I agree. But it’s clear that Apple wasn’t able to deliver anything like that. What they were able to deliver is the Vision Pro. If they’d been able to make it significantly smaller and lighter there’s no doubt they would have.
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I did the demo, its awesome, but I'm still not buying right now
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I agree. But it’s clear that Apple wasn’t able to deliver anything like that. What they were able to deliver is the Vision Pro. If they’d been able to make it significantly smaller and lighter there’s no doubt they would have.
Someone has to make that 3D content. Then someone has to pay them for that content. That someone is Vision owners. Is any major media company going to invest millions in content for a device that has fewer than 500k units installed? How much do you think they’d have to charge each person in order to make their investment back on such a limited user base? $75 per movie? $250 for an F1 event? Who knows. The whole idea is predicated on someone actually spending the money to make it in the first place. Sports will likely be the least accessible content on the platform.
Given the large number of negatives surrounding Vision so far it strikes me as a long shot that many media companies are going to have much interest in it.
Glad there are a handful of people here who appear to have at least some cursory if not more specialized knowledge about technology. Some of the discussions about what the AVP is going to become are largely completely untethered from reality in an unpleasant way.
Especially on key things like how light enters the eye or at what distances the eye functions or how much energy density would be needed to make anything remotely glasses like to work at the level of sophistication some people are imagining…. These aren’t matters of opinion where we’re all on equal footing.
IMO for speculative discussions to be worthwhile we have to have some common understanding and agreement of what’s possibly just behind the horizon of today’s tech and what is pure fantasy. Without that some of these discussions might as well be with children. Perhaps some are LOL.
Especially on key things like how light enters the eye or at what distances the eye functions or how much energy density would be needed to make anything remotely glasses like to work at the level of sophistication some people are imagining…. These aren’t matters of opinion where we’re all on equal footing.
IMO for speculative discussions to be worthwhile we have to have some common understanding and agreement of what’s possibly just behind the horizon of today’s tech and what is pure fantasy. Without that some of these discussions might as well be with children. Perhaps some are LOL.
I mean, yeah, those are the obvious facts. We have no idea if they even considered this tech avenue as opposed to the traditional headset, especially since Google seems to have snapped up and killed the company. It may have allowed them to make a smaller product and get closer to a usable glasses form factor by initial release.
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter, just in interesting potential alternate tech branch that this could have taken.
Reporting over the years has strongly suggested that Apple tried to make glasses and found it impossible. Reporting also suggests that several of the engineers on the Vision project left it in protest believing that it’s not ready for public consumption. So no, I don’t think this could have or will branch into a glasses form factor. There’s not enough room. Where would the heat go? The LiDAR scanners and cameras can’t be eliminated from the system without completely compromising it. You’d lose hand and eye tracking.
I actually disagree. Normally I’d share this sentiment, and you’re certainly right leading up to this point in time. But now that the AVP is out there, there is a renewed concerted effort to bring the evolution of this technology to fruition. Never underestimate what can be achieved with well-funded, concentrated focus at scale.
All while Neuralink continues its slow march towards public adoption. Quantum computing gets ever closer. Heck even artificial intelligence has been having a moment as of late. Screens built into lenses? They’ll figure it out. And it won’t take as long as we thought. I’m no Apple fanboy, but I credit the AVP with recalibrating the estimated time of delivery for such purely fantastical technology.
Look no further than the history of successful computing platforms mixed with capitalism.
Look no further than the history of successful computing platforms mixed with capitalism.
That is a completely generalized reply to a specific question about your very specific claim.
I think you’re assuming a lot with no evidential reason to do so (in this specific case)
Reasonable minds can disagree, and so we will.
Cheers and have a good night
You’re right, that is what I did.
My response was to disagree specifically with the statement that it will take decades (which I define as 20 years or longer) to develop this technology. I find it hard to believe that human technology made it this far, and now we’re just going to sit here forever. I’m simply betting under 20.
Yep. I think it was the founder of an AR company that got sold to Snapchat said the type of AR glasses we're all dreaming about are "well over 10-15 years away." I think what many don't appreciate is that the research path for the kind of technology Apple need to build a compelling "just like your regular pair of glasses" product is not dictated by mere funding or will power, but by the limits of physics and science and the rate of discovery/experimentation within those fields. It will happen but I think even the claim it will happen in 10 years is unrealistic. More like 15-20 and that's optimistic.
It sounds ridiculous until you think about what technology we had 10 years ago. We had the iPhone 6. Can we realistically claim the iPhone 15 is a whole different beast from the iPhone 6? Let's be honest, we can't. I still have a 6 in my room and it's perfectly usable. If I had to use it I wouldn't be missing much (save for software incompatibility). There are still people that use the iPhone 6 today and their experience is not much different from that of a 15 Pro user. That's 10 years worth of refining the same fundamental technology.
12 years ago the first Oculus Rift was demoed. I remember buying one a little under a decade ago. The most reasonable Vision Pro reviews can be summarized as "it's the best we've ever seen in that category" but nobody out there is claiming it's a whole different paradigm than Meta's Quest 3 for example.
When you really break the Vision Pro down what you're left with is fundamentally a repackaged iPhone. That's not a knock against the product, it's just reality. There are new generations of technology in there (micro OLED), yes, but at its core it's an iPhone/iPad. The leap from Vision Pro to AR Glasses is so gigantic that the list of "if we had this we can do it" extends into mostly theoretical technology that either doesn't yet exist or hasn't seen the outside of a lab in years (ultra tiny all day batteries? wireless power over a distance of multiple feet? nano scale displays with micro lenses that provide retina quality images whilst remaining perfectly transparent? lasers beaming the image into your eyeball?). Again, 10 years of refining the technology we already have from iPhone 6 to iPhone 15 and the result is not mindblowing.
I think we'll sooner see the folding phone perfected than the first clunky version of an AR glasses product.
@Zwhaler Capitalism is not a magic bullet that transforms science into a function of 'the more money we throw, the quicker we get there.' Capital helps but there's a reason all of these companies look into research at universities and the startups spun out of them. The cutting edge of fundamental engineering is still dictated by scientists in labs working the same way they've worked for a very long time. Apple, the most valuable consumer hardware company on the planet, has made 'the best Meta Quest ever' according to reviewers and VR hobbyists but they haven't leapfrogged everyone else with some new groundbreaking technology that nobody else has discovered. Everyone is working at the edge of what scientists in labs are capable of discovering. Say what you will about Zuck but he was right: if Meta wanted to build a Vision Pro they could, but whether or not it's the right product for Meta to build is another question entirely.
There's no magic here and throwing money at the problem is not a surefire way to get us there, otherwise Apple would already be doing it and their gigantic war chest would put them leaps and bounds ahead of the competition that have 1/10th of Apple's resources. That's not the case.
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I'm replying to your post typing on my MBP, wearing my Viture XR One Glasses, complete with prescription inserts.
It doesn't seem to be a problem - no transparent OLED required.
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Zero. It already exists.
It just doesn't look as cool as that, and the screens aren't as good, and the field of view isn't as good. But the PPD is 55, so the 1080P content looks very, very good indeed.
You’re not thinking of the future. You’re judging based on what’s available right now and I am stating the tech ideas are all ready there to make this smaller. It just takes time and R&D.
I am not so sure they don’t have something half the weight all ready in development that’s less than three years out. These things take time at scale.
The weight isn’t the main problem. It’s the tunnel vision and the lack of light that makes low quality cameras used display grainy images to the wearer. They don’t work well in a dimly lit room as far as seeing what’s in the room. And the glare sucks when have less light.
Well, back when I was a kid, airplane tech had just gotten to the point where adults around me were talking about how it used to take X hours to fly from A to B, but it now only takes half the time! Yay, progress! So I thought surely if things keep progressing at this rate, by the time I grew up, we'd be able to fly from Tokyo to New York in 5-6 hours. But no, progress in airplane speed stalled, and travel times on airplanes are pretty much the same as when I was a kid. So past progress isn't a guarantee of future progress, and yes, we could very well "sit here forever."
Nice review. However, we won’t get this in a small and light pair of glasses for decades to come.
Just FYI. The AVP is able to work with the MAC Studio. Unlike the laptops you cannot just look at the studio to enable the virtual display, however, you can start a virtual display session from the AVP control center.
If you do keep it, be wary that the outer layer of the front glass is actually plastic, and will scratch.
What most people don't get is that this is never going to happen, not even in 100 years. A pair of glasses can physically never provide all the immersion and rich feature set a full-on headset can. It will get lighter, more comfortable, and improve camera & screen quality over time. But it will never be as small as "glasses". Don't hold your breath on that one.
See? A perfect example not possible with glasses which are open to the sides. Glasses simply are a different use case that exclude any fully immersive experiences. But we might actually get a hybrid device that can be worn similar to glasses all-day with AR features, and optionally you can magnetically attach a light seal with speakers that allow for more immersion for VR experiences. But that's still at least 10 years away.