Form factor for AR is literally like nuclear fusion at the moment. I don’t know when they are going to get it looking like normal fucking glasses, but until then, no one is going outside with this shit.
They have to pivot this soon enough to a cheap at-home AR thingy.
VR is, IMHO, a fundamentally flawed concept. To immerse yourself, you need to block out your peripheral vision and everything else.
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.
I've been literally playing Cricket VR for 4 hours everyday since X-Mas.
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
They argued VR total immersion is a niche case. I’m not sure you’re rebutting them?
Most people can’t exercise for four hours a day while ignoring their environment, effectively outside of their home.
Whereas if you had glasses that let you do AR thing, you could do that while keeping an eye on your kids or on what you’re cooking or while doing some chores or while brushing your teeth etc
What you described sounds very cool! But could you do it with young kids or a household to run?
I think this argument against VR stems from a misunderstanding of what VR is competing with or excelling at. VR is not your mobile phone. Repeat it with me, VR is not your mobile phone! You will not play bejewelled on the train in VR, you will not check your email while waiting for the kettle in VR, you will not doom scroll Twitter when you're lying in bed in VR. Those things, as you correctly identified, belong to the realm of AR. VR is not AR, they are two completely different types of technology, markets, use cases, etc.
The V in VR is there for a reason, the virtualization of experience is the core principle. The person you are replying to is using it to virtualize Cricket. It is replacing a real Cricket game with a virtual one. This has value because, I'm guessing, they haven't been able to play Cricket for a long time due to some set of constraints in their life. VR makes this former pastime available to them again because they don't have to leave their home, they don't need to buy or rent equipment (other than the headset and game), they don't need to find a local group, they don't need to schedule their time around a set date. All they have to do is put the headset on and jump in a match. Think hard about these differences. Ask yourself, what does it remind you of? Where has this happened before?
I think VR is cool! Really enjoyed playing a zombie game when I tried it. The cricket thing sounds fun. I can readily conceive more people will use it for niche experiences and use cases will grow.
But you still didn’t address OP’s point. Immersive VR is like being out of the house. You can’t keep an eye on things.
Most people living regular lives have a limited “out of the house” time budget, and would like to spend a good chunk of it on in person experiences or errands or work.
Actually this analysis suggests work has the highest potential to bring in VR, as most people already budget 8-10 hours of “out of house” time for work, so VR isn’t competing with anything except the office environment.
> People who diss VR is the same kind who diss AI. Mixed Reality / AI will enhance productivity of everyone leaving the luddites far behind
There really is no guarantee for that. There have been a lot of techs supposed to disrupt everything just to flop miserably.
> in the next 5 years
I got a free vive in 2015 when they launched it in LA, promising a world wide revolution by 2016, 7 years later and still VR is nowhere to be seen. Just like fully autonomous teslas would be there "in two years" in 2012.
I'm very cautious with people promising revolutions "really soon". Crypto, VR, "AI", 3D TVs, 4D cinemas, self driving cars, it's all the same shit, rinse and repeat, "Bro! you gotta buy it now and invest everything you have in it RIGHT NOW! or you'll miss every opportunities!". All we get is the same as with everything else, very slow incremental evolutions, and that's when the tech doesn't straight up disappears
Yeah glad you’re enjoying vr but as someone that bought a vive in 2016 there is an embarrassing lack of quality software. I just looked at the top games 2023 article and literally every single one has been out for 2 years AND HL:Alyx is still the best / possible the only true ‘AAA’ vr game released to date.
Until the software gets moving with something truly interesting vr is pretty much a gimmick at this point.
I hold out small hope that when Nintendo and maybe Sony get really serious about vr, then we’ll get to some truly fun, unique and new game mechanics / experiences.
I will not hold my breath. I tested the first (admittedly rudimentary) HMDs in the mid 1990s. VR was f-ing hot back in the days among those of us interested in "computer graphics". According to commentators, VR would have disrupted our lives over the next a few years. Here we are.
The key thing missing at that point was a half-trillion market surrounding the hardware comprising the VR devices. The cellphone industry is going to continue to plow ahead no matter what happens with the popularity of VR so no matter what displays are going to get better, mobile processors more powerful, energy efficient and smaller, networking will speed up, and hand-face-eye tracking will get better.
The only necessary tech that isn't driven by a large existing market are lenses. That's a pretty good deal for VR hardware, you just have to focus R&D money on one area while getting the rest practically for free (yes I know a lot of work goes into integrating those other components but it's nowhere near the same as having to develop the tech in the first place).
> To immerse yourself, you need to block out your peripheral vision and everything else.
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.
I want VR so that I can have 8 different monitors and even more desktops. I want this at work so I can have different remote sessions up and just look right to see the current metrics, left for slack and email, vs code central...
That's why a proper VR headset wins over the various cheap "strap your iphone in" things. The comfort on the latest headsets (that are not cheap, granted) are orders of magnitude better.
100% agree. VR immersion is fundamentally broken anyway due to the locomotion problem. You can walk freely in your play area but it's always too small compared to typical game world size. So you end up being able to look around, duck, and dodge, but if you want to take a step forward, you need to remember to twiddle a joystick instead. It's a lot of cognitive load and discomfort for very little benefit.
Flat games feel quite immersive already. And others can easily be nearby and watch.
Regarding using a joystick to move around in VR, in my experience I wasn't very inconvenienced by it. I travelled immense distances in a variety of worlds and am glad to have not actually had to walk that far. I also found a preference for the original Vive's trackpads for movement over the Index's more conventional stick movement. The pad just felt more intuitive.
Walking around with 1:1 between VR and real space is indeed pretty cool, but I wouldn't want to do it full time in all games.
Same, I've never really had an issue with walking with the stick. The only thing that really took some adjustment was learning to walk with the stick but turn in person, now it's just second nature.
How come you manage to "remember to twiddle a joystick" in your flat games?
It's honestly not an issue and the early Valve thinking of that only room scale locomotion is acceptable is silly for anyone who's spent more than an hour in VR.
Some games compromise on this by having the character sitting in the pilot's seat of a ship or a mech, making the interaction with the joystick make sense. I haven't tried them, but it seems like a good way to go, particularly for a game with fighter jets or something like that.
I’m aware of several flight simulators that support VR headsets. For those who don’t get queasy using VR in a simulated aircraft, it is an excellent benefit:
In real life, many tasks like flying the landing pattern or joining a busy area of lift require constantly scanning both the instrument panel and outside the plane, at various angles.
If you use a standard monitor, you’re teaching your hands to push buttons that switch the direction of view. If you use VR, you teach yourself to look around with your head.
If you are flying for the purpose of training yourself to fly in real life, or practising skills you’ll use in a real aircraft, the latter is -referanke, all other things being equal.
Agreed. I type 'b' with my left hand which is why I was asking. E.g., if I had my right hand in the same spot, the 'b' would have been correct but the rest would have been the same.
I tried MS Flight Simulator with a Quest tethered to my desktop and I couldn't get the resolution high enough to be usable for the instrument panel. I'd have to still zoom in for them to be readable. The concept is amazing but I couldn't get reality to match up with it.
It was also weird not being able to see the my throttle and yoke and all the different buttons I needed to use. I didn't have enough hours on the setup to have it all be via muscle memory yet so I needed to be able to look at my cheat sheet sometimes.
The Quest doesn't have the resolution, no. Common headsets for flight sims are the HP G2 Reverb and the Varjo Aero.
Serious simmers will usually havr a high end HOTAS and instrument panel set up too, which will reflect commonalities of real aircraft and be muscle memory.
Flight sims are great in VR. E.g. Varjo XR-3 is part of a virtual reality-based training solution for aviation training. The headset has high enough resolution so that all instruments and their texts are readable.
Plenty of games work at room scale, with foot locomotion in a small area. Beat saber, for example, is great and needs only a few feet of standing area, but there's also a ton of escape room games that work that way.
Don't discount teleportation based locomotion, either. You don't need to walk everywhere, and moving between rooms by fade-out works pretty well.
Yet VR is extremely fun and provides a set of experiences unmatched by traditional gaming. Especially for the Wii/casual crowd. Much like TikTok-hate on HN, it's probably another example of adult nerds who fail to grasp the value in early-adopter zoomer heavy tech (even though adult nerds have plenty to love if they actually spent time investing into trying it, just like TikTok).
> 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.
What's your point? That parents won't want to buy VR for their kids because they want to protect them a different video game interface that will ignore their surroundings slightly more than what they were doing before? If that's what you're saying it only shows you're someone who hasn't actually used VR much.
Anyone who has used VR knows it isn't even a permanent replacement for hardcore day-to-day gaming. That's why I used the Wii/Casual analogy. It's amazing for small spurts of lightweight gaming. Which just happens to be very attractive to kids/young teens (and yes non-gamer adults) who aren't hardcore gamers (Nintendo/mobile shows this is a massive market).
Do you understand the point the parent was making? The children's market is not what VR developers are going for. For one: COPPA kinda makes monetizing VR spaces not possible; two: some parents might let their kids have one, but right on the device it says not to let kids under 12 use it, so I doubt most will. Mainstream consumer adoption is not squeaky voiced pre-teens.
Do you not understand arguments or do you just ignore points you don't like? I am not contending that children don't use it. I am contending that children using it to any extent is not desired by the manufacturers nor does it count as mainstream consumer adoption. Please don't respond again about how kids use it.
So your argument is parental pearl-clutching will kill VR, despite that fueling the early market, because manufacturers don't want kids using it in the first place? Even though the wide adoption among young early-adopters is fueling its initial growth and the potential for tech/price to penetrate beyond niche casual/kid gaming to mainstream markets remains?
No, I told you exactly what my argument was and you refuse to acknowledge it and make up your own instead. I find you frustrating to converse with so I shall exit this conversation.
Also, your 5 minute later post-edits are ridiculous. You add completely new sentences.
Since you don't seem to know the book or care to understand my point, I'll keep this post anyway: You don't mainstream technology via your early adopter market. To succeed you need to mature tech and adapt it to a general market.
So the fact some rarely-enforced children protection laws or hypothetical cultural parenting rules might hurt VR IF the only market was merely kids in the long run is bad, sure. But that's not what I said matters in my original comment.
VR's market in the future isn't casual gaming for kids. My point is that's all it is now. And for that it's doing a great job and has a real lively market to fund the tech. Your fears haven't born true for early adopters (because it's fundamentally a hypothetical mainstream critique), so it doesn't really matter, as long as it's sufficient fuel the tech til it bridges the gap and the tech matures.
(Edit sniping is your problem, my goal isn't to win fast-paced internet arguments but to communicate my points as well as I can)
> (Edit sniping is your problem, my goal isn't to win fast-paced internet arguments but to communicate my points as well as I can)
Then slow down and take a breath before hitting the reply button the first time. Pausing and then rereading and proofing as needed rather than fast-paced posting with fast-paced follow up edits is the way to go. This is coming from someone who also used to very often tweak my posts after initial posting.
Fair enough, I tend to over use edit on HN more than other sites because I never cared to win flame wars, but it does help improve the quality of the replies you get from people, as seen here. So noted.
I think the author of that comment meant that if you have little kids, you need to keep an eye on them, and playing with a headset that blocks your peripheral vision is not going to be something a parent can do in that situation.
That comment didn't mean to say that kids would not play VR. It was suggesting that parents wouldn't.
Again all I'm saying is what matters is that enough kids do in fact play VR, today, to fuel the tech so it can mature into a mainstream technology. The only way this hypothetical (future) parent issue would discredit VR as a mainstream technical innovation is for VR companies to have bet solely on causal/kid gaming for their long term success.
This is why OP missed the point. Because I didn't agree that that was an important point he a) got emotional for being disagreed with b) assumed that I thought it wasn't true. But I only ever said it didn't matter, not that parents or regulations dont have power in this dynamic.
Evidence points to Quest 2 being very popular among kids and their casual gaming platform via Android-esque VR games has provided a strong and sufficient market from which multiple companies can mature the technology to a wider market.
It was a faulty premise to dismiss the technology, because it fundamentally mischaracterizes how technology normally mainstreams (by first having a real and successful initial early adopter market from which you adapt and mature to mainstream markets - not betting on early adopters to BE the mainstream).
Although I will agree I probably should have said "yes you're right" so OP didn't feel I misunderstood. Altough if he wasn't so quick to win an internet "fight" he might have let me explain.
> (Edit sniping is your problem, my goal isn't to win fast-paced internet arguments but to communicate my points as well as I can)
It is a problem for everyone who reads the comment thread. Please either wait to post long enough re-read and edit, or indicate which sentences have been added later. (Edit: the latter is commonly done like this.)
He replied to 2 of my comments <1 min when I made some additions 2-3min after (and I didnt change my arguments just expanded). I'm not on HN to win fast paced arguments. But I do understand that some people are.
In the future I will take this into consideration re: using "Edit:" for people who reply before you even notice.
> The average, casual user isn’t going to do that on a regular basis.
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.
people are expecting and wanting at least AirPod level success here. I can't think of a mainstream product that's direct to consumer that's "niche", perhaps inherently so
I agree with the parent comment, VR is going to be a strictly niche thing. People, as in the vast majority of people, do not like wearing something covering their eyes for long periods of time. I think this is why Meta's big bet on Enterprise VR is going to be a flop.
This doesn't mean VR won't be successful for gaming or highly technical niche things just that getting over the chasm of early adopters/niche to mainstream isn't likely to happen. There are going to be a ton of anecdotes here on HN about how people like it but people here on HN are in the early adopter/gaming niches.
> the vast majority of people, do not like wearing something covering their eyes for long periods of time
I am dubious of this claim given that large numbers of people spend hours staring at their phones every day. They may not be covering their eyes but they are surrendering all of their attention to a tiny rectangle and foregoing a lot of other more worthwhile things.
My hope for VR is that the social experience becomes so compelling that it can break most people out of their addiction to their phones. That's going to be a hard nut to crack but the metaverse will be waiting for them when they finally look up.
No thanks. VR is about the experience, not the content. Its killer app is being together in the same space as other people, not shopping or posting text. More immersion is better so it doesn't matter if you can easily look away from it, ideally you would have a smart passthrough that lets you bring elements of your surroundings into VR so that you can easily pick up a drink or find your couch. Moms won't be using VR as a time sink while they're waiting in the car to pick up the kids, they'll be using it when the kids are in bed so they can go out for drinks and a movie with their friends.
I wonder if high quality pass-through video would improve the issue with covering the eyes.
I've found that even the current pass-through on the Index has made me a lot more comfortable moving around, knowing that if I'm close to knocking something I'll get a low-res view of the real world before I hit it.
Maybe. What I don't get is any sense of what value VR adds for a business.
Imagine a 200 person call center dealing with health insurance claims, questions, etc. They likely have a PC, headset/phone (possibly digital) and a bunch of licenses to software that might cost an average of $1500 per person to have them be functional. It operates in a cost center part of the company, budgets are tight, investments in IT have to have an ROI to make sense. What value is there in a $1500 VR headset per person? How is this going to save that department money?
It won't, they set up the call center so they could get rid of the more expensive in person local offices that used to exist to handle claims and sell insurance. That's not the right business for VR anyways, it's too broadly customer facing whereas VR for business is more B2B or internally focused. Remote workers are a big target for VR. Virtual doctor's visits are another. Remote education. Internal company training for maintenance, emergency or other physical procedures. B2B sales calls. Interviewing. Even tradeshows would be a target with a capable enough network and server setup.
To be honest I haven't thought about the business case for VR much. I enjoy it as a recreational tool.
I do think AR has some amazing potential for business and I suppose VR efforts could work as a stepping stone to getting that right.
Some random thoughts that might work now that I'm thinking about it:
* A social tool for remote companies.
* It might improve remote meetings/whiteboarding.
* I'd probably be more likely to go to a VR trade show than a real life one.
I don't think it's going to take over every enterprise. A laptop is more than enough for a lot of work, VR would probably get in the way.
> To immerse yourself, you need to block out your peripheral vision and everything else.
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.
> Your brain quickly adjusts to the lack of peripheral vision, bad graphics, low contrast, etc
I'm always reminded of this when I revisit a game I remember playing as kid. The graphics and sound _never_ live up to my memory of them. Brains are great at filling in those details.
Viewing VR through the lens of entertainment is a fundamentally flawed approach IMO and the whole industry got this wrong.
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.
But there is Augmented Reality. You could be watching something while the augmented reality tracks your kids on a virtual overlay.
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.
Real killer app will be pack of cards or smaller projector that will turn any shiny surface into an ad hoc HUD.
Gets most of the value of AR without having to wear anything. Like… imagine being able to have a recipe projected right on to the counter top or stove door.
I think it's important that Augmented Reality is implemented by mostly the same tech as Virtual Reality.
I think AR is more useful at least to begin with, it helps us in real reality, not in some virtual reality which requires lots of people to be in the SAME virtual reality as you are to be useful. Whereas everything and everybody around you already is in your augmented reality.
The average user wont do it because there is still physical barriers. The headsets are too heavy still, and outside of the Quest2, they are usually tethered. It’s not a casual experience yet because even putting the headset on is not a casual matter. You have to fuck with the strap to get a nice aligned view, constantly adjust the visor, scratching your nose or adjusting your glasses requires fumbling around.
It’s not as simple as picking up your phone, or … well, it’s not as simple as putting on glasses.
I'd think that's more related to a fact you need pricy gaming PC in addition to pricy headset, all to play select few games
> You have to fuck with the strap to get a nice aligned view, constantly adjust the visor, scratching your nose or adjusting your glasses requires fumbling around.
Other than casual utility cycling (which doesn't require expensive equipment or setup time), people don't do those things casually. Most people don't do them at all, or do them occasionally on a dedicated holiday for doing that. People who are really into them do them a lot, but even those people generally do them on dedicated trips.
VR has a lot of problems, but that’s not one of them. The only thing you’ve proven is that you have yet to use modern VR within the last three years.
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
The intimidation aspect is interesting here. I'm old enough to remember people being intimidated by the big scary computer on the desk. People being weirded out by VR and prophesying that it's just a fad very much so reminds me of the same responses to computers.
I do feel that are we are now in that same era for VR where there is a huge barrier to mass adoption. I believe only Apple can move the industry ahead at this point
If it’s your one hour of exercise a day, you can make it work. But yes, keep young kids away, especially if you’ve learned to punch or slash really hard in your VR shadow boxing or fencing experience.
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.
I've experimented taking a rooted Quest 2 on flights before and have enjoyed it. 6DOF is a bit of a problem, but watching movies and non movement based games are great.
Apart from the flailing limbs and suddenly-rotating head with apparatus. Eliminating those, are we back to just watching a movie? That said, I'd much rather watch a movie on a plane in a VR headset than off of a seat back.
Watching a movie in VR on a flight beats the hell out of the crappy headrest TV. A 2 hour flight turns into a 2 hour experience in a full size movie theatre. The seats are fairly similar so it would probably add to the immersion. With good noise cancelling headphones you might even forget you're on a plane.
I mean, there are other applications for VR that might make sense for spatially limited situation like a flight is. On some planes I couldn't even open my laptop properly. With VR you might have lots of screens.
Accounts of the work suggest ski goggle like size for the first release.
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.
It's ridiculous! Even more so because the underlying patented materials tech has been timing out on the shelf gathering dust for over a decade.
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.
Yeah I agree people will wear headsets outside if it's compelling enough. How many people were being just as dorky with Pokemon Go when that first came out? There was a plague of arms-length-phone-holders in every park for a year.
Apple are apparently working on this area, they've got 2 products coming out. The VR headset (with passthorugh) likely this year, and an AR set of glasses (with options for prescription lenses) which will do the whole projecting into your field of vision thing.
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.
Other than fashion, what possibly positive function could such a device afford?
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.
The point is that if it is reasonable or maybe even worthwhile to wear when off, then it can support all-day wear (not all day use) given power constraints, which makes it a lifestyle product not a gadget, like a watch. Put it on when you leave in the morning, take it off and put it on the charger at night.
I think it will flip up. They will do what you said but they can only do that for a few hours a day before the battery dies, and worse, if the battery dies, you can’t see anything anymore. So they need a mechanism that lets you keep wearing it when it’s dead. If you have to take it off when the battery is dead, it will end up in the closet next to your other headsets.
I’m guessing they will have a design that is fashionable and comfortable to wear when flipped up and off.
> they will use external facing screens that recreate the appearance of the wearers face
Honestly that sounds horrifying and straight out of some Black Mirror episode. Possibly it comes with an app that makes your external face smile and covers up the bags under your eyes?
Even worse is their vision of people playing complete idiots in public places --yeah, I'm just gonna do virtual fencing in the middle of a crowded street and make myself vulnerable to assailants. The park, yes, that works but a busy street, are they just out of touch with reality?
“Enterprise” product: why spend the resources making something people _want_ to use when you can instead focus on just getting one person (who doesn’t use it) to buy it, then force it on an entire organisation of users.
That's an oversimplification. Plenty of enterprise tech products are a drastic improvement over what the orgs were doing before (usually no tech).
The problem is the products themselves are usually garbage due to the bureaucratic/"management" driven sales process that adopts the tech, where product development is driven by saying "yes" to every customer's demands.
The good consumer products figure out what people want for a demographic by listening to them (or being them) - but not actually letting them design the software itself by doing everything they ask. Yet there's still plenty of low-quality enterprise software which is miles better than previous 'processes'.
Like people walking into you while looking on their phone, which, somewhere like central London, happens 1000x per day? That used to be frowned upon and before that (90s) it was straight-up weird. At least with AR you can see where you are going. It's just weird how little peripheral vision people have and yet stare down at their phone while walking.
Or like people filming me (which is luckily not allowed where I am) without consent? Talking about nuisance.
No one wanted to wear glasses when they first came out, or use umbrellas or ride bikes. Everything is embarrassing at first until it becomes normalized.
I have not, used them for maybe 5hours in total, after one hour it is freakin inconvenient to have them on a nose. Lack of ipd adjustment makes it one eye to have part of the screen always blurred and last one is dumb lack of spec that would allow for full Linux support.
Honestly, I've seen less compelling AR applications than I've seen VR ones. Between Windows Mixed Reality, Pokemon Go and the AR Lowe's app, there's not really a whole lot of compelling AR use-cases. VR at least has an entertainment niche, which gave us the likes of Beat Saber, Half Life: Alyx and an IMAX experience in the comfort of your sofa. Neither one seems poised to succeed IMO, but the push for AR adoption seems to be a top-down decision, not one driven by profound demand.
AR has some very compelling use cases in medicine and manufacturing. There is also the idea of using AR instead of a physical monitor that may lead to drastic adoption. While the Hololens 2 is expensive, FOV limited, and clunky, the user experience is absolutely incredible. They are the only good smart-glasses like experience I know of right now. They show you what a world is like when the smartphone escapes the little box we carry around.
The hard part of AR is the shared experience part. It's close to creating a cross-platform MMO game.
I'll keep saying this until it happens...the biggest AR use case, for me, is replacing the television. The fact that we all have giant boxes as the centerpiece of our main rooms is something unnatural that we take for granted. I'm not sure how far AR devices that allows for social viewing of television content are away, but I feel in my bones that it will happen and when it does children of that generation will be confused as to what a television was and why it was needed.
That's a fair point, but I struggle to see how we haven't already reached that point with smartphones. Most people today already have a portable screen they can comfortably stow on-person, it feels like a hard sell to get them to ditch their TV and smartphone for a situationally useful headset. Doubly so if every participant needs a discrete headset.
While I enjoyed watching movies in VR, it's just more comfortable to lay down on the couch and watch a movie without a headset on.
You have to hold a smartphone. The great thing about TV is that it is on in the background and you can do other things while you (don't) watch it. Picture a cooking show while you cook or cspan while you work on your hobby or some TV show you kind of care enough about to talk over with your friends but don't care enough about to devote all of your attention to...
Right. Say I prop my iPhone up against my rolling pin and put on Orange is the New Black, though - is that not the same effect? I don't think people will pay boucoup bucks to project a picture-in-picture display over their face.
I'd want it if I could "pin" the the video to a physical space on demand, allowing me to move the video around a room and control its dimensions. Especially if it could stream the content of the videos from a beefy home pc. That would allow me to get rid of all the screens around my apartment with digital version while controlling all of them from the same source.
VR is a different beast and much less comfortable than I envision the (medium to long term) future of AR to look like. I don't love watching movies/TV in VR right now, if only because I find the headset makes my head overheat.
A TV is like a piece of furniture, or a decoration like a painting. As compelling as it is, you can choose to ignore it, make eye contact with and talk to someone else in the room wether the TV is on or not. It's casual.
I imagine too what an outrageously high pixel count a VR set would have to have to render a virtual TV with the same resolution as a real one.
And even aside from the above, I really can't see myself putting something on my face and dropping out of my environ for anything more than about 5 or 10 minutes. It's just weird.
> I imagine too what an outrageously high pixel count a VR set would have to have to render a virtual TV with the same resolution as a real one.
Yup. It might take decades to get there, but I think we'll get there.
> And even aside from the above, I really can't see myself putting something on my face and dropping out of my environ for anything more than about 5 or 10 minutes. It's just weird.
I'm envisioning the equivalent of a pair of spectacles. People wear spectacles all day every day without _too_ much issue.
> I'll keep saying this until it happens...the biggest AR use case, for me, is replacing the television
Personally I think they'll be replacements for mobile phones. This will only happen if the devices start to become indistinguishable from a normal pair of glasses and allow for prescriptions as well.
Audio will either be through bone conduction or small speakers like how Bose's Audio Glasses [1] do it now (I have a pair of these actually, got them for free at a developer hackathon they hosted once a few years ago, never use them mainly because I don't wear contacts and need prescriptions)
Ideally it could even pick up subvocalization to be able to compose messages in quiet situations without rudely having to speak out loud, if you're the type that cares about that (I certainly do)
We might still need some small handheld device paired with it, maybe it has a simple keyboard on it or maybe just a number pad that also serves as 4-directional buttons for traversing menus and things in your view"
Yeah I’m not putting VR googles on my children. That in and of itself makes it a non-starter.
What you describe sounds like a single person experience which is fine but watching a show or a movie can also be a social experience and very often is exactly this. Seeing other people’s reactions and sharing space is a huge part of it. You can’t do that in VR.
AR, not VR. To clarify - and I should have said this in my original post - I'm envisioning the equivalent of a pair of spectacles, not a huge headset, with the knowledge that it's probably many years off...
I'm somewhat skeptical though I'm sure I'll be proven wrong.
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
example: in the video an actor is sitting in a chair, youre in a room with no chairs. What does it show?
example: theyre in an open 20x20 foot room, no furniture, your in a 10x10 foot room on your bed. When they walk across their room you'd seen them first walk througb your bed and then walk through your wall
> If I’m in a room with no chairs, there would be no chairs unless one is added visually.
> They wouldn’t walk through my bed because they aren’t in my room.
If you're sitting on your bed with your AR googles there is a bed in your room. If they are standing in their room they'll be standing or sitting through your bed. They have no concept of where your bed is because your bed doesn't exist in their room.
Tons of AR demos try to show this feature. Tons of companies are working on it. Most believe it's a mass market feature.
But it's unlikely to work because each person's surroundings don't match every other persons. One's at a desk, One's at a cafe, One's in their bed, One's on their soft. They aren't each positioned in a way they can all appear in each others AR.
Maybe this will make it clearer. Imagine you're on your bed laying down. You want to AR video conference with your friend. They're in the bathroom. Where does their AR project your body? Your body is laying down. There's no place to project your body in the bathroom that fits you lying down.
Right. I kind of think we are talking past each other.
The scenario you’re imagining won’t be an issue because I don’t think AR will allow my “AR presence” to go anywhere that my body is not. AR is about augmented my experience of the reality my body is experiencing, not experiencing ‘realities’ in other locations.
To whatever extent that intentional restriction breaks down, we will have to accept that non-bodily presences cannot fully understand and interact with the environment (and will likely engage with animations to do so).
For your specific bedroom/bathroom scenario, I would choose simple talking heads (floating in space) akin to current expectations for a video chat. There wouldn’t be an attempt to match the speakers to each others environment by default, but if you wanted to do so, yes - one of the speakers would probably need to match their body position such that it can match the environment on the receivers end (so the person laying down would need to stand).
Generically, I think AR will be restricted to the local environment of my body, and anything related to my digital presence traveling to a location different than where my body is found will operate under VR rules (which will be understood as a distinct set of rules/affordances/expectation than AR). We will avoid many problems by not mixing the paradigms.
I think augmented reality is hard. Practically speaking VR only needs to create an image, while AR needs to create and register an image in space and time.
As someone whose built stuff for both, I agree. With VR I can test things out on my computer and be reasonably sure that, say, the things I see in the Unity Editor will be the things I’ll see later in my headset.
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.
If Pokemon GO had this during its hay-day the dork factor would have been socially acceptable.
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.
I get where you're coming from, but I think we all forget how much we looked like dorks out playing pokemon go. The difference was we were dorks in large groups. If you and a friend are doing this together, you're no longer a dork. You're going your own way.
This is where I think Glass got it wrong. They made it feel exclusive when they should've been giving them away.
Pokemon Go players don't look like normal people looking at their phones. They look weird, all grouped up ignoring each other.I happened upon some sort of event that attracted like 30 of them and it was unsettling - some people had 2 phones and it was silent except the sound of tapping.
After watching the HoloKit press, though, I should be thankful for silent and grouped up as opposed to running around in a crowded area being an annoying jackass.
When I worked in San Jose every workday morning I waited at the bus stop with other employees (generally no one I knew however) waiting for the Corporate Bus to arrive. Invariably everyone was engaged with their phones except me. I guess I'm old — I haven't found anything interesting on my phone to look at when I just want to pass the time.
I guess I mention this because I suspect that without phones, we might have chatted with one another, got to know one another while we waited for the bus to arrive.
> without phones, we might have chatted with one another, got to know one another while we waited
If I'm an employee on a company bus, I'm just as likely to be a (mostly) silent meeting attendee on a status meeting as listening to an audiobook or podcast. Sometimes I've done this and just communicated via meeting chat to give feedback/add to meeting discussion.
Without phones, I'd probably be WFH so I could attend the meeting.
This is not the form factor that will change the paradigm. The smartphone was. I agree with you that if you had your face slammed against a Gameboy as an adult in the 90s, people would have judged you. That changed real fast, but it had to be the right product/form.
Whoever gets the AR glasses that look like glasses out first wins the game.
I can see the killer app being something practical, like being able to look at a recipe and watch a video for food prep while I’m doing food prep. Or being able to look at an engine bay and diagnose am issue and see parts identified as I look and point at them.
I was thinking about that too. Imagine having image recognition within the headset or glasses which can draw boxes around items and match them against a global database. One could be walking around and see something interesting, then press a button or say a phrase to query it for information right in your glasses.
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.
The captions idea sounds really useful. I've used live captions during Google Meet calls and having a ~1 second visible history of live conversation is indeed really helpful for conversation flow. Having that in real life conversations would really be something.
In fall 1999 the wife of one of my co-workers call me and 4 other co-workers all dorks because we were using cell phones. Now I'm sure she's more addicted to her's than her husband.
I find this product fascinating. The design looks ugly, but I can see how they got there. Mixing the real world and iPhone display in the way they are is super interesting. As is the decision to leave the edge of iPhone for touch input. Also interesting to see them leveraging Apple technologies so heavily. I can't really see this gaining any real market, but I like some of these design choices.
Agreed. Looks like they're using a half silvered mirror for the real world pass-through which was a technique used by early arcade games like Space Invaders that projected black and white graphics over a painted background.
HoloKit, originally a Google Cardboard-like AR device for the iPhone, has been relaunched as a more premium $150 iPhone accessory. Unfortunately no SDK available anymore (for now at least).
> HoloKit, originally a Google Cardboard-like AR device for the iPhone, has been relaunched
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)...
It looks exactly like those under $20 VR kits for phones. My guess is that the added value is in the app if it can overlay VR on top of the realtime video from iPhone cameras.
No, it's quite different from those, and it's not overlaying VR on top of camera video. You're looking at the real world through a diagonal window, and the phone screen is reflecting off that same window so you see it overlaid on your direct view of the world.
Looking at tech specs there is no touch controls. Input is either by using CV hand tracking or sending motion controls from an Apple Watch. Basically they are using Apples SDK for everything.
I bought one and regretted it as there is a strict no return policy. My purpose was possibly using it for AR development but I found the experience not much better than Google Day Dream, as far as I can remember, and possibly worse because the hard plastic molding made it harder to position your phone. Also I missed the Daydream remote.
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.
I saw a bunch of these types of things at a Japanese gadget show in 2018. One interesting idea that one had colored rings to wear. The colors made it easier to do finger motion tracking.
I predict the first successful AR product for mass market consumers will be simple glasses that block real world ads with basic rectangles or pixelation.
Your own personalized moments in time play back at Times Square. Or subtlety getting me to learn Spanish by injecting it on things… actually hang on while I parent that last one.
This is doing all the right things and I think I'll get one, though I think their product videos are doing a disservice showing people playing in crowded areas. Show people playing in parks surrounded by people bored on picnic blankets. If it's in a crowded area, show assisted navigation.
We'll know they're onto something if people are messing with these in Dolores Park when the weather turns nice in April.
Is this kind of plastic phone holder always the first step for something breaks into the market? VR had that everywhere after the Oculus Rift dev came out and things were hyped up; I picked some up at the airport because there were huge stacks of them next to the cash register. It was very fiddly to get your phone in without pressing all buttons and messing it up so you had to take it out because you cannot configure it while in the holder.
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?
Does this have an embedded microphone for audio input? I quickly skimmed the tech specs and it looks like the answer is "no" (presumably if you want that, the intention is that you use AirPods/some other Bluetooth input device).
I wouldn't be surprised if it just fell back to the iPhone itself when you didn't have AirPods. It'd be a pretty crap audio experience (both input and output) in comparison though.
It's difficult to gauge from the photos but I was thinking that the phone is seated too far from the mouth for reliable audio input (it certainly feels like I have to raise my voice, if not shout, whenever I'm talking to someone with the phone that far away from me).
Very interested in this. Tho I feel a bit sad as I had an idea for this precise product years ago and built some crappy cardboard prototypes but never quite got it far enough along to make anything of it. Understanding optics was something I got stuck on. The "damn, that could've been me if I'd worked harder" feeling stings.
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.
We originally launched the Mira Prism in this market in 2017 before pivoting to enterprise. https://www.mirareality.com/
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.
Worth remembering that both Google Glass and Microsoft Hololens found a very niche market on training and technical assistance on industrial machines maintenance.
It feels like AR hasn't really gotten much more advanced in the past decade. This looks like a HoloLens demo from 7 years ago. Feels like the whole space has stagnated. I know Apple plans to release something soon, but will it really be a big leap? I'm not so sure. Obviously, the M chips will help it, but it still has some fundamental flaws as an idea. Though I find it more exciting than VR.
one interesting 'hack' that could be done with an AR headset's output would be its ability to project onto a film which is on the inside of a windscreen, and interacting with the OBD (or whatever the EVs have) and giving a HUD of the available data it received.
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...)
Really interesting setup. Can see quite a few industry-specific applications for this in my area where we'd consider Google Glass but is simply too closed down / too expensive at the moment.
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.
I feel for the poor souls who were accidentally captured on the recordings - they don't look too pleased. I do worry that one of my kids is going to get trampled by an adult who can't see because he's too busy slaying a dragon. We have already had a lot of near misses with people on e-scooters!
Not a very original or clever form factor. At least design it more like the Mira Prism (https://www.mirareality.com/) where the phone position is closer to your head and have a large open FOV. I get that they want to expose the phones back camera for tracking - but use some fancy mirrors or something?
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.
it seems they really wanted for iphone to think that it in the correct position, like if it was in the user hand. Otherwise placing phone horizontally, flipping image and using some kind of periscope for the camera would make a more compact and much less "dorky" looking device.
Is it supposed to run existing iphone AR apps too?
> seems they really wanted for iphone to think that it in the correct position
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.
Existing AR apps lack stereoscopic support and lack interaction model needed for this. But wouldn't be hard to add support for this. Basically just a presentation and UI level change.
You are probably not the target audience if that confuses you. Modern "zoomer" design takes a lot of inspiration from geocities and the webdesign that was popular before they were born.
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.