this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Why do you think it’s neither a good AR nor a good VR device? Have you tried it, what advantages have they sacrificed specifically? Pretty much everyone who got their hands on one to try them out was pretty blown away by the product itself. At this point the price is the main inhibitor, obviously.
AR you are meant to walk around, the tech comes from the wearable computing industry and its primary usecase has been industry and manufacturing with a secondary usecase for design. One of the key parts of augmenting reality is the ability to interact with that reality. Those soft bumpers that let it become so dark and VR like will kill your vision making it not possible to safely walk very far in them (stay in your home!)
For VR, one of the BIG use cases everyone harps about is telepresence. this won't work as they hope as AR systems have sensors mounted on your head, the sensors can only see some of your body and wont be able to track your movements in detail. This will become a bigger issue with VR games where if they require good motion detection you are back to spending an extra 1k USD on motion sensors to place around your room.
functionally the use cases for AR im seeing advertised are novelty at best, Im not seeing a use case to keep goggles on my head so i can have 4x 720-1080p windows floating in front of me when I can, for the same price, have 4x 4k monitors. Im sure they will develop software more suited to the use, though the AR applications are going to be limited in scope due to being stuck in movement.
finally size is still a problem, both the hololense and the avp are large, heavy and cumbersome, even with the newer sleek desgins. This is a market segment waiting to get trashed by simple projectors and the same motion sensors used for VR. Kinects problem was cost and usability, motion detection was actually fixed prior to the production going under and laser projection tooling just gets more impressive every year.
I don't expect giant goggles to become vogue.
I mean yeah these are decent points and you may be right but as far as I can tell you have not tried them out and are just best guessing. Those guesses may be good no doubt but they are no more to me than Apple telling me it’s gonna be great. If anything Apple has a track record here.
They have clearly shown that you’re meant to walk around in these, albeit it inside a large living room (which shouldn’t be an issue if you’re dropping $4k on this). The displays are supposed to be second to none and do not sound like you’ll get measly 720p windows.
You’re definitely right that these glasses won’t go vogue, but they are the first of their kind in a new product line, for Apple anyway. I’d be surprised if we don’t see them shrinking in the same manner that everything else has been shrunk. This one is for the devs and tech enthusiast.
I will certainly give them a try and the ceremonial pass (not because apple, I also don't own a hololense as I no longer need it). I understand I am not your usual pundit in this kind of conversation, I was developing wearable computer technology for the power industry in the late 90s and followed VR/AR since I fantasized about it as a kid in that crappy VR5 tv show. I love the concept of what is possible, I have always wanted the reality to be as amazing as what people hope.
It's not that it won't get there, its that, as usual, wide use VR/AR tech is still a lot further down the line than envisioned and honestly, I just don't think people will be putting it on thier faces unless its MUCH smaller.
My thoughts on projection tech are fully conjecture though the speed of which holographic innovation is going, I almost expect that to hit first. Really, NOT having to put something on I think is such a boon that you could have lower resolution and other defects and still be usable as long as it was responsive. If something workable comes out that has a real use case I's expect it to fly if general enough.