Yup. I’ve been watching reviewers on YouTube describe their experiences with the current VR/AR/etc. glasses models, and while many reviewers are filled with nothing but praise for them, as in the first video you link to, it’s easy to find not a small number of reviewers who aren’t entirely happy with any of these glasses, and their criticisms are well-founded, making many people want to wait for something better. The review you link to for the XReal Air Ultra is an example of a nothing-but-positive review, but the first review I found on YouTube right after watching that, of the XReal Air 2 Pro, describes a whole raft of issues with it, and while their Ultra model might be much better, I suspect the reviewer’s many issues with the Pro are present in many or most of the other glasses available now, and so it still illustrates really well the many problems most people might actually have with just about all current models:
As you and that reviewer point out, blurriness is an issue with many of these glasses despite praise for their sharpness, since “sharpness” is in the eye of the beholder—what seems “razor sharp” for some people is actually blurry and just pixelated enough for many or most people to be dissatisfied, even for content that maxes out the resolution of the device.
Other issues that some people are fine with, like comfort, not needing a high FOV, or virtual screens that stay put, etc., are also things that more people won’t be fine with. Most of these glasses do at least one or a few things entirely right, but those things tend to be what too many reviewers focus on when describing their initial reactions, and not enough buyers will want something expensive that does just a subset of things right, out of a list of other things it should also do right. Someone doing a quick and simple review at a tech fair like CES, where the developers are hanging over their head, usually won’t catch a lot of real issues that someone doing a more careful review later at home will find.
It’s probably obvious to most readers of MacRumors, but it should also be pointed out that the quality of the example videos taken with most (all?) of these devices is much higher than the quality the user is actually seeing.
In other words, we’re still seeing a lot of unhelpful hype about these glasses, even from many reviewers. The experience described by the manufacturers and in brief reviews, won’t actually be the experience that most people have. Despite many pluses, there are still a few too many negatives for too many people.
So Apple decided that packing enough decent specs into a pair of specs so that most people would be happy with them, by Apple’s standards, doesn’t seem to be doable with current tech. Maybe Apple will come back to the glasses form factor once the tech improves. Dropping it entirely now, despite the current limitations, might seem like a mistake, but maybe if they come back to it in the next couple years, they’ll still be able to pick up more or less where they left off, though that might not be all that useful if the technology has changed enough that what they learned before is no longer relevant.
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