for this year, probably followed up by a cheaper (but still expensive!) $1,500 model by 2025.
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).
And? I'm not talking about the $400 headset that was doing both. That was the Quest Pro (which already exists in the market as mixed reality) and eventually the fully AR glasses in R&D assuming you read my comment? Meta already has more than one product for this.
> What might happen in the future is for the discussion about the future. currently not the case.
The over-arching discussion is already about the future Apple AR glasses, and Meta's intention about their own AR glasses couldn't have been more clearer and relevant with their acquisitions.
It all gets a bit hazy as soon as you start bringing in video from the headset cameras.
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.
I don't think its hazy. video pass through on these headsets don't extend the VR into AR, its an ease of use function to let you navigate your environment while wearing a headset. It might be in the future cheap headsets have AR, but that not is the case today.
VR replaces your world with a virtual one. AR casts virtual things into the normal world.
Camera pass through isn't AR, the same way a security camera isn't AR just because you could potentially view it on a VR HMD. There needs to be the component of combining the normal and virtual worlds. Camera pass through is just an ease of use feature.
> Camera pass through isn't AR, the same way a security camera isn't AR just because you could potentially view it on a VR HMD.
I would suggest that this is a very modern interpretation. Pokemon go is an "AR" game, even though its camera-mediated. Wayfair has an "AR" furniture viewer, apple has "AR" feature to view the new mac mini: https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/ (search for AR)
as I said, its hazy, and its only now that laser/waveguide see through displays are possible that we can have real-world overlays.
I think the next $400 unit from Meta will focus on camera-based XR features. The new $1,500 Quest Pro is clearly a trial round for features they're hoping to be able to include in the next consumer unit.
That's debatable - the Quest Pro has been roundly criticised for having passthrough that isn't good enough for many AR applications (e.g.: you can't read text through it and it has very poor temporal stability), while being marketed for those applications. If they can't do great passthrough at 1,500 dollars, it unlikely that they'll do good passthrough for 400. Hope to be proven wrong, as I'd love to use a headset for productivity.
I have a Quest Pro and I find the passthrough pretty impressive (not knowing any better I suppose — I wasn't expecting to read a newspaper wearing the headset anyway).
If the same capability were available in a $400 unit, I think it would appeal to many people.
Given that AR headset also tend to reduce vision (need to block incoming light to be able to project these 'augmented' object), I'm not sure that the distinction between AR and VR-with-passtrough is very important.
There are different AR implementations possible with different tradeoffs.
>And VR with passthrough is AR unless you're being pedantic.
It isn't. It doesn't do what AR does. It's just an ease of use of feature. IUf you watch a security camera through a VR HMD is it AR? No, because none of the virtual world is being cast into the real world. It doesn't meet the basic requirements of being AR.
Have you used any passthrough apps on VR headsets? I work on one and it's functionality is the same whether it runs on VR/passthrough or traditional AR hardware.
I agree the Quest is a good deal at $399 (I paid $299, the original price) but is something still a good deal if it's no longer used and on a shelf with similar dusty inert equipment?
Well, it's certainly a better deal than paying $3,000 for the same result?
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.
If the result is “sitting on a shelf unused”, yes, both $3000 and $400 devices are equally capable of that. (As my own history of excited gadget purchases bears testimony…)
The point was, if you’re unsure whether you actually would keep using it, the Quest is a much cheaper way to scratch that VR/XR urge.
I've been very bearish on AR and especially headset AR for years. Building useful UX in front of someone's face is incredibly hard and doing it with such poor visual precision is impossible. I worked at a digital design shop a few years ago and they were throwing devices at us and asking us to come up with just some compelling demos and I don't think we really succeeded. We need multiple optics breakthroughs before we can even think about what these could be good for.
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.
Small nit: the US didn’t pause the HoloLens, they said it wasn’t rugged enough to deploy as is, and they wanted more design before they bought a bunch for field use.
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.
Phone and headset AR have different affordances for different situations. Phone AR actually works right now and is deployed to everyone's pockets. And phones are much more capable input devices that headsets which allows for things like Pokemon Go. And you don't need to worry about obscuring the user's view so they can do full occlusion of real images and not worry about someone walking into a telephone pole. You can't do immersive, but immersive isn't the only or even the best approach.
Having watched Apple wrestle with "rumors sites" for decades and eventually develop a symbiotic relationship with them for its benefit, I'm going to posit that nothing's actually changed. Apple "leaked" this news to cool analyst and market expectations.
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/
This doesn’t really surprise me. Apple is really good at miniaturization but they also have an aversion to cables.
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.
When I read there was a cable that attached to your hip I knew it wasn’t coming out anytime soon. I couldn’t see Apple of all companies doing something like that. It sounds more like a prototype than anything else.
These rumours have been milled for years now with the same cycle each time:
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.
This is unsurprising. The tech just isn't there yet. It may never be more than a niche product and has some fundamental problems (eg displaying black).
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.
Exactly. Apple is good at product design and hardware/software integration.
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.
People fall into some interesting traps when it comes to technology.
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.
Good, I don't think the masses are clamoring for AR glasses and if its not an amazing product, it would probably be a flop. Seems like current tech just isn't there yet to make these things tolerable to the average person.
AR as a principle assuming arbitrarily advanced and unobtrusive technology (and, perhaps, ignoring social pantopticon concerns) that works for most people even those without perfect vision would probably be pretty transformative. Look at anything/anyone and have basically a HUD overlaid with all sort of information.
From my recent past experience working on AR at one of the companies named in this thread, I can say that battery, display, processing power, heat, and user input are all among the biggest problems being worked on.
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
TBH I am a bit disappointed, I was holding out hope that maybe Apple could finally be the one to crack this.
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.
Unfortunately, yes this seems to be the state of matters currently regardless of cash invested, similar to ie fully automated driving.
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)
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.
The watch has a very small display surface. Glasses can potentially use your whole field of vision. You could display an entire room full of monitors rendering full size web browsers and other applications. So there's a huge difference in what info you could see.
I don’t think “data on the fly” and “display a room full of web browsers” has a lot of overlap.
The NReal is a “full vision(ish)” glasses, so that’s available, but you probably couldn’t produce that wire-free. It it’s doable if you’re willing to plug-in when needed (so not on the fly).
You could do apple-watch-in-the-eye (Google glass basically) but that probably couldn’t sustain browsers or monitor images for long. It would work for things like notifications though… which the watches already do.
You can do a lot more with the ability to display using the whole field of vision. That's just a fact. If you can also use better control systems (gestures, etc) and interact with a visual environment those are also big benefits. You're right that the glasses form factor can't get near that right now, but we know that headsets can (like the Quest).
I am also of the opinion that Apple really messed up the watch ecosystem by locking it down so much. They prevented us from fully utilizing web browsing, text messaging, wouldn't allow spotify streaming for years, etc, not because of the watch being incapable, but because they wanted to maintain their walled garden and didn't trust watch owners to be able to type on a watch. If they allowed these things the watch would have been much more successful.
I wear an apple watch, it's not really a good information display vector. It's great at displaying certain things but definitely bad for textual information, in addition to needing to raise the arm to actually read it.
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.
I don’t know I think it’s a great vector. Not if you’re trying to read a book, great if you’re trying to check a notification.
Even reading an email while walking with a visual overlay seems distracting or dangerous. I can’t imagine anything that requires strolling but isn’t better served with a phone display.
Yeah just having some kind of display would be huge, partly for integration with voice controller AI tools. Using Siri would be so much easier with a visual GUI aspect so it could show you options, let you quickly skim and skip to what you want it to do, etc.
Apple often delays product releases if they aren’t sure the product is going to deliver on its promise of high usability, or if the manufacturing can’t yet be scaled to the volumes they know they will need to pump out if it is successful. I wish more companies had this level of discipline.
I wonder if the leak of the design was a way for them to gauge how the public would respond to a device like that and the sharp negative response was all they needed to hear to put it on the back shelf for a few more years.
They should focus on making the iPhone better at AR. There is so much potential in using smartphones as an AR device. The problem is it clunking and unreliable.
Google sees the potential, they been adding a lot of AR features to their mobile apps, like Maps. Lens is also getting pretty good.
iphone has the better AR toolkit in terms of capabilities.
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.
I think the second point is essential. Occlusion is cool, sure, but not terribly important.
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)
When I heard that Apple was working on AR glasses, I ditched my Killer AR App idea and bought a chunk of their stock. I figured that this would be the company that could pull it off because they have a much better pulse on culture and marketing than players like MS, who are as out of touch as a cable news watching boomer. I figured that they would be all over the blazingly obvious Killer App that would make them ubercool again and that sidesteps all the problems of glassholes and liability for safety issues. As soon as Apple announced AR, I knew they would make the Killer App in house (ala Final Cut Pro and Logic) and, in doing so, crush my startup.
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.
Hey, hit me up at the email in my username. I’m a multi-instrumentalist and professional software and audio engineer who has worked in music technology in the past. :) This piques my interest.
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.