I so want Apple's AR Glasses to come to fruition, if only to disrupt the eyeglasses industry that is dominated by the monopoly Luxottica. Luxottica owns nearly all the major eyeglasses and retailers, and their products have 1000% markup.
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Apple AR Glasses Reportedly Still at Least Four Years Away From Launch
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4 years likely more but I do think this is the real future of tech so it will take time that's for sure.
Um, I tell people what they want is years away or probably impossible all the time, and they're still happy to pay me. Sometimes the technology just isn't ready yet, sometimes it will never be ready.
Imagine your boss asking you for 3840x2160 resolution video over the internet in 1993. Hey, the web exists now, give me streaming 4k video! I mean, a 45 megabit connection was only about $32,000/month, everybody can afford that, right? Wasn't gonna happen, was it?
That's a pretty extreme example, but R&D takes time, not every project can be done by the end of the week.
Like everything else, the use case will end up being ads.
I don't want them. I don't want every surface in the real world being turned into a billboard. And you know it'll happen.
Apple’s incredibly slow production times are unreal.
They’ve been working on the Apple Car for nearly ten years. Tesla was incorporated in 2003 and had their first car out five years later with the Model S out in 2012.
It sounds like even the AR goggles for this coming WWDC have been rushed. And four more years for these AR glasses?
Not to mention their snails pace for updates to products like the Mac Pro. Honestly, what is taking them so long?
They’ve been working on the Apple Car for nearly ten years. Tesla was incorporated in 2003 and had their first car out five years later with the Model S out in 2012.
It sounds like even the AR goggles for this coming WWDC have been rushed. And four more years for these AR glasses?
Not to mention their snails pace for updates to products like the Mac Pro. Honestly, what is taking them so long?
How can you know this without knowing how the glasses work? The question I have is how a person's eyes can focus on a screen that is so close without some optics between the screen and the eye? This is not a technology issue, it is basic science you can't get around.
OK so now we know 100% for sure there is no screen or at least not a screen like we have seen on other products. It simply can't be done with any technology. It must work with no screen.
So they use a projector. The image must be somehow projected into the eye with a rear-facing system. Now we can discuss the technology needed for that. Perhaps it would look like a cellphone camera, but with a tiny display screen where the camera sensor would go? Or perhaps that use a laser scanner to "print" the image on the eye. This would help solve the batter and heat issue, as it would need only some nanowatts of power.
With lasers, they could power the projector with an in-frame battery. But the computer would still need to be larger than would fit in the frame. Maybe a tether to a cell phone sized box.
But without knowing how it works, we only guess.
Use the Magic Leap 2 and you’ll have a clear line of sight for a product up to Apple standards. Affordability (~1.5k?) will take much longer.
There is no Apple car. It's not coming ever.
Apple is playing with some car-related technologies. They're not building a car. It's a long-running research project, not a product in development.
As far as actual product updates? I have no idea, and there really is no excuse. There was even less excuse when they were using Intel chips, new reference designs came out from Intel all the time, all Apple had to do was design the physical board layout and put it in a machine. We should have seen new models across the product line every 6 months. It's like Apple has one guy doing all the engineering instead of the multiple teams that we know they have to have.
But for AR glasses? For them to not be complete ****, they're going to have to have display technology that doesn't exist yet. Four years is optimistic.
Oh, and Tesla was working on their first car for almost 10 years. The original roadster was a Lotus car with a Tesla motor and badges. And they still don't do it well, Teslas are some of the worst built cars since the Yugo.
It’s an educated guess, because AR glasses have been an obvious “next big thing” for two decades or so now, and any technology suitable for it will be pursued with vigor by the industry. But so far we haven’t really heard of such tech, and several major technological breakthroughs would be needed to make AR glasses a reality. Those usually don’t happen within just a couple years.
About your idea of projection, I don’t see this as viable, because it would be purely additive to the image your eyes see without glasses. For example, if you look at a white wall or a blue sky, you won’t be able to project dark text over it. This rather severely limits what you could do in AR terms. You could only display ghost-like brighter-than-the-environment objects, and could only really use the glasses in relative darkness. True AR glasses would need the ability to selectively filter out light coming from the environment.
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The AR has a camera. The things you see are a combination of real time video from the world and generated images. The light from the world never gets to your eyes so bright surfaces don’t mean anything but they are real time adjusted to work with the other images.
You are talking about XR (what Apple’s upcoming headset will do), not AR. The hypothetical AR glasses from this article’s title are about see-through glasses.
The idea of AR Glasses is good. No issues there. Do these glasses solve a problem? Yes. Personally this is the product Apple should do R&D. But the whole idea of VR headset no it’s literally a waste of time. It’s not gonna sell well and people don’t like wearing something strapped to their face. No brainer. But hey Apple has money to burn 🔥
It will happen when it’s meant to happen. Iterating on the headset for awhile will probably get them there. More adoption of the headset may get people used to a device that is sort of between AR glasses and a headset as another intermediary step.
This rumor always felt unfeasible to me. It would still need to be powered by some sort of headset.
Hard to understand why so many commenters appear to have difficulty understanding that VR and AR are completely different things. Different products, different markets, different purposes and use cases, different operational environments, different hardware and software, different technology, and so on. The only relationship between them is that they go on your face and are primarily visual oriented devices. Same way that computers, tablets, smartphones, smart watches, etc. are all different things that serve different markets and purposes, with the only commonality that they share some fundamentals of technology. Which is why many people (probably almost everyone here) owns and uses products in more than one of these categories - quite commonly all of them. If VR and AR eventually measure up to their promise, most of us will eventually end up owning devices in both categories, because the purpose of one is to put you into a fully artificial reality unconstrained by the limits of the physical world, but the purpose of the other is to enhance your interaction with the real physical world around you. There is a time & place for each, not a question of either/or. Neither does one evolve into the other merely because they share certain enabling technologies.
in practice, most likely VR will reach technological critical mass to become a mass market item before AR. We might find out on June 5th, but sounds like possibly Apple has devised a VR product that can measure up to general market expectations using available technology. It sure seems like practical and desirable AR will require technology still beyond the state of the art. Especially battery technology - hard to see how AR reaches even initial expectations without solid state battery technology, which seems to be perpetually just about here now.
in practice, most likely VR will reach technological critical mass to become a mass market item before AR. We might find out on June 5th, but sounds like possibly Apple has devised a VR product that can measure up to general market expectations using available technology. It sure seems like practical and desirable AR will require technology still beyond the state of the art. Especially battery technology - hard to see how AR reaches even initial expectations without solid state battery technology, which seems to be perpetually just about here now.
Battery is less of an issue than lenses. Pass-through AR is not true AR and wouldn’t work on this form factor.
AR glasses should sell more than a AR/VR headset. Price will play a key role.
The issue is that there is a lot of overlap in how the terms are used. When the term AR is used with phones/tablets, it means that a camera captures live video from the real world, and that video is displayed on the device's screen, and some virtual objects are rendered on top of that video feed.
Most VR headsets have a similar "AR" capability, and I'm guessing Apple's version will be more advanced than the "AR" on any other consumer VR headset. Before long, almost all VR headsets will have similar video passthrough features that are more advanced than those in today's headsets.
But I think the more useful differentiator is whether the device is transparent or opaque.
Unless Apple prevents their AR glasses from recording, there AR glasses will suffer the same fate as Google AR glasses did which is that society will not accept people walking around with glasses that can record what is going on around them every hour of the day. Whilst there is an abundance of CCTV camera's everywhere, their use is regulated in many parts of the world, meaning you cannot just take CCTV footage and upload it to social media when ever the mood takes you. This will not be the case of AR glasses. The wearer will be able to record at anytime they want and anywhere they want and then upload it to social media. Google suffered a backlash on these because many critics complained about intrusion into peoples privacy. Just because people are out and about in public it does not mean they consent to having their lives intruded upon by AR glass wearers (google AR glasses price was also a cause for concern).
Unless Apple address the recording issue, their AR glasses will suffer the same fate as Google's AR glasses.
Unless Apple address the recording issue, their AR glasses will suffer the same fate as Google's AR glasses.
I think AR glasses in 4 years is very optimistic. The challenges of component size and power usage are significant, it will more likely be something like 10 years.