69 comments
weberer · 12 days ago
I feel like whenever the topic of AR glasses come up, these large companies focus too much on cameras. When really, I'd be happy with just a persistent display that can be in my field of vision. A clock, notifications, maybe a map if I'm walking. I've been using the Viture One glasses as an external monitor and they've been great for privacy in public places. You definitely can't walk around with them since the internal prism messes with your sense of balance. But they are a nice step in the right direction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdc9rcrZW8I

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matwood · 12 days ago
These stories about unreleased Apple products always make me laugh. It's rumored Apple stops working on something they were rumored to be working on.

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kace91 · 12 days ago
Apple's adventures in XR are weird.

I started my career as a dev working in VR apss. At the time there was consensus in the industry that apple was about to release something huge that would push the whole industry to the mainstream - and indeed you couldn't rely on any new VR/AR product or software without it being silently acquired in months and their website redirecting to apple.

Fast forward one decade, nothing's happened yet. I moved to web dev long ago, but people seem to be still waiting.

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iamleppert · 12 days ago
Fast forward to the year 2025. We have ultra-wide monitors that cover our entire field of view for less than $800, don't need to wear bulky headset, and can perfectly maintain our situational awareness without the need for 1 TFLOP of compute and 8 tracking cameras.
jmyeet · 12 days ago
The lesson here is that simply wanting something to be true doesn't make it possible or practical. We also tend to get carried away with sci-fi becoming reality.

You see this constantly where people desperately hope for some form of FTL. They want it to be true and cling to fringe theories because of that.

Companies have been trying to make VR happen for decades. It's not going to happen. Not only do people not want to strap something to their head, there are fundamental technical limitations around latency, true blacks, depth-of-field and what input feels "natural".

People just take Snow Crash and Ready Player One too seriously.

AR is kind of the between of that but it has fundamentaly technical problems and constraints like processing power, energy, true blacks and lag. A true AR experience would have to constantly repaint the overlay as you move your head at incredibly low response time to feel "natural".

Lag will be a major factor with AI chatbots for probably some time to come. The processing loop is basically text to language to embedding into AI model and then converting that token stream to spoken language. That takes time. We're such a long way from something that feels "natural" like talking to another person.

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