Report: Apple CEO “cares about nothing else” Than Building Breakout AR Glasses Before Meta
a year ago by Khuda to c/technology
In theory, there’s a Million awesome business applications for it.
Let’s say you’re in construction and your glasses tell you exactly what to build where and how.
You’re a waiter and the glasses tell you which table ordered what, needs attention, etc.
You’re a network engineer and the glasses show you on every port which device is connected.
And don’t even get me started on the military applications.
Of course we’re not there yet. But that’s why they’re so obsessed with it. They want to be the first.
I think for the most part society has gotten used to being on someone’s camera when in public at pretty much all times.
It’s something I used to think about, now I just, don’t.
Everyone has been looking for the next big hardware thing. It looked like it might be foldable phones for a little while but I reckon AR Glasses are the ultimate endgame until they start making bio implants.
They've gotten used to it in different political circumstances. But as people start to see how an authoritarian and vindictive fascist government works with surveillance tech to invade and endanger people's lives, attitudes to things like always-on cameras may start to shift.
If it helps, they don't have the battery life to be constantly recording or sending that much traffic. And that stuff can't be invisible, us nerds can see it all. That's one of the things dystopian sci-fi dramas have to gloss over, it all still runs on the properties of physics, sending a wireless message, even if the contents themselves are encrypted, we can still figure out where it is going and how much data it is by reading the wave. No way to block that from being possible.
Plus, there is no reason to be covert or secretive about manipulating people. They have been literally saying it out loud for years now, and it's still just as effective.
Imagine being anyone anywhere whipped like an Amazon worker. Will the waitress have to piss in bottles? Bad for tips I think.
How does the construction app know what needs to be constructed and how?
How does the waiter app know which table ordered what, needs attention, etc?
How does the IT app know on which port every device is connected?
These things are all real hard to know. Having glasses that display the knowledge could be really nice but for all these magic future apps, having a display is only part of the need.
As somebody who wanted google glass back in the day and thinks AR glasses would be really really cool, this is ultimately where I end up on it, and with a lot of tech in general: the primary usefulness of any of this shit is in accurate and relevant information, and that’s the part of the equation that these big companies are definitely NOT in the business of producing. In fact, they seem to have discovered a while back that inaccurate and irrelevant information being blasted in your face is the real money maker. And now with AI/ML producing so much/filling in gaps, I just can’t imagine that it’s going to get any better.
That being said, I think the tech is so cool. I’d love to travel to a new city and be able to get directions around to different sightseeing spots and real time star ratings above all the restaurants instead of anxiously glancing at my phone the entire time. If we ever get to that level of goodness I’m in, but I have a lot of doubts that it’ll ever be more than another attention-seeking thing attached to your body.
We were already there 10 years ago with Google Glass. Despite its failure in the consumer market, it found significant success in enterprise settings in the exact scenarios you've listed.
Except, all of these are scenarios in blue collar work. Apple seems hell bent on making this succeed in white collar areas with its emphasis on meetings, which is extremely baffling.
How Is Google Glass Doing in Enterprise and Industrial Settings? - Engineering.com - https://www.engineering.com/...
All of this can be done with AR on a mobile phone.
Only when you need to do this AND have both hands free do AR glasses become necessary. So surgery, bomb refusal or something niche like thar.
This might be the dumbest take I’ve heard today.
Everything your smartphone does your laptop can do, too. Therefore, smartphones are useless!!
Everything AR can do that your smartphone can do today will be a hundred times more convenient because you don’t have to carry a slab of glass with you all the time. You just have to wear glasses. Like I already do anyway.
The only reason for smartphones to still exist in a world where AR is compact will be if we can’t figure out a way to efficiently input data without annoying everyone around us. As soon as that problem's solved, nobody will be using smartphones anymore.
I need a good reason to spend $2000 to do something I can already do with a $100 phone. Using 2 hands is very niche.
This might be the dumbest take I've heard today.
You're forgetting that AR headgear requires to WEAR THAT THING ON YOUR FACE AT ALL TIMES
No matter how compact (don't even start talking about some techbro "all conteined in a lens" type of shit), there will absolutely, always be people who will refuse to wear it. (Ask any former glasses user who went for contact lenses)
A phone you glance at and is in your pocket only when you need it is a million times more convenient than something that goes over your eyes all of the time.
Your world where external compact computing devices (phone/tablet/smartwatch/a slab of glass) are no longer needed is mostly constructed out of flatulence of the technology brotherhood.
The biggest issue is the software and tools are immature, and it's been that way for a while.
Sounds like a robot would just steal your job if that was implemented well. (And that is a big IF) Meanwhile you would pay off your AR glasses by watching a constant stream of ads for months.
you're a network engineer and the glasses show you on every port which device is connected
Unifi equipment already can sorta do this! The little dot pattern on the screen is an AR code and you can use the app to see this. It's pretty cool actually. I've never actually used it for real work though, I just look at the dashboard on my laptop and find the port that way.
It would be really really cool to be able to just touch the physical port and be able to change the settings in real space with AR glasses though.
This could also be the breakout app for AI. While AR glasses obviously need shape recognition and manipulation, the real world has many many more things than likely to be codified. How do you deal with that? AI. How do you do arbitrary summaries of whatever you’re looking at? AI. How do you interact with the glasses and the real world? Speech recognition and AI.
You heard it here first, folks. Two hot new technologies with no real use yet will find each other and turn into something useful
I mean, technically, we heard it first at the demonstrations of the meta and google glasses, where that is exactly the main use of them demonstrated. But they also do smartphone stuff. Like project directions when looking straight ahead, and a map when glancing downwards. Or translate stuff you are looking at. Their AI stuff was like, "Where did I leave my keys?", "Can you play me the first song off this album(while holding a record)?", and they also did more general memory stuff like "what was the title of the white book on the shelf?".
But yeah, even "indoor" VR headsets have an AI assistant on them now that can help with context aware intelligence. Like "What is this thing I'm looking at?" And it can be used in both the real world and the virtual world. Like, "Is this everything I need to bake a cake?" or "how do I kill this boss?" See, real world and virtual world... lol. Or like, "Can you give me a hint on this puzzle? Not too big of a hint though.".
I just personally don't like asking questions out loud.
I’d really just like some glasses that simulate multiple monitors without needing special software. That’s all I want
Yep, and that seems to be the route Apple was going. Screens you can place anywhere in your visual field.
Yep I've played with virtual monitors in VR space and I don't even like watching movies on them, the loss in resolution and the way the dynamic aspect of it (using a moving screen to simulate a static screen) makes it a shitty solution. Eventually it'll be good enough to watch TV in but I can't imagine doing serious work in it.
I did have fun with the novelty of moving multiple screens around like Minority Report but it really is just a novelty at this point
Quest 3 lens and displays actually are nice to look at, I coded for 5 hours in it the other day, and the only glaring flaw was the weight. My forehead hurt afterwards from the pressure, and I wasn't even using stock strap. The stock strap on quest headsets is known to be terrible. Tbf I only have a 1080p monitor for comparison bur its nice.
If you tried on anything lower than a Quest 3 with Virtual Desktop, you were right.
Quest 3 was the first VR headset to make virtual screens worth it. The clarity of pancake lenses cannot be overstated. The Quest pro technically had them too, but it wasn't quite good enough in some of the other aspects.
A Quest 3 with Virtual Desktop has replaced my TV and monitor because it was an upgrade to both. Even if all I did was placed those screens statically exactly where they used to be in real life. But of course, they can be anywhere, any size. The screens are 4k 120hz, good enough for pretty much anything. Once you get to about 80 degrees field of view, every pixel of a 4k 60hz signal can be temporally represented. Your head micromoves enough that you aren't missing any detail between each frame of the reference taking up two of the headsets frames. And when playing a game in actual 120 fps, you won't notice that you aren't seeing every single pixel directly physically represented every single frame, it looks good. Worth doing. 4k still looks much nicer than 1440p, which can be fully properly represented at that size and framerate.
Using anything other than Virtual Desktop, there is no need to set a monitor any higher than 1080p since they can't even draw that well enough to be properly represented. Virtual desktop is the only one that uses timewarp layers. If you were around for Carmack, you'll know that was always his first advice to every piece of VR software he reviewed, "please use timewarp layers for anything you want to look clear face-on" it's a huge difference.
The resolution thing is actually almost solved IMO. I used my Quest 3 in AR mode almost every single day and the screens are perfectly fine for reading text or having a video on in the background.
Yeah there's still some screen door effect but it's really only noticeable when I look for it, it disappears in normal use.
And I genuinely can't think of a reason you would need 1000hz displays. Human eyes start to get steady motion at like 50-60 and 90-150 is when the normal eye starts to hit the limit.
Current wanted level by the police would be quite handy
It depends on what you mean by special software, but current VR headsets already do that out of the box, it's just that their built-in multi monitor stuff is not amazing. Without any special software, you could have multiple apps open, and those apps could be any android app(including browsers or relatively bad desktop experiences like dex). The third party stuff you can download or buy is just way better. And it's also way better when the multiple monitors are your computer's monitors. Cuz then they have 50x the horsepower behind them. For current headsets, generally the best option is Virtual Desktop, if you don't need more screens than can be handled by high quality timewarp layers. You can get clear 4k or 5740x1080, or anything smaller. With other multi desktop options, you can get more total screens, but there is no point to picking anything above 1080p since even that is already not rendered clearly.
Solutions for current VR/MR/XR headsets will follow to VR/MR/XR glasses, since headsets and glasses are slowly meeting in the middle. Headsets will continue to shrink while packing in the same or more tech, and the glasses will slowly be able to handle more and more tech in their tiny frames.
There will always be full size headsets, but they will essentially be the PC equivalent to the glasses being the smart phone equivalent. We will also likely still have PCs, but it's concievable that a smartphone won't be necessary for most people anymore. And even for the people that would still want a smartphone, a "processing puck" for the glasses would be the more likely solution. Give them pocket computer level power instead of smart watch level. So you can play good games on them, like 10-15 years ago-then pc game graphics.
I'm not sure that wish will every be granted. You need some sort of specific software to get the hardware communicating.
But Apple will happily take a 30% cut of everything bought using the AR glasses.
This AR obsession is utterly baffling to me.
It's a mobile phone you don't need to hold.
It's a mobile phone that never goes in your pocket.
It's a mobile phone that is always on and has access to everything you see and hear.
That's pill. They just have to sugar coat it enough for everyone to swallow it (like we did with phones).
It’s a bummer than those sound like bad things simply because corporate abuse is always a forgone conclusion. If your data was truly private and always entirely under your control and ONLY your control, those would be really attractive features.
Totally. I'd also love to train a LLM on my own personal data and preferences, but there is no way I'm trusting a corporation that information.
Some implementations also have the problem of constantly pointing cameras at non-consenting passers-by.
Exactly, it's literally just the next step more convenient than a smartphone. You know how many people have neck and back problems now from smartphones? Not having to look at your hands or even hold anything in your hands is going to be so much better. Not having to pull your phone out of your pocket for a map or a web search or a text or to translate stuff(visual or audio). Having both hands free while doing the things your current phone does, or new things a current phone can't do.
It's going to be so much nicer, and sure, the first one is gonna be expensive and not perfect, but it only needs nerds to start with anyway. We'll make sure it gets to a point where it doesn't annoy normal people and offers real value. And while the most popular ones will inevitably be the ones made with walled gardens like apple and meta, there will be good ones too for us nerds to move to once we have finished beta testing the mass market ones for you guys.
It's the same as every tech product cycle. You know the main thing preventing wider adoption of VR/MR/XR right now? Headsets don't look cool... so, once they are a pair of glasses, or sun glasses, the main barrier is gone. Can't say people wouldn't spend 500$ to 2000$ on something as un-necessary as a smartphone every couple of years. They very much do. And if you no longer need to buy or carry a smartphone, all of a sudden you got exactly that amount of money in your pocket.
I want an open source version of this https://www.evenrealities.com/
Yeah, open source third party ones come a little later. But they will come.
A corporate marketers imagination. Yes.
Sure in a decade or so it might have matured enough to have shed all these issues
That's the point. They want to set themselves up so that when the issues are shed and it becomes a realistic product, they're already in a place where their product can be the one that takes over the market. If you wait until a product is viable before starting on development, you're too late.
Maybe it’s as simple as the next big product. When smartphones were new, nobody foresaw just how huge they’d become. Nobody could have foreseen what a force they’d turn Apple into. But now improvements are simply iterative, the market is nearing saturation, there’s not much room left to expand what’s next?
Maybe AR. It’s a really cool technology just now becoming practical to implement. Think of them as where smartphones were 15 years ago. Maybe they won’t go anywhere but imagine if they did! Imagine being the company most associated with the next hit tech product!
Apple risks stagnating if they don’t find a next hit product
It was in the movies they liked when they were kids. Or at least in the movies they think users want to see brought to reality.
As in an answer to the question "what's cool and futuristic". Solving medieval barbarism and wars is futuristic, but turns out to not be achievable. Same with floating/underwater oceanic cities, blooming deserts, Mars colonies and 20 minutes on train from Moscow to New Delhi. At the same time the audience has been promised by advertising over years that future will be delivered to them. So - AR. For Apple this is the most important part, I think.
Also to augment something you have to analyze it, and if you have to analyze it, you are permitted to scan and analyze it. That's a general point of attraction, I think. They are just extrapolating what led them to current success.
Also in some sense popular things were toys or promises of future for businesses and individuals alike, in the last 10-15 years. The audience is getting tired of toys and promises, while these companies don't know how to make something else.
So let Tim Apple care about anything from AR in front of him to apples in his augmented rear, he surely knows what he wants. As another commenter says, a source of instructions and hints for a human walking drone is one, with visualization. I'm not sure that's good, because if you can get that information for the machine, having a human there seems unnecessary. And if that information is not reliable enough, then it may not improve human's productivity and error rate.
And the most important part is that humans learn by things being hard to do, it's like working out in an exoskeleton, what's the purpose? And if training and work are separated here, then it seems more effort is spent in total. Not sure.
What should they be pursuing now? They have state of the art chips, tablets, phones, laptops and even all in one desktops, the only thing they don't have are TV's, at this point why not try to conquer the next frontier. even if it takes a decade?
Agree on all that. In addition, headsets would become so very unhealthy if they took off. Just imagine the addictiveness of phones combined with the sedentary qualities of TV, with both dialed up to 11. People's vision would get all fucked up, and they would start dying on their couches plugged in. It’s simply not a vision for the future that has any legs.
It's for real time facial recognition for LEO so they can easily identify and round up immigrants and dissidents. They want the government contracts
Being able to keep a screen in front of the user at all times is the goal. This is one step closer to replacing the eyes Cyberpunk style.
This is why Siri and Apple Intelligence is so important to Apple, getting away an actual keyboard will make this more addicting. They can decide what to show you before you even start thinking about it!
Corporations would love being able to not only know where you are at all times, but now they have the tech to see exactly what you see!
it’s not that complicated, the goal is to create another hit product that everyone wants like the ipod and iphone.
They already did this with Google glass and failed spectacularly. There is no market for this. Nobody is wishing they had computer glasses. It is something being forced onto consumers for the benefit of apple and it will not work.
You'd think with the massive failure of their apple vision they'd have learned this lesson already.
I'm not even a huge proponent of AR glasses, but i think that's a pretty shortsighted view. AR/VR tech was still in its infancy when google decided to drop it (as they do with many beloved products btw), and Apple has a history of repackaging/refining products in a way that allows them to catch on. Apple Vision is by all accounts a cool product, just still way too expensive for mainstream use. The tech is still maturing. I'm not saying Apple will for sure succeed, but it's just silly to outright claim "there is no market for this".
also "forced onto consumers"? no one is being forced to buy anything, what a ridiculous take.
You are complaining about me pointing out that there is zero DEMAND for this product. Nobody is asking for "Augmented reality" or whatever. It is not innovative or moving technology forward it's literally an excuse to harvest a million more data points per minute for no benefit to the end user.
You seriously can't comprehend how these companies use, manipulate, and coerce you to create a false demand for this slop? There is plenty of great literature on the subject, and if you'd like I can direct you to people with expertise to explain the concepts. Just stop mindlessly accepting and defending this behavior and stand up for yourself as a consumer.
There's a gag in Futurama about ads being displayed in your dreams. If that were possible they'd be doing that, but right now they're settling for just the waking hours.
Futurama also has an episode of the eyePhone.
https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/EyePhone
Lol.
How far apart were those two episodes? Like, production date? Futurama is a long-running show with a big gap in the middle, they did topical episodes about Napster and the iPhone.
That’s ok, I’ll just disagree with their Terms of Service!
Next courageous Apple creation:
Such a prescient episode.
It's a still frame from Star Trek The Next Generation, episode The Game
The plot is a wearable device that is an AR "glasses" game that as you play the game it "makes you feel good" gets used to take over the Enterprise so terrorists can hijack it.
At the time I imagine it was intended to be part of anti-drug campaigns with the AR and companies curating what you see to distract from reality angle/sentiment being more relevant today
I think the fundamental problem with the AR glasses is something that can't be overcome.
I think its easy to see the utility to owning a pair of glasses that look good and provide real time information as desired for what you are looking at or hearing.
HOWEVER, I think very few people will want the product these co.panies will make. This will be a method to throw ads literally in front of your eyeballs. Enshitification is too big of a thing now and so any new product is tainted by the expectation it will rapidly turn to garbage at a high price to you.
Also, while we may think we can be trusted, we dont trust anyone else having all that info, I dont like the obvious privacy implications that these can present. Filming with them is also terrifying.
So, just to be clear, that 'something that can't be overcome' is.. checks notes capitalism?
You might be giving people too much credit here because the same things could be said about a lot of products and services that have come out over the last 10 years
Yeah my best guess is that at most these will at best lead to homebrew and specialist uses. For example I have to wear glasses my astigmatism is rather severe so contacts don't work, so if I could attach a small projector to my glasses and put my phones display onto it I would have so many uses.
Good, I wanna see Apple flop just like Meta's VR nonsense did.
I think it's less that people hate VR and moreso that tech companies obsession with it as a next step in tech and not as a piece of specialized hardware.
Bcz it sucks.
The problem is they're making it suck more, by piling their usual proprietary shitware on top of it.
How is Quest a flop? Or are you talking about something else?
Bot quest and ray band products are huge success dominating their respective markets.
I really wish people were more serious about these markets so it can be done well from the get got rather than starting to be fixed and regulated 2 decades later.
There's a big piracy scene on Quest so if you really put in the effort you're not giving these evil assholes much but generally I agree. There's so much entertainment and things to do that I can really wait a bit longer as VR is not going away.
If you get one, buy Walkabout Mini Golf. I've spent so long playing that and hanging out in its worlds.
I’d be interested to hear from the youngest generation (15-20 YO) to hear if they care about this at all.
I’m approaching 50 years old and had been an early adopter most of my adult life. Growing up from the 1980s through 2000s, there was a near-mainstream narrative that we were living in a unique era of emerging technologies. It was exciting and we were anxious for anything new.
It seems to me that nothing is really new and there is nothing exciting, if not interesting, about technology today.
I’ve actually been stripping down the technology from my life as it’s become too distracting to get things done and has prevented personal growth and the formation of memories. For one example, I recently subscribed to a print magazine because I prefer a tangible object that I can associate with in and of itself (and choose to own and collect).
Looking at analog trends like vinyl records and film photography and cassette tapes, it seems like people are at least trying to incorporate tangible objects into a modern lifestyle. Then you have the trend of the dumb phones which indicate people are becoming more aware of the detriments caused by an always connected lifestyle. Thankfully, some car manufacturers are returning buttons to their cars in response to owner feedback about everything being a touch screen.
I mean, I’m not a multi-trillion dollar organization with different departments studying the feasibility of future products but I do wonder if something like AR glasses are already more of our past than our future.
I think there’s a more than reasonable desire for a device to help you through your day - especially in foreign countries. But do you think you want that to be glasses or something else?
Lastly, this reminds me of the prediction from Michio Kaku in Physics of the Future about augmented reality contact lenses. Should we at least accept AR glasses as first step towards contact lenses? Do you think society would accept these 20-40 years in the future?
i am somewhere around it, and i think the best part about AR glasses is we don't have to buy monitors,
when i used to be 15 couple of years ago i also fantacized about the asthetics of 80's after watching many 80's animation films, there was just something about them ,although i wasn't alive during that period.
i am personally more excited about fdvr, i hope we have it in 25 years, but i don't think we will
It seems to me that nothing is really new and there is nothing exciting, if not interesting, about technology today.
There is the massive infiltration of personal privacy to surveil everyone for whatever reason that is currently deemed acceptable, so there is that - smh
I'm in that age range and while I enjoy VR (VRchat is one of my most played games), I think at a certain point AR is "going too far". The current AR technology in the quest 3 is nice, good enough I don't need more. Being able to watch vids on a big screen anywhere in my house is enough.
Apple and meta though I think they want an all encompassing device that you wear all the time that replaces the phone, and thats a step too far. People already spend enough time on there phones when uts a single tiny screen, I don't think it would be good for attention spans to be able to spawn in infinite floating windows at any time.
You can kinda already have 6 floating windows on the quest 3 which is too much stimulation for a single person and I don't think its good for society to have this. I think if it can get a form factor similar to glasses (which I doubt is possible), people will buy it and get addicted.
Current day vr is like the polar opposite of the future AR that they want anyways. VR games force you to only focus on the current thing, because you are in the game, can't alt tab or look at your phone while in loading screens or watch youtube while gaming. This kinda forces you to do it in moderation.
There are a lot of things at Apple that I, as the paying customer, would rather Cook care more about than AR/VR boondoggles.
Well I do want this, augmented/virtual reality is exactly the kind of shit I dreamt about as a kid during the 90's, and having a huge screen available anywhere I go is pretty fucking cool.
But yeah, I used a VR headset exactly once for like 5 minutes, and there's no way in hell I'd buy one from meta or apple. If Valve releases good XR/AR glasses I might consider it.
I love VR and have multiple devices but the platforms are still really bad. There's so much jank amplified by all of the greed by Apple and Meta. For example on Apple's VR device you can't have multiple users - they were so greedy that they thought they'd sell multiple devices per household.
Can't wait for Valves Deckard or whatever next VR project they're working on. Steamdeck is everything a handheld should be and if they can finally nail that in VR it would be awesome.
why? AR has always been superior to VR in terms of technology. i had hopes googles and later microsofts demo a few years back would take off but the tech just couldn't find a niche market to hold onto and its just taken a backseat because it isn't as gimmicky and easy to market to a ready-to-burn-money demography as VR (gaming). AR has actual real-life every-day application. as long as Apple does it well, competitors will follow, and as they do, we'll actually be able to use it one day.
But you're going to get a lot of people who don't want to be around Glassholes as all AR includes a camera.
I think they called it “iSee”.
It's the smartwatch bullshit all over again.
1 in 10 have one
9 in 10 don't care and never did
Wdym lol smartwatches are everywhere now.
1 in 10 is still a lot of people. That's like every redhead you know territory.
You can?
S**t!
Not on Reddit. You might hurt someone’s feeling and be accused of threatening violence.
But we are on Lemmy where you can threaten to confiscate people's organs and only get your comment removed sometimes.
Now which do you like more your kidneys or your skin?
This is just another attempt to capture even more control over our attention - advertising everywhere. Of course Apple wants it
You're right. Tim Cook only gave Trump $1m for fun, right?
Classic Tim Apple.
Boringgggg, do another trick apple.
Anything that will create jobs, help people and the planet. Fuck everything else.
I would love to have a good pair of ar glasses to play games on my Steam Deck with. Connect a controller, and not have to hold up the heavy Deck itself.
But given Apple's propensity for walled gardens and lock-in, and Meta putting manipulative spyware into everything they make, these hypothetical glasses won't be coming from either of those companies.
I've got prosaspoagnosia, I just want them to display little name tags under the faces of people that I know.
Look into Xreal glasses.
Does anyone even want AR glasses? I don't.
id get them if they were from framework or something and ran some open sourced AR software
I mean, maybe of ots done well. I have the meta raybans and love them, mainly because I can listen to music as if I had earphones in, and talk on my phone with them, record, and take videos.
If it had a UI to select options and could display info too, that would be pretty sick imo.
I'm curious what drives you to record videos using the glass. As opposed to a phone/camera, the POV is very restricted as you cannot move vertically (unless kneel/crawl and look up/down ofc). So I'm sure it cannot be called a replacement to a traditional phone/camera.
So what is your motivation to use it ?
Actually I never record videos and rarely take pictures with them. It's the feature i use the least.
I use them for music, phone calls, and AI requests (like having a Google home you can ask at any moment). Once and a while I'll ask it to tell me what I'm looking at to listen to it describe something. That feature uses the camera to snap a shot of what your looking at.
When I walk somewhere and need to use maps, it tells the directions to me as I walk which is pretty neat.
nobody on this planet is more qualified to navigate the oncoming global operational tsunami. doesn't mean he's an engineering visionary, or knows how to build the machines that build the machines.
Boring everyday stuff like reading notifications without pulling out your phone, watching videos on public transit, watching a tutorial while working on a project, reading a recipe while cooking, navigation, watching whatever people watch when they get high, text magnification for folks who need it…
without pulling out your phone, [doing phone stuff x10]
Ding ding ding.
Everyone is so focused on AR glasses having some killer use case that must justify it's existence. The use case is simply not pulling a phone out of your pocket; not waiting for face ID, tapping your way to the necessary app, and so on.
Removing these micro inconveniences has always been Apple's forte (even if a little stagnant in recent years), so it's no surprise that they will continue to pursue the same.
Yes, I swear that’s the biggest benefit of the Apple Watch. For the things it does, it’s so much more convenient than dragging a big old phone out of your pocket. From reading texts and notifications, to payments, to exercise and health data, to 2fa,to using a voice assistant, even checking time and weather.
Then again that’s a high bar of convenience for ever lower marginal improvements for the goggles to try to build
Thinking of that article about Deepfake porn the other day probably real-time nude body overlays for everyone you meet. Can't think of a serious application that is actually useful enough for people to want this.
You don't think that's a good enough reason?
I really want it just for my crippling propsagnosia. Having something be able to tell me that A. I know this person, and B. What their name is could really give me a leg up with trying to integrate into society.
I think this is a case where the imagination is much, much better than the reality.
For the mobilization of technology, miniaturization has had a lot of benefits, not just in the technology, but in the accessibility. Having a desktop computer instead of a mainframe was huge. It brought the computer to the home. Laptops becoming viable was huge again. It untethered the computer from the wall. For most of the planet, we're still in the midst of the massive leap that is smart phones. It put a computer in the pocket of billions of people.
Beating that is hard. Smart phones are the most accessible, most powerful devices most end users have ever used. We take that for granted, and we take the time it took to get there for granted. It took 25 years of desktops to get real, decent laptops (personally, I'd say mid 90s). It took 25 of laptops to get real, decent smartphones (again personally, I'd say ~2010ish).
Like it or not, we have another decade to go probably before the technology is there for the next evolution in personal computing. But the problem we have really is that there's not another leap as far as accessibility is concerned. Smart phones work places where laptops can't. Laptops work places where desktops can't. Desktops work places where mainframes can't. Smart phones can work anywhere. Taking the computer from the datacenter, to the home, to your backpack, to your pocket is huge. Is the next step from the pocket to your wrist? To your face? Is it worth it? Is it really that much better?
They're not trying to solve the next 'where you can compute' problem. Smartphones can already be used anywhere. They're solving the 'when' problem and there are lots of times that a phone can't be used.
Lots of people see the 'when can I compute' optimal solution to be anytime. Think of all the places people bring cameras. That's where they'd love to have a computer. An HMD can do that if it gets small enough
A reality distortion field that seperates a person from the real world? What could go wrong?
It's about as dystopian as it gets.
You don't have to strap the internet to someone's face to distort their reality with it, as demonstrated by... Well, gestures broadly
It's taxing imagining everyone naked all the time. I'm at least looking forward to technology doing that for me.
Just a part of my fear.
This seems like a tech that would be hard to get right? There are a lot of trade-offs involving cost, weight, resolution, processing, battery life, etc.
For my part, I would probably use AR features rather sparingly to maintain my sanity, but they could be very useful in certain narrow applications. Whether these would be sufficient to justify the price tag is uncertain. I also tend to be rough on glasses, so that would be a worry.
The most useful applications I can think of that would run permanently (while wearing them) would be stuff like name tags for people if you are forgetful, labeling roads in front of you with their names or maybe the destinations in that direction at an intersection and similar low intrusiveness applications. Certainly nothing that could be considered a killer application.
Yeah, I suppose they could also be useful for translation when travelling someplace where you can't read the language, provided it's reasonably accurate and not too laggy?
In terms of occasional use, I was thinking they could be good for loading speeches or music/lyrics when you're up on a stage. But while that seems like it ought to be a fairly trivial feature to implement, as both a software developer and performer, I could see this being more challenging than you think to get a good experience out of that sort of app.
For sure, I mean, we already have had google lens for almost a full decade. Phones already do real-time overlaid translation with nearly no lag through the camera. The glasses can literally just run that same app. Also does real time audio translation.
And for the google ted talk, he was indeed using them as his teleprompter.
I'd prefer a Mandalorian helmet with a removable physical display inside. OK, walking in such a helmet is a bit weird. But better than bigass glasses, since a helmet can at least be supported with something on your shoulders, have weight and pressure distributed better.
What do AR glasses look like in your imagination?
It's pretty hard to tell in real life if someone is wearing a stylish frame or AR glasses. They are a bit thicker than normal glasses need to be, but not as thick as glasses that are just thick for no reason other than to look a certain way.
Is that on the market or just a dream?
Anyway, a transparent display is just as bad as a transparent terminal emulator window. Only good for looks.
A transparent display is necessary for glasses based AR. The parts where stuff is displayed obviously aren't transparent, but when a pixel is off, the screen is transparent in that spot. There have been transparent displays for decades, and smart glasses for at least 5 years, but AR glasses are relatively new, yes. Smart glasses and AR glasses look relatively similar to regular glasses. AR glasses are a little more obvious when they are being actively used, as other people can see the section that isn't transparent. But smart glasses don't have the capability of advanced graphics and are more like a heads up display.
https://youtu.be/gElClXpg4J0?t=2m44s This is a partially pre-staged demo of the ones google is doing, but it does at least show the look of the glasses. And metas second gen ones after orion have slimmed down a bit too. What I have seen of apples looks like they are also going to be pretty slim. But I haven't seen anything past concept stage yet for them, so hard to say how close they'll get to what they are aiming for in the concept.
Are you actually trying to say no one bought iPods or tablets?
iPod's were literally the hottest piece of tech in the world in their heyday
Yeah, ipods wasnt the best example for me to use. the world was supposed to be taken over by tablets and they came and went. And the metaverse. And google glasses. It seems like futurists get it wrong a lot. And I think apple's glasses will inevitably fit in there too.
Screens are stale and old from a product managers perspective but they do the job better than glasses probably ever will. I will furusit predict myself that glasses will ultimately fail to be adopted.
so, the iPhone 17 gonna be the same again then
They know that the government contracts for real time facial recognition via AR will be massive. They want to make a fortune enabling oppression
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This AR obsession is utterly baffling to me. There are so few real applications and the hardware requirements are insane so it's not something that will get widely adapted anyway. Sure in a decade or so it might have matured enough to have shed all these issues, but AR/VR feels like a really out of touch thing to prusue, especially if you look at the garbage ideas they have on how to use it - virtual meetings??
I get movies and games on these, possibly even some recording and porn, but these are not their B2B wet dreams anyway.
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