This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
I feel like it's a CEO's job to care about all aspects of the company he is supposed to lead.
Nope. Only profit.
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?
It does ruin most things doesn't it? 😮💨
And I care zero about ever purchasing those things.
Does anyone even want AR glasses? I don't.
yes, not from apple though. That's a guarantee they would be useless for a tinkerer
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.
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.
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.
In the current US political climate, giving everyone glasses with always-on cameras run by big tech companies seems particularly dangerous.
I agree. But unfortunately, nobody gives a flying fuck.
I’d really just like some glasses that simulate multiple monitors without needing special software. That’s all I want
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.
Google already made AR glasses and they failed. Not because the product was bad, but because AR is stupid and has such a niche case that it's practically worthless.
Good, I wanna see Apple flop just like Meta's VR nonsense did.
Why do you people hate VR?
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.
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.
Having borrowed a quest 3 last week I’ve almost pulled trigger on buying one.
The only thing holding me back is.. it’s Meta.
Luigi :)
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 would have to be so good to be what these guys want them to be and the technology is just not there yet.
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?
Classic Tim Apple.
There are a lot of things at Apple that I, as the paying customer, would rather Cook care more about than AR/VR boondoggles.
Guess what Tim Apple? No one wants them just like no one wanted your stupid headset that I honestly can't even remember what it was called.
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.
I don't want ads thrown into my eyeballs. So that's a big no from me.
I agree with you fully. It's a sad state that we can't even imagine wearable glasses tech without invasive ads
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'd be a little more enthused if both companies main goal from this wasn't to make us work while wearing them.
