From using various VR systems, a hololens, and reading reviews of the vision pro I really feel like hand gestures are a bad way to interact with AR systems. They might work in a pinch (heh) but some sort of small controller that can act as a pointer and has a button or two is superior in every way.
It's interesting that meta went through the effort of bundling an accessory but stuck with hand gestures anyway.
6dof input from hand gestures is a killer feature but it has to be rock solid. So far only controllers can do it but it's getting much better every year.
Haptic feedback, discrete buttons and precise analog input from controllers are also very important. The downside of controllers is that your hands are full and it's just not feasible for an all day wearable.
Hopefully someone figures out a good compromise be it rings or gloves or whatever.
I agree, and I also think that walking around to items positioned statically in space is a really dumb way to do embodied computing. I mean if an app is associated with your kitchen fridge or whatever fine, pin it to your kitchen fridge, but if I'm going to be enveloped in an omnidirectional high def display, I want a way to bring the windows to me, not have to move my body to different windows.
Anyway, Logitech made an awesome little handheld keyboard for home theater PCs, called DiNovo Mini HTPC, I was able to pair it with Vision Pro.
Imho hand gestures are the best way to interact with XR.
If your only experience is the HoloLens, you’re roughly a decade out of date with how well it can work today.
There’s also not been much until the Vision Pro that combines eye tracking with hand tracking which is what’s really needed.
You should really try the Vision Pro, because it really does move hand tracking to the point where it’s the best primary interaction method. Controllers might be good for some stuff , in the way an Apple Pencil is, but most interactions do not need it.
Traditional personal computers have both a keyboard and a mouse / trackpad. Game controllers have both joysticks and buttons.
While analog manipulation devices (mice, trackpads, joysticks, the 3D controllers) are good at physically precise manipulation and navigation, keys and buttons are good at symbolic / textual entry and logical / symbolic navigation with comparatively very low effort and high speed.
When VR / AR acquires a fast and low-effort symbolic input mode, comparable in efficiency to a keyboard, and it becomes possible to build highly productive interfaces driven by it, like Vim and MS Excel are driven by the keyboard, many interesting developments will happen.
Kind of a pointless comment to make if you haven't actually tried the Vision Pro.
Its interface is unlike anything else and really can only be experienced in person. The ability to simply glance at UI controls and slightly move your head whilst resting on your leg really does feel like magic.
And the UI is built around it so if you are looking for example at a sidebar it will lock you into choosing the options unless you substantially look away. This makes using it much easier and faster than a controller.
while I agree, you also just don't have a choice as otherwise you force the user to carry a controller with them all the time (and even then the experience sucks because you have to take out/reach for your controller every time you want to usei t)
It depends why you think hand gestures are bad. The wrist babd is detecting brain waves and allows for hand gestures while the hands are out of the field of view of the cameras.
The EMG wrist band is the most exciting part of this release, IMO. That strikes me as a great solve that pushes into software a lot of hard problems that were solved with hardware previously.
The Vision Pro uses optical sensors for hand tracking, so if your hands aren't visible to the device it obviously can't track them. Electromyography solves that problem, and I could imagine Apple integrating some variant of this in a future Apple Watch, and just falling back to optical sensors if you don't own one.
> The company that looks most poised to capitalize on a product like this is still Apple.
It's also possible they don't ever put out an offering in this form factor. They never released a dual screen phone. They never released a touchscreen laptop. This might be one of those things they just don't touch.
Also, I wonder if they'll have a tough time filling the form factor with stuff to do. The lack of apps was a huge reason the APV flopped, while Meta has a large headstart in making it possible for devs to build for their device, even those without exp in spatial dev / game dev / etc.
The 100 degree field of view in the AVP is noticeable because it is a VR headsets. Most VR headsets like the Meta Quest 3 have greater field of view than the AVP, which is why the 100 degree is so noticeable.
Is that true? Last time I was reading about holographic lenses, it was a flat white laser backlight fed into a waveguide (the hologram part), and filtered through an LCD. An actual LED projector would have darker darks, but I would much rather have a higher resolution..
It's definitely helpful to hear about the waveguide production problems. Obviously, that's going to be the greatest hurdle; after all, they are manufacturing a completely unique object with very small feature sizes.
Huge kudos to Meta for breaking new ground and doing a ton of R&D/M&A to get to this point. Once MicroLED comes on a little further and the form factor shrinks this could be the next consumer electronics platform.
Silicon carbide is really interesting, we need high RI materials to make this work.
Hopefully glass 3D printing or similar will make cheap, Rx waveguides possible.
It is helpful for becoming negative to negative companies where they deserve it.
IG Farben had great technology (for that time) but needed change of name and half of century of good service so they have been removed from our memory as producers of Cyclone B. Now they are known as Bayer. And my neighbor (concentration camp survivor), while he was alive, wasn't buying Bayer products and he was quite vocal about it. Any of them, regardless of technology, different people, different products,... Guess why. Will you say he was negative?
Thats why FB was renamed and I am eagerly waiting what they will be like after 50 years. Until then, they will not be anywhere near my devices and even less filtering my sight.
For me personally they build a lot of trust back with their work on llama. Also they do have capable software engineers. But hardware is a different thing. I am still burned by their handling of hardware support for Oculus devices. To such a degree that neither VR nor AR is of significant interest anymore, never mind developing software for such products.
That said, I was never a Facebook user. I do have an account and that is that, which I tend to not use in most browser session because of Facebook surveillance.
facebook has not been negative, they notably refused to play ball with the antipoaching agreements with other big tech companies in the bay, and technical people such as myself greatly respect them for it
Was just going to write that there is no way people trust META to become their eyes. Maybe some smaller player. We already greatly distrust f*n mobiles which eavesdrop on everyone's conversation. Considering recent cyberpunk breach I actually expect more people to try to distance themselves from this all. It will probably be top product for telemedicine and teletutoring one day, but it will never be safe in the hands of Meta, no matter how many lammas they put in the loose...
Think about it - sometimes it is much more about trust than technology. Yeah, I know all your chats go back and forth commercial GPTs, but you know half of my GPT interraction is already local inference based and it does similar job, and is OK. So that much about wanting to let s.o. see your naked friends. Their days are numbered and if you see how IT history unfolded - there is always rush to the cloud and away from the mainframe. Its like the breathwork in criya yoga, happens simultaneously in a sense.
From the funny side of things - such wearables open perspective to lot of people talking to themselves being O.k. in society. Perhaps we could only agree to have such visual interface when things get closer to what guys have in Cyberpunk 2077. Honestly I really hope someone developes a genetic enhancement or all children born 2000 suddently become enlightened enough to master telepathy.
I'm much more fascinated by the propspect of personal electronics, and how cheap they have become. I don't want Meta in them for sure, and nobody apt-get installs gcloud or fb as his must have tool.
And they'll likely drop support/updates for it quickly after release... These out of pocket devices are sunsetted faster than mobile phones, especially so because they require completely independent development teams that companies love to roll essential staff off of.
There have been so many attempts to make VR glasses that it's really not innovation at this point, it's just gimmicky throw-away pocket tech. Something far better to invent is a phone that can project on walls, or project a full-size keyboard onto a table for an easier writing experience.
Most of these companies are gutted by investors, and turned into profit machines... There are very few visionaries leading projects now, and huge hurdles with IP theft and related lawsuits that hold up most of the typical innovation, unless these companies come up with game changing ideas that focus less on pushing out ads, they're going to fail with micro-projects like this. VR glasses have been around for ages, none of what Zuckerberg demoed was revolutionary, gotta be honest about it.
I used to work with psychology researchers conducting experiments with wearable cameras. Anything involving human subjects needed IRB approval, informed consent, ethics review, etc.
But with essentially any piece of tech you use (not just FB), you check "I agree" on a document you'll never read and give the same data to a private company who will use it however they want. And they charge you for it.
Imagine if I told you a research organization decided to throw out all their ethics and start charging their research subjects to be experimented on, and that this was actually a really solid business model.
The technology they've packed into these things is amazing - it's an incredible achievement.
But, that said, there's also plenty of room for negativity around the actual product conception. It may have niche applications, but it just doesn't seem that most people need or want AR for everyday use - it's a solution looking for a problem. For gaming VR seems a better fit than AR, and same for Metaverse in general.
AR seems a bit like Segway two-wheelers - cool and fun, but with limited actual use. I could see AR glasses being used in the same way as Segway's end of life use for tourist city tours, or for other similar rent-to-use entertainment experiences.
The sad thing is that there are a lot of things AR glasses could be useful for in my everyday life, but it all assumes that those glasses are working for me and me alone. I'd never use a product that was going to spy on everything I see and do. I'd never use a product that would fill my vision with ads either.
Sort of the whole point of this style of waveguide optics is that the screen is not pressed up against your eyeballs. It's projected out 3-6 feet in front of you (and ideally, anchored to the real world in some way).
I think the main question will be if Meta can run the glasses under a different business model than ads/personalization. I know Meta feels like they missed out on owning the hardware ecosystem with mobile, but a big part of why Apple's product work is because their business model is not ads.
If they can fix their incentives there it will address 80% of the concerns in this thread.
Counterintuitively I think a passive screen affixed to your face will reduce your reliance on all other screens. Glasses aren't a great form factor for scrolling feeds, but they are much better at connecting you to your physical world (which phones are the worst at). That plus just the posture improvements [1] that glasses can provide over the phone may make this a winner.
I think the hardware and idea is great. But I simply can't ignore the fact that it is made by Facebook, which is basically the posterchild for modern addiction optimizer adtech business.
The last company I'd want to put right in front of my eyeballs for any extended periods of time is Facebook.
This is the only comment on here about fb that makes sense. Meta is fully capable and willing to make products that protect user privacy, and they have in the form of WhatsApp and others. But what they definitely aren’t capable of is building things you aren’t addicted to use in order to generate them revenue constantly.
Maybe as they transition to hardware they’ll spend more time making their products worthy of chronic upgrades rather than chronic addictive usage.
Agreed. I was commenting [1] on how this could be one of the posts where HN is totally wrong about looking back 10 years from now, similar to the Dropbox post.
To be fair, that post wasn't wrong. To this day I still carry a USB thumb drive, most people I know have/use them, and they're still selling very well. Linux users are still fully capable of moving files around themselves.
The problem with waveguides are the manufacturing defects are on the micron level, and you need to get those channels perfect - then produce the same pattern a few more times for other colors, and hope they all perfectly line up.
I don’t see 3D printing being a solution here for a very very long time
I agree, though it's hard not to be negative. My first thought after "oh cool" was "how long until this thing languishes and gets discontinued?" The recent history of AR devices doesn't exactly do Meta a service.
I agree, just because you don’t like a company or you don’t have a use for the device doesn’t mean that it can’t be a good step forward for tech in general, and for those who will find a use for it.
I wish I didn't have to be so negative because these are cool, but it's Facebook. Surveillance and ad tech that cause brain rot are what they do for a living. At this point they could just sell versions of these products that aren't subsidized by evil, and they still choose not to do so. This means no matter how much they talk about the future of AI being open, no matter how nice their AR glasses are, I can't do business with them. Everything facebook does is burdened by being facebook and I for one am glad at least one demographic won't let them forget it.
IMO it is ironic the EU has forced Meta to take leadership in educating the public on the significance of "privacy," but not in the way the EU wanted. "Privacy" means two different things: (1) censoring sensitive personal life info from the public, versus (2) limiting government power. Who will invent the words to distinguish the two, I don't know, but it will turn "privacy ethos" into "X ethos" and "Y ethos," and Apple will sort it all out.
Some people have morals and ethics and believe that its not okay to just do what facebook does without taking responsibility.
You build a platform which allows you to share fake news and pay to win shit to billions? You make sure the algorithm makes you as much money as possible?
You know who made sure facebook fixes this? Politics, not suckerburg.
This would be like Telsa coming with new tech. Tesla / X-Twitter & Facebook / Meta are companies I will never financially support. They make money off propagating misinformation and their CEOs are not decent human-beings.
I mean, sure, I get that. But also, are any big tech CEOs decent human beings? It's hard to participate in tech at all with that strict of a moral code.
I met a lady once, we were in a line at DefCon. She worked on these and was quite concerned that they'd end up on the heads of children, feeding content-reaction biometrics about those children to people who would then use that data to manipulate those children in harmful ways.
I'm curious if people think that that's worth worrying about, or if the idea of optimizing ad placement based on whether it makes your pupils respond in the desired way is the kind of thing that's only effective in sci-fi.
Nick Clegg (public affairs guy at FB) is currently lobbying to get VR headsets on schoolchildren. I can't think of anything I want less than my kids wearing those things while in class all day.
It’s really interesting how much eye tracking can glean. I’d be curious to test some of those algorithms on myself and see what it said; do you know if there’s any open source stuff that lets you play with it?
Cocomelon are already focus group testing their addictive hypnotic kids videos. They don't need millions of kids to develop this crack for kids, just a dozen or so.
Speaking of which, I just recently blocked Cocomelon on my kid’s iPad. How insane is it that a company is purposefully putting out crack in video form targeted explicitly at toddlers!?
Brought to you by the same people that thought cigarette candy was a brilliant idea.
Am I worried about a a mega-corp programming all the nations children? Yes!
But lets not forget that programming of children already exists. TV, social media and ... parents and grandparents and teachers.
The raw technology adds nothing. The software implanted we certainly need to think about.
I don’t think ad placement for children should be the primary concern.
Unless I’m misunderstanding the current state of the technology, it’s possible today with a little effort to put my biometrics in a feedback loop with (say) GPT-4o, and use those measurements to rapidly produce and refine an increasingly horrifying series of images, personalized to my lizard brain reactions.
That’s gross, but the same technique could be applied more subtly. Imagine the worst things people suspect about TikTok’s algorithm, but with biometric feedback on its individual effectiveness.
Pushing ads at children is a major concern because children have zero defenses against the kind of sophisticated manipulation advertisers use against them.
More than just ads though, collecting data on children is dangerous as well. We really don't need corporations starting a dossier on children and placing them into buckets at such an early age. It's bad enough we hand school children chromebooks so that Google can track their test scores, growth, and intelligence
Maybe it could actually be used for the inverse - automatically overlay any ads in your field of view with pictures of kittens, or something like that.
As cool as these are I’m not sure a lot of adults (at least in Denmark) is going to put these things on children. Facebook isn’t exactly a popular brand these days, and even though Instagram made it rather big with kids from the previous ages I think the next generations will be less likely to get on the Meta platforms. In part because what you’re asking about here has been revealed as something Facebook does.
It’s all based on anecdotal knowledge, but at least in my little bubble of the world nobody wants their children on Meta if they can help it. Which is a little bit hypocritical considering a lot of the same people don’t mind using Google, OpenAI, Microsoft products and so on. For some reason Facebook has taken the brunt of the dislike and I think a lot of my colleagues might actually feel better about their children being on TikTok than any sort of Meta product.
Not that you can really avoid being included on the Meta platform if these things start filming you in public.
> my colleagues might actually feel better about their children being on TikTok than any sort of Meta product
As a former scrolling addict, I can attest that Instagram is by far worse for mental health than Tik Tok. It's about the algorithms.
If you show Tik Tok that you like certain niche content it will learn that and only show you it, when it tries to show you something else that you don't prefer (once every 100 videos in my case) if you show disinterest it won't show more of it.
With Instagram, what you prefer (e.g. mindful content) is secondary to bombarding you with content that triggers endless scroll behaviour. I've tried training it to not do that by clicking the explicit "not interested" button, on dozens of videos at a time, multiple sessions, but it just wouldn't work. At times it seemed like it is finally learning what i prefer, and then next day mindless memes are again 90% of the feed. In contrast, Tik Tok required a tiny fraction of explicit training that I prrformed on Insta, and on Tik Tok it was very effective.
I can say with absolute certainty that Instagram is very detrimental to my health (hence I don't use it), and suprisingly Tik Tok is actually pretty great.
My usual Tik Tok session now looks like this: I launch it, get a video that's really relevant to me, and for every video that I watch there's about 30% chance that I'll close the app because I'm either thinking about what I learned or researching it. My endless scroll behaviour is never triggered. And I don't usually use Tik Tok more than 2 times a week. This isn't because of willpower, it's because I genuinely value the content it's providing me and I need time to digest it. Watching more often would be like wasting it. This has been going on for about 6 months now.
Disclaimer: I wouldn't be suprised if I'm in some a/b testing program within Tik Tok, and it might be using a variant algorithm. I don't have evidence, but I know that for a time my UI was a little different than others' (e.g. no favorite functionality).
Problem is not children having access to it. It is more parents outsourcing parenting to YouTube/TikTok or Meta. If parents still take responsibility on how much and where the child spends their time, it is no different than any other tech gadget. People are concerned about new tech since the time of Guttenberg.
I think that's a realistic scenario. They will certainly attempt to use the data accessible by XR devices to make ads more effective. Actually succeeding at doing so seems realistic to me, too.
Whether the legislature has notably limited data collection for ad purposes by then - probably not.
If it’s Facebook for sure. I’m still waiting to see if Microsoft has actually changed or is just doing a very long PR stunt. A lot of Balmer execs are still there. Putting a new head on the fish doesn’t necessarily prevent the rot.
we need protections for children. An argument can be made that adults are responsible for their data, perhaps protections here are also needed, but children can't be held responsible. I would not want my children's data being harvested for some multimodal model; these days even toothbrushes are iot devices. Where will the data harvesting begin to end?
I've long been a huge skeptic of the whole Metaverse project/undertaking, I think I've called it a smoking crater where ten billion dollars used to be.
But this is really interesting: it sounds like the display works, and it sounds like the puck is workable, and it sounds like both can squeak above the line in terms of battery life. If those things are true I may turn out to have been completely wrong.
I don't know the first thing about silicon carbide display substrate thingy yields, so I can't remark on whether or not that's a "scale will make cost acceptable", but I bet some mega geniuses at Meta think so or they probably wouldn't be showing this much.
If it turns out that I was dead wrong on this I'll be glad I was, it would be really cool if it works.
> I think I've called it a smoking crater where ten billion dollars used to be.
It’s less of a waste of money if it paints Facebook as a technology leader and distracts lawmakers, and helps give the company mind space among the tech press.
In fact the metaverse may have started out as DC strategy [1].
Facebook Inc. is old and boring, catering to a predominantly older cohort and becoming “Big Social” by buying up anything promising (Instagram, WhatsApp). But Meta Inc. is a scrappy pioneer at the forefront of American tech that’s creating the future™. Be harsh with them at your peril, is the implicit message to lawmakers.
If you look at it as a PR / Corporate defense strategy, a billion is actually cheap.
The Verge's article[1] mentions that the consumer version planned to be a few years out won't have silicon carbine lenses, and that those lenses are responsible for the majority of the cost of the Orion device due to extremely poor yields. Sounds like they're pretty great otherwise so maybe they're return to it at some point in the mid-future.
I agree regarding the undertaking - enormously costly, but if they can make it "just glasses" it might actually end up as the "next computing format" Zuckerberg was looking for. (Even in that case though, whether it was worth the investment/Meta can stay on top I don't know.)
I think it's fair to assume this is where the VAST majority of the Reality Labs spend was going ... cutting edge R&D on getting this kind of form factor, whilst some others (who perhaps lack object permanence) thought it was all going on Horizon.
Aswath Damodaran did an analysis on Meta valuation. He found out that even if all the 10s of billions being invested give 0 in terms of revenue it doesn't have much impact on its stock value and in turn companies value. So, I think it would be stupid for Zuckerberg to not invest in Metaverse unless he is missing some better opportunity.
$10B? Closer to $50B now. They're spending about $3-4B per quarter at the moment, and their guidance last earnings call was spending in RL would only tick up in the coming quarters.
Given that this is AR, not VR, and that AR has never even been as popular as VR outside a few industrial niches, I don't think this should change anything in your estimate of the value. Despite all the hype, the only thing that XR has ever been mildly popular for has been VR gaming. AR glasses can't do that well, since everything is transparent, instead of making you feel like part of the game world, so I would personally bet these will be as DoA as a consumer mass market product as the Holo Lens was.
AR was never popular because there never has been a consumer device for it. When Google glass was first revealed there was a huge buzz for it.
Holo Lens hat the problem that it was both too expensive and too bulky.
If meta can make this sleek and affordable I can really see this picking up, I can think of many use cases where this would be better than both a smartphone and a VR headset:
- Navigation
- Cooking
- Interior design (like the IKEA app)
- reading (holding a real book and 'click' on words to get definitions and translations like on an ereader)
- music playing and instrument learning
This is a silly take. AR games are perfectly possible. Games don't need to look photo real to be immersive and a holographic animal with enough grounding in physical space still feels real, anyhow.
Additive displays do make it hard to port existing games but that was true for mobiles and touchscreen. If the platform is popular, it will have games.
> I've long been a huge skeptic of the whole Metaverse project/undertaking, I think I've called it a smoking crater where ten billion dollars used to be.
Following your train of thought, we can assume that even with skepticism, if the price is right, people will buy it, just as we purchase many other gadgets. While the market size may be smaller than that of mobile phones, it could still become appealing once people start seeing their neighbors and friends using it.
They are as small as the technology can be made today. Meta knows that they are still too big. Zuckerberg said on stage that they will attempt to miniaturize them further and this is not a consumer product today.
Making them as small as they are is an incredible feat actually. They are better than Hololens in every respect and Hololens is absolutely massive in comparison. There are at least 5 cameras, two HD projectors, an IMU, microphones and speakers in this thing plus the chips and batteries to run them all continuously for two hours.
I was an early adopter of the Galaxy Note which looked outlandishly large and goofy, back when people still spoke in awe of how Jobs made the 3.5" iPhone to fit the human hand naturally and no other form factor could possibly be right.
Fast forward today and nearly every phone looks like a galaxy note. Turns out when the utility is there, people will adapt.
> to fit the human hand naturally and no other form factor could possibly be right.
I still think this is correct. "Features" like Reachability, and even Screen Time, are software solutions to hardware problems.
I don't think people would be as addicted to their smartphones if they stayed small. At that size, they were more of a tool, and a means to get something done when away from a proper computer. As the size increased, it became mobile-first, doom scrolling entered the picture, and people started asking if phones were bad of our mental health.
Those of us with larger hands are happy with larger phones with bigger screens.
But even people I know with smaller hands generally prefer larger phones, probably for the same reason most PC computer users prefer larger monitors rather than the 14" monitors of yesteryear.
It still seems like an improvement though. They could be mistaken for very unfashionable glasses. That’s so much closer to what people want, than Apple or Microsoft’s headsets.
Actually it is a little bit annoying, people might actually get away with wearing these things, which means Facebook spyware might be entering everyday life. I’m glad I’m too old for parties.
Thick rims like those are considered high fashion right now. It's the opposite of goofy and says a lot about the audience here that you're all oblivious to this fact.
>... and says a lot about the audience here that you're all oblivious to this fact.
What does it say beyond, "This person doesn't pay attention to high fashion", and why does it feel like you're judging people for that? Who cares if people aren't into it? To my mind, your comment says a lot more about you than what ignorance to high fashion says about others.
There's a reason they call it high fashion and not just fashion. But granted, maybe theres some billionaire bubble that's in on the joke and loves the look of this.
Wanna see the first prototypes for mobile phones? And even then it's really good compared to a Quest, but def. not good enough if you're going to wear this on the daily
My dad ran a hospital and literally had one of these things: https://hips.hearstapps.com/autoweek/assets/s3fs-public/IMG_... - Things seem to move so quickly these days I'd guess the Orion things will be reasonable to buy in 6/7 years. Getting old sucks!
The benefit of a mobile phone was extremely obvious to everyone as soon as you said what it was.
I've been reading about AR for years and I still have no idea how, if at all, I would use it. Never really come across a use case that's compelling for me. Getting WhatsApp messages without taking my phone out of my pocket feels like the opposite to the direction I'd like to move in.
The first iphones and ipods were stunning for their time; they changed the industry and people would wait for hours on end in line at stores. It seems like a reach to compare these glasses to that.
True! But society can move backwards sometimes, todays smartphones are growing and and each generation of BEV gets heavier!
Something in the collective unconscious is screaming "put the biggest brick you can make in my hand and give me a main battle tank to go to TJ's." and industry is happy to oblige!
Maybe wearing a gigantic ugly thing on your face that beeps and has flashing lights isn't such a far step
That's why this AR sunglasses bid is absolutely the wrong move.
Someone needs a lesson about the uncanny valley. Short story: unless you are all the way at the top go down, not up. Lean into the goofiness that your limitations demand. Make a decent new thing, not a strange old thing.
I don't know, right now I'm more interested in the capabilities of these glasses. But the video showing people's reactions to using them... That's what seemed a bit strange to me. Or you sat "goofy".
It's because the lenses aren't transparent OLED displays like the ones LG is making. The images on the "screens" are literally being projected by small projectors fitted into the frame onto the lenses.
The problem is that these companies keep wanting to put processing in the glasses. The glasses should only have the minimum circuitry to send, receive and render very high definition video. All the processing should be done in another device (like the arm band) that is carried nearby (like the wireless microphones they use in TV or concerts: https://www.amazon.com.mx/UHF-Wireless-Microphone-System-Kit... ). That way you are not CPU constrained.
I would say have a "cache level" like combination:
* very low/few computation done at the glasses level
* medium computation done at the brick unit level
* hard/intensive computation done in the cloud.
> The problem is that these companies keep wanting to put processing in the glasses.
I agree. The obvious choice is to offload to our insanely powerful phones. Unfortunately WiFi is too disruptive on mobile OSs and raw Bluetooth is.. well does that even need an explanation? Apple are probably the only ones who could deliver a seamless high bandwidth link and decent pairing, atm. But they spent their prototype-billions on a headset instead.
On the other hand though.. do we really need to run multiple cameras and a realtime image processing pipeline to say that the cacao on your countertop is, in fact, cacao? These AR “experiences” make cool demos, but once the novelty wears off, nobody wants to play planetarium or anatomy class for hours a day.
Note that without the whole AR part of it, there’s still some really cool hardware for all kinds of purposes. That can be really handy when you want or need both hands free. For instance POV video for say sports, HUD and voice interface for eg cycling, maybe watching videos while working, anything requiring gloves (cold, wet hands, gardening) todo-list in the corner of eye when shopping, etc etc. You could reduce form factor and increase battery time significantly, even if you keep accelerometer, gyro, projector, light sensor, cameras etc. But for some reason, utility is not even a priority with these companies.
I understand your position. It's the architecture that a lot of players in the space (e.g. Qualcomm) are doubling down on --- and it seems intuitively obvious that we should tether smart glasses to ubiquitous phones.
The problem is that by doing so we make glasses secondary, auxiliary devices. You wouldn't leave your house without your phone, but if you forget your tethered glasses, well, no big deal.
The only way we move past phone as personal computing form factor is making alternatives standalone devices. If you could do everything you do on your phone, but on glasses, you might drop the phone habit. If you can't drop the phone habit, and there are only so many things you can take with you when you leave your house, AR glasses will always be an afterthought.
Is it feasible to do wireless transmission of video at extremely low latency?
Wireless microphones are not a good comparison because they are probably analog, but even if they are digital a few dozen milliseconds of delay is going to be imperceptible for audio in a way that video is not.
Having built similar tech (Meta, YC S13), it's been a great year with Vision Pro, Orion, Spectacles and more coming out.
Currently at my co, seeing most day to day use out of XReal, and keen for Visor.
AR/XR/MR/VR app I'm most looking forward to is a 360 location share with the sharing user in AR, and the receiving user in VR, with additional virtual objects shared between. Orion would be great for the send side, with a few extra cameras and Vision Pro on the receive side.
The main thing letting down tech today is how open the platforms are for external developers.
The lack of projecting black I don't see as an issue, clip on something for VR (ok 70 degress isn't quite enough but getting fairly close), or just dim and use gradients for day to day work.
I think we're still at the most basic level in terms of understanding optical physics and ultra high resolution much smaller devices will come out, probably not too soon though.
I remember Meta (your old Meta not the new Zuck's Meta) had an amazing section of the site where you could submit and see sort of like Kickstarter proposals for use cases and I always wondered where all that creative devkit type passion went. Probably on a couple hard drives in a lockup.
Ah yes! I remember working on this. It was born out of asking all the YC founders what they wanted to see - and anyone else we met as well. Formed the basis of our second kickstarter which we self hosted and was much more successful.
> The main thing letting down tech today is how open the platforms are for external developers.
You mean how closed they are? Apple was bad about this, but I think Meta is pretty good with helping spatial / game devs? Am I wrong about that? I don't work in the space, it's just my impression
Yes, correct. As in their degree of openness (not much) is what's letting them down. I see how you could have read it as I meant their too open, which I definitely don't think is the case!
Hard edged, per-pixel light blocking is impossible for the foreseeable future. What's possible today, and what Magic Leap has, is diffuse dimming of large areas of the display.
The problem with light blocking is that when the blocker is millimeters from your eye it is completely out of focus. Unlike for the display, you can't use optics to make it appear farther away and in focus because the direction of the light it needs to attenuate can't be modified (or else your view of the world through the glasses would be warped).
For a near-eye light blocker to work, it would need to be a true holographic element which can selectively block incoming light based not just on its position but also its direction. Each pixel would essentially be an independent display unto itself that selectively blocks or passes incoming light based on its direction, instead of indiscriminately like a normal LCD. I have no idea how such a thing could ever be fabricated.
Damn! That's a throwback. I remember reading about you guys in an airplane magazine once and getting hooked on the concept. I always wondered where y'all went...
a bunch at Vision Pro, some at Zuck's Meta, some at Hololens, some doing other things. Meron is doing BCI, I'm doing AI infra - strongcompute.com (YC W22)
I just can't imagine ever buying something like this from Facebook. I know everyone shits on about Google being bad and whatnot, but the things I buy from Google aren't really part of their advertising business. I pay for Workspace and Google Cloud Platform, and those things don't advertise at me.
I am more likely to cruise around already logged into Google as a result of using those things, which obviously plays into their ad business, but those products that I pay for aren't vehicles for advertising and I don't think Google would ever try to make them that.
Likewise, Apple does obviously advertise some of their own services (like iCloud backup) in mildly annoying ways through their devices, but by and large I'm buying a thing from them and only to the extent that I am engaged with one of their Apps (like TV+ or Music) do they try and advertise at me.
In neither case are their platforms inherently about advertising.
Facebook just strikes me as a fundamentally different company. Even if I were to pay them for these glasses I would have no confidence that it wasn't just a gigantic suckhole being fed into their slush fund of data.
Agree with the sibling commenter here, this stance baffles me. Google have been caught breaking the law on data collection enough times at this stage that there's absolutely no reason to ever assume they aren't being as invasive & insidious as they can be in their products.
I think people seem to give Google a free pass because so much of their presence in our lives is implicit/invisible but they are so much more embedded than Facebook could ever be.
I take a totally different position than you do. If I can't think of a technical reason Google can't get data from something, I assume they do. Why do you think otherwise? Google's full of exactly the same rapacious MBA types that Facebook is, and has the exact same obligations to its shareholders. They're essentially the same business (trap users in your services to mine their data and show them ads). I honestly see very little difference.
I find the MBA hate on HN so weird. The founders and leaders of these companies are technologists first. We need to look in the mirror - there's no dodge that software developers, not MBAs, have built these invasive, addictive, misleading, and dangerous products.
There is always a comment saying Apple is much worse than people think compared to Facebook or Google. But there are never any Sources. Google and Facebook track you wherever you go on the internet. You can't get away from it. Apple only shows ads in their App Store. And you can turn off Apples tracking in their Settings. How is that "Much worse than you think"?
> Facebook just strikes me as a fundamentally different company. Even if I were to pay them for these glasses I would have no confidence that it wasn't just a gigantic suckhole being fed into their slush fund of data.
I agree, and to that I would add the way they've been contributing, if not actively engaged, to push reality-denying propaganda from hostile third parties, including state actors.
Data collection is not only bad because of advertising; that's the most visible annoyance to us, but I'd argue that the kinds of data collection that Google (and especially Apple) enable can be orders of magnitude more harmful (things like client side scanning of content, location tracking even with the phone turned off and these all-knowing AI datasets that are just a query away from learning the most intimate things about you).
The fundamentally different aspect is also at the user end - you need fb account to run these gadgets, spend money associated with this account and when someone tries to “hack” that account (because it is public), you loose it without a chance to ever get back the account or money. There is no way how to contact any living person for support, most you can get is their faq.
I cannot imagine such situation with gmail.
My first thought was, “does Meta have a user base anymore that would be interested in this?” Who is their early adopter demographic?
Someday old people will use VR for escape but only when they are the late adopters. Zuckerberg has lost his damn mind. But don’t tell him that, I want the full Willie Wonka experience.
I've used Facebook for years and the worst that's happened is they've tried to show me some ads. I can live with the forces of evil knowing I've put up "hi mum, here's my hol pics" etc.
Google very publicly commits that enterprise customers (GCP, Workspace) have their data firewalled off from ads. If you have evidence to the contrary, there are many, many companies and governments that would like to know.
This looks to me like a consumer product, so it you should compare it to Google's similar products, not enterprise ones.
Does Google stop tracking you when you pay for Youtube Premium ? When you buy a Pixel phone ?
Like you, I do think that in general Facebook is an evil company, more than the others mentioned, but I don't think that if Google were able to produce a similar consumer device, they would track me any less
This is the form factor that I always wanted from HoloLens (which I own). The release is very light on details of field of view and resolution (other than "best ever" puffery), that's where we'll get a better sense of actual use cases. The ball game shown looked very rudimentary in terms of only taking place in a small directly-in-front-of-user sense. This is also where HoloLens games fell flat -- you'd turn your head slightly to the left or right, and suddenly key game elements would vanish.
Edit -- the home page says 70-degree FoV. Not bad, better than HoloLens (45-degree FoV if I recall), but perhaps not enough to turn your head to the person next to you while still having game elements persist in vision
I tried out the first gen version at a meetup and it was really nifty (the latency was fantastic), but I just couldn't work out what anyone would use it for in real life, it seemed too limited to be useful.
Readit News
https://www.theverge.com/24253908/meta-orion-ar-glasses-demo...
Wireless compute puck. 70 degree FOV. Resolution high enough to read text. Wrist band detects hand gestures and will be used in another product.
It's interesting that meta went through the effort of bundling an accessory but stuck with hand gestures anyway.
Haptic feedback, discrete buttons and precise analog input from controllers are also very important. The downside of controllers is that your hands are full and it's just not feasible for an all day wearable.
Hopefully someone figures out a good compromise be it rings or gloves or whatever.
Anyway, Logitech made an awesome little handheld keyboard for home theater PCs, called DiNovo Mini HTPC, I was able to pair it with Vision Pro.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/226367904044?_skw=Logitech+DiNovo+M...
If your only experience is the HoloLens, you’re roughly a decade out of date with how well it can work today.
There’s also not been much until the Vision Pro that combines eye tracking with hand tracking which is what’s really needed.
You should really try the Vision Pro, because it really does move hand tracking to the point where it’s the best primary interaction method. Controllers might be good for some stuff , in the way an Apple Pencil is, but most interactions do not need it.
While analog manipulation devices (mice, trackpads, joysticks, the 3D controllers) are good at physically precise manipulation and navigation, keys and buttons are good at symbolic / textual entry and logical / symbolic navigation with comparatively very low effort and high speed.
When VR / AR acquires a fast and low-effort symbolic input mode, comparable in efficiency to a keyboard, and it becomes possible to build highly productive interfaces driven by it, like Vim and MS Excel are driven by the keyboard, many interesting developments will happen.
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Its interface is unlike anything else and really can only be experienced in person. The ability to simply glance at UI controls and slightly move your head whilst resting on your leg really does feel like magic.
And the UI is built around it so if you are looking for example at a sidebar it will lock you into choosing the options unless you substantially look away. This makes using it much easier and faster than a controller.
Also the gestures are recognised by something you wear rather than cameras, so I'd expect them to be more reliable.
Try it out , it’s really neat
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Something named after a small rodent that we use already. And a monitor that we use already. Then you are cooking. You've invented the desktop pc.
The Vision Pro uses optical sensors for hand tracking, so if your hands aren't visible to the device it obviously can't track them. Electromyography solves that problem, and I could imagine Apple integrating some variant of this in a future Apple Watch, and just falling back to optical sensors if you don't own one.
Wireless compute puck = iPhone Wrist band = Apple watch (although most people wear it on their non-dominant hand)
From the videos it looks like Meta adopted Apple's UI of a horizontal handle bar underneath a window for interacting with a piece of content.
Considering that the 100 degree field of view of the Apple Vision Pro is already noticeable, 70 degrees seems really limiting.
It's also possible they don't ever put out an offering in this form factor. They never released a dual screen phone. They never released a touchscreen laptop. This might be one of those things they just don't touch.
Also, I wonder if they'll have a tough time filling the form factor with stuff to do. The lack of apps was a huge reason the APV flopped, while Meta has a large headstart in making it possible for devs to build for their device, even those without exp in spatial dev / game dev / etc.
For an AR headset, 70 degrees is pretty good.
Facebook seems better aligned in that regards.
did meta buy them out?
https://www.roadtovr.com/facebook-acquires-ctrl-labs-develop...
I had the first myoband sdk and didn’t work for me. I imagine tech is much improved now
Context: I was part of this acquisition, but am no longer at Meta.
Is that true? Last time I was reading about holographic lenses, it was a flat white laser backlight fed into a waveguide (the hologram part), and filtered through an LCD. An actual LED projector would have darker darks, but I would much rather have a higher resolution..
It's definitely helpful to hear about the waveguide production problems. Obviously, that's going to be the greatest hurdle; after all, they are manufacturing a completely unique object with very small feature sizes.
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Huge kudos to Meta for breaking new ground and doing a ton of R&D/M&A to get to this point. Once MicroLED comes on a little further and the form factor shrinks this could be the next consumer electronics platform.
Silicon carbide is really interesting, we need high RI materials to make this work.
Hopefully glass 3D printing or similar will make cheap, Rx waveguides possible.
Negativity? Yes Facebook was negative for 20ish years and as a result of their behavior technical people don't like them.
This is not something, we are wrong about even if your "negativity here" silently suggests that.
You reminded me of something, please read this article: https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/leave_my_br...
It is helpful for becoming negative to negative companies where they deserve it.
IG Farben had great technology (for that time) but needed change of name and half of century of good service so they have been removed from our memory as producers of Cyclone B. Now they are known as Bayer. And my neighbor (concentration camp survivor), while he was alive, wasn't buying Bayer products and he was quite vocal about it. Any of them, regardless of technology, different people, different products,... Guess why. Will you say he was negative?
Thats why FB was renamed and I am eagerly waiting what they will be like after 50 years. Until then, they will not be anywhere near my devices and even less filtering my sight.
That said, I was never a Facebook user. I do have an account and that is that, which I tend to not use in most browser session because of Facebook surveillance.
It's only privileged, highly-paid coastal elites that hate FB.
Zuck, can literally say GFY as they don't matter in the broad scheme of things and innovations.
It's FB. They're not popular. I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole, because I expect it will be absolutely stuffed with user surveillance.
Think about it - sometimes it is much more about trust than technology. Yeah, I know all your chats go back and forth commercial GPTs, but you know half of my GPT interraction is already local inference based and it does similar job, and is OK. So that much about wanting to let s.o. see your naked friends. Their days are numbered and if you see how IT history unfolded - there is always rush to the cloud and away from the mainframe. Its like the breathwork in criya yoga, happens simultaneously in a sense.
From the funny side of things - such wearables open perspective to lot of people talking to themselves being O.k. in society. Perhaps we could only agree to have such visual interface when things get closer to what guys have in Cyberpunk 2077. Honestly I really hope someone developes a genetic enhancement or all children born 2000 suddently become enlightened enough to master telepathy.
I'm much more fascinated by the propspect of personal electronics, and how cheap they have become. I don't want Meta in them for sure, and nobody apt-get installs gcloud or fb as his must have tool.
There have been so many attempts to make VR glasses that it's really not innovation at this point, it's just gimmicky throw-away pocket tech. Something far better to invent is a phone that can project on walls, or project a full-size keyboard onto a table for an easier writing experience.
Most of these companies are gutted by investors, and turned into profit machines... There are very few visionaries leading projects now, and huge hurdles with IP theft and related lawsuits that hold up most of the typical innovation, unless these companies come up with game changing ideas that focus less on pushing out ads, they're going to fail with micro-projects like this. VR glasses have been around for ages, none of what Zuckerberg demoed was revolutionary, gotta be honest about it.
But with essentially any piece of tech you use (not just FB), you check "I agree" on a document you'll never read and give the same data to a private company who will use it however they want. And they charge you for it.
Imagine if I told you a research organization decided to throw out all their ethics and start charging their research subjects to be experimented on, and that this was actually a really solid business model.
AR is certainly cool tech. It is just too bad there’s no company doing it that isn’t doing it just to spy on you.
But, that said, there's also plenty of room for negativity around the actual product conception. It may have niche applications, but it just doesn't seem that most people need or want AR for everyday use - it's a solution looking for a problem. For gaming VR seems a better fit than AR, and same for Metaverse in general.
AR seems a bit like Segway two-wheelers - cool and fun, but with limited actual use. I could see AR glasses being used in the same way as Segway's end of life use for tourist city tours, or for other similar rent-to-use entertainment experiences.
I really hope this isn’t the case. We have enough screens around us as is, the last thing I want is screens pressed up against my eyeballs
If they can fix their incentives there it will address 80% of the concerns in this thread.
Counterintuitively I think a passive screen affixed to your face will reduce your reliance on all other screens. Glasses aren't a great form factor for scrolling feeds, but they are much better at connecting you to your physical world (which phones are the worst at). That plus just the posture improvements [1] that glasses can provide over the phone may make this a winner.
[1]: https://www.today.com/health/texting-neck-how-hunching-over-...
Was there a lot of engineering, novel problem solving, and even new invention? Yes.
Does that matter to customers if it comes together in a product that they don't feel is good enough? No.
For a site focused on tech and startups there is an awful lot of whiteknighting for companies who should know and do better.
The last company I'd want to put right in front of my eyeballs for any extended periods of time is Facebook.
Maybe as they transition to hardware they’ll spend more time making their products worthy of chronic upgrades rather than chronic addictive usage.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41656380
I don’t see 3D printing being a solution here for a very very long time
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You build a platform which allows you to share fake news and pay to win shit to billions? You make sure the algorithm makes you as much money as possible?
You know who made sure facebook fixes this? Politics, not suckerburg.
My morals also say that sharing any news, be it fake or real, should be allowed. Likewise they say making as much money as possible is admirable.
Negativity isn't spared on bad actors.
I'm curious if people think that that's worth worrying about, or if the idea of optimizing ad placement based on whether it makes your pupils respond in the desired way is the kind of thing that's only effective in sci-fi.
https://nickclegg.medium.com/how-the-metaverse-can-transform...
The chart here is... well, eye opening:
https://newatlas.com/science/science/eye-tracking-privacy/
Brought to you by the same people that thought cigarette candy was a brilliant idea.
Unless I’m misunderstanding the current state of the technology, it’s possible today with a little effort to put my biometrics in a feedback loop with (say) GPT-4o, and use those measurements to rapidly produce and refine an increasingly horrifying series of images, personalized to my lizard brain reactions.
That’s gross, but the same technique could be applied more subtly. Imagine the worst things people suspect about TikTok’s algorithm, but with biometric feedback on its individual effectiveness.
But eventually it all devolves to this (and I include teens < 18 as children here).
Remember that FB started out as a way to connect with your college buddies.
More than just ads though, collecting data on children is dangerous as well. We really don't need corporations starting a dossier on children and placing them into buckets at such an early age. It's bad enough we hand school children chromebooks so that Google can track their test scores, growth, and intelligence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
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I don't know about anyone else, but I will never buy AR glasses with ads. That's a deal breaker for me.
It’s all based on anecdotal knowledge, but at least in my little bubble of the world nobody wants their children on Meta if they can help it. Which is a little bit hypocritical considering a lot of the same people don’t mind using Google, OpenAI, Microsoft products and so on. For some reason Facebook has taken the brunt of the dislike and I think a lot of my colleagues might actually feel better about their children being on TikTok than any sort of Meta product.
Not that you can really avoid being included on the Meta platform if these things start filming you in public.
As a former scrolling addict, I can attest that Instagram is by far worse for mental health than Tik Tok. It's about the algorithms.
If you show Tik Tok that you like certain niche content it will learn that and only show you it, when it tries to show you something else that you don't prefer (once every 100 videos in my case) if you show disinterest it won't show more of it.
With Instagram, what you prefer (e.g. mindful content) is secondary to bombarding you with content that triggers endless scroll behaviour. I've tried training it to not do that by clicking the explicit "not interested" button, on dozens of videos at a time, multiple sessions, but it just wouldn't work. At times it seemed like it is finally learning what i prefer, and then next day mindless memes are again 90% of the feed. In contrast, Tik Tok required a tiny fraction of explicit training that I prrformed on Insta, and on Tik Tok it was very effective.
I can say with absolute certainty that Instagram is very detrimental to my health (hence I don't use it), and suprisingly Tik Tok is actually pretty great.
My usual Tik Tok session now looks like this: I launch it, get a video that's really relevant to me, and for every video that I watch there's about 30% chance that I'll close the app because I'm either thinking about what I learned or researching it. My endless scroll behaviour is never triggered. And I don't usually use Tik Tok more than 2 times a week. This isn't because of willpower, it's because I genuinely value the content it's providing me and I need time to digest it. Watching more often would be like wasting it. This has been going on for about 6 months now.
Disclaimer: I wouldn't be suprised if I'm in some a/b testing program within Tik Tok, and it might be using a variant algorithm. I don't have evidence, but I know that for a time my UI was a little different than others' (e.g. no favorite functionality).
Whether the legislature has notably limited data collection for ad purposes by then - probably not.
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https://nypost.com/2024/08/08/business/google-meta-reportedl...
But this is really interesting: it sounds like the display works, and it sounds like the puck is workable, and it sounds like both can squeak above the line in terms of battery life. If those things are true I may turn out to have been completely wrong.
I don't know the first thing about silicon carbide display substrate thingy yields, so I can't remark on whether or not that's a "scale will make cost acceptable", but I bet some mega geniuses at Meta think so or they probably wouldn't be showing this much.
If it turns out that I was dead wrong on this I'll be glad I was, it would be really cool if it works.
It’s less of a waste of money if it paints Facebook as a technology leader and distracts lawmakers, and helps give the company mind space among the tech press.
In fact the metaverse may have started out as DC strategy [1].
Facebook Inc. is old and boring, catering to a predominantly older cohort and becoming “Big Social” by buying up anything promising (Instagram, WhatsApp). But Meta Inc. is a scrappy pioneer at the forefront of American tech that’s creating the future™. Be harsh with them at your peril, is the implicit message to lawmakers.
If you look at it as a PR / Corporate defense strategy, a billion is actually cheap.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/24/faceboo...
I agree regarding the undertaking - enormously costly, but if they can make it "just glasses" it might actually end up as the "next computing format" Zuckerberg was looking for. (Even in that case though, whether it was worth the investment/Meta can stay on top I don't know.)
[1] - https://www.theverge.com/24253908/meta-orion-ar-glasses-demo... (ctrl+F for "silicon carbide", it's the last mention)
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This $10B bet is that they're the leader of the next wave where smart glasses replace smartphones.
Holo Lens hat the problem that it was both too expensive and too bulky.
If meta can make this sleek and affordable I can really see this picking up, I can think of many use cases where this would be better than both a smartphone and a VR headset:
- Navigation - Cooking - Interior design (like the IKEA app) - reading (holding a real book and 'click' on words to get definitions and translations like on an ereader) - music playing and instrument learning
Additive displays do make it hard to port existing games but that was true for mobiles and touchscreen. If the platform is popular, it will have games.
Following your train of thought, we can assume that even with skepticism, if the price is right, people will buy it, just as we purchase many other gadgets. While the market size may be smaller than that of mobile phones, it could still become appealing once people start seeing their neighbors and friends using it.
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Reminds me of the old 80's NHS glasses in the UK (which you could get for free if you couldn't afford otherwise).
Or for those of you old enough, Brains from the old Supermarionation versions of the Thunderbird show (https://i2-prod.walesonline.co.uk/incoming/article8451975.ec...)
Making them as small as they are is an incredible feat actually. They are better than Hololens in every respect and Hololens is absolutely massive in comparison. There are at least 5 cameras, two HD projectors, an IMU, microphones and speakers in this thing plus the chips and batteries to run them all continuously for two hours.
Fast forward today and nearly every phone looks like a galaxy note. Turns out when the utility is there, people will adapt.
I still think this is correct. "Features" like Reachability, and even Screen Time, are software solutions to hardware problems.
I don't think people would be as addicted to their smartphones if they stayed small. At that size, they were more of a tool, and a means to get something done when away from a proper computer. As the size increased, it became mobile-first, doom scrolling entered the picture, and people started asking if phones were bad of our mental health.
But even people I know with smaller hands generally prefer larger phones, probably for the same reason most PC computer users prefer larger monitors rather than the 14" monitors of yesteryear.
Actually it is a little bit annoying, people might actually get away with wearing these things, which means Facebook spyware might be entering everyday life. I’m glad I’m too old for parties.
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What does it say beyond, "This person doesn't pay attention to high fashion", and why does it feel like you're judging people for that? Who cares if people aren't into it? To my mind, your comment says a lot more about you than what ignorance to high fashion says about others.
I've been reading about AR for years and I still have no idea how, if at all, I would use it. Never really come across a use case that's compelling for me. Getting WhatsApp messages without taking my phone out of my pocket feels like the opposite to the direction I'd like to move in.
https://img.cohan.dev/qFlL7.jpeg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GI_glasses
Something in the collective unconscious is screaming "put the biggest brick you can make in my hand and give me a main battle tank to go to TJ's." and industry is happy to oblige!
Maybe wearing a gigantic ugly thing on your face that beeps and has flashing lights isn't such a far step
Someone needs a lesson about the uncanny valley. Short story: unless you are all the way at the top go down, not up. Lean into the goofiness that your limitations demand. Make a decent new thing, not a strange old thing.
I would say have a "cache level" like combination: * very low/few computation done at the glasses level * medium computation done at the brick unit level * hard/intensive computation done in the cloud.
I agree. The obvious choice is to offload to our insanely powerful phones. Unfortunately WiFi is too disruptive on mobile OSs and raw Bluetooth is.. well does that even need an explanation? Apple are probably the only ones who could deliver a seamless high bandwidth link and decent pairing, atm. But they spent their prototype-billions on a headset instead.
On the other hand though.. do we really need to run multiple cameras and a realtime image processing pipeline to say that the cacao on your countertop is, in fact, cacao? These AR “experiences” make cool demos, but once the novelty wears off, nobody wants to play planetarium or anatomy class for hours a day.
Note that without the whole AR part of it, there’s still some really cool hardware for all kinds of purposes. That can be really handy when you want or need both hands free. For instance POV video for say sports, HUD and voice interface for eg cycling, maybe watching videos while working, anything requiring gloves (cold, wet hands, gardening) todo-list in the corner of eye when shopping, etc etc. You could reduce form factor and increase battery time significantly, even if you keep accelerometer, gyro, projector, light sensor, cameras etc. But for some reason, utility is not even a priority with these companies.
The problem is that by doing so we make glasses secondary, auxiliary devices. You wouldn't leave your house without your phone, but if you forget your tethered glasses, well, no big deal.
The only way we move past phone as personal computing form factor is making alternatives standalone devices. If you could do everything you do on your phone, but on glasses, you might drop the phone habit. If you can't drop the phone habit, and there are only so many things you can take with you when you leave your house, AR glasses will always be an afterthought.
Wireless microphones are not a good comparison because they are probably analog, but even if they are digital a few dozen milliseconds of delay is going to be imperceptible for audio in a way that video is not.
Currently at my co, seeing most day to day use out of XReal, and keen for Visor.
AR/XR/MR/VR app I'm most looking forward to is a 360 location share with the sharing user in AR, and the receiving user in VR, with additional virtual objects shared between. Orion would be great for the send side, with a few extra cameras and Vision Pro on the receive side.
The main thing letting down tech today is how open the platforms are for external developers.
The lack of projecting black I don't see as an issue, clip on something for VR (ok 70 degress isn't quite enough but getting fairly close), or just dim and use gradients for day to day work.
I think we're still at the most basic level in terms of understanding optical physics and ultra high resolution much smaller devices will come out, probably not too soon though.
You mean how closed they are? Apple was bad about this, but I think Meta is pretty good with helping spatial / game devs? Am I wrong about that? I don't work in the space, it's just my impression
Even still, modern displays are so so good that an additive display is a massive step down.
The problem with light blocking is that when the blocker is millimeters from your eye it is completely out of focus. Unlike for the display, you can't use optics to make it appear farther away and in focus because the direction of the light it needs to attenuate can't be modified (or else your view of the world through the glasses would be warped).
For a near-eye light blocker to work, it would need to be a true holographic element which can selectively block incoming light based not just on its position but also its direction. Each pixel would essentially be an independent display unto itself that selectively blocks or passes incoming light based on its direction, instead of indiscriminately like a normal LCD. I have no idea how such a thing could ever be fabricated.
I am more likely to cruise around already logged into Google as a result of using those things, which obviously plays into their ad business, but those products that I pay for aren't vehicles for advertising and I don't think Google would ever try to make them that.
Likewise, Apple does obviously advertise some of their own services (like iCloud backup) in mildly annoying ways through their devices, but by and large I'm buying a thing from them and only to the extent that I am engaged with one of their Apps (like TV+ or Music) do they try and advertise at me.
In neither case are their platforms inherently about advertising.
Facebook just strikes me as a fundamentally different company. Even if I were to pay them for these glasses I would have no confidence that it wasn't just a gigantic suckhole being fed into their slush fund of data.
I think people seem to give Google a free pass because so much of their presence in our lives is implicit/invisible but they are so much more embedded than Facebook could ever be.
Google has "build an ad profile about every human being" in their DNA just like Facebook, employing similar creepy tactics with Gmail and Chrome.
(P.S. Apple is much worse than you think. Look up Apple's first party tracking.)
There is nothing at all wrong with it since you are a direct user of the product or service.
1. Show ads for apps in AppStore
2. Show ads in the News app.
What else are you thinking of?
I agree, and to that I would add the way they've been contributing, if not actively engaged, to push reality-denying propaganda from hostile third parties, including state actors.
This only happens for photos that were going to be sent to iCloud where all photos are scanned server side.
It's hilarious to me that this feature which is actually a privacy win for consumers got so heavily criticised.
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Someday old people will use VR for escape but only when they are the late adopters. Zuckerberg has lost his damn mind. But don’t tell him that, I want the full Willie Wonka experience.
I've used Facebook for years and the worst that's happened is they've tried to show me some ads. I can live with the forces of evil knowing I've put up "hi mum, here's my hol pics" etc.
Advertising is 80% of Google's business. If you think those things aren't being factored into their ads model.... Idk what to tell you.
And yeah, I do expect that if Google sells it, there's a chance they will allow me to control it, but if it's Facebook, there's no chance at all.
But in either case, the product is too intrusive to concede control to those companies.
Does Google stop tracking you when you pay for Youtube Premium ? When you buy a Pixel phone ?
Like you, I do think that in general Facebook is an evil company, more than the others mentioned, but I don't think that if Google were able to produce a similar consumer device, they would track me any less
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Edit -- the home page says 70-degree FoV. Not bad, better than HoloLens (45-degree FoV if I recall), but perhaps not enough to turn your head to the person next to you while still having game elements persist in vision
I tried out the first gen version at a meetup and it was really nifty (the latency was fantastic), but I just couldn't work out what anyone would use it for in real life, it seemed too limited to be useful.