Will Apple Ever Make AR Smart Glasses?

[subjonas]

I went and installed it - it's called "DaVinci Eye" - the demo had some pictures that you could select, and then you could 'place' them on surfaces in your environment. It seemed to lock the image to the surface (horizontal or vertical) quite well including perspective, almost perfectly (it seemed to change slightly in depth on the surface as I moved around). You could also adjust the transparency of the image on the surface. They advertise it as an aid for drawing. That's all I tried.

I just took a look. Very cool app! That would have been incredibly useful for several analog projects I did in the past. A street chalk painting especially comes to mind. These days though I only work digitally, unfortunately.

 

[lilkwarrior]

Yes, I think you are right about this. Orion is much more compelling, and no doubt Apple do have something in development but they will never tell us [unlike Meta have].
What Meta have done, is provided more confidence in developing for Meta devices, where as currently there is little incentive at all to develop for AVP. Meta also provides some great development tools to create for the Quest 3, Apple on the other hand.....

No doubt though Apple will make better glasses and I have faith long term, but for now Meta are winning in the near term.

…You’re latently saying you prefer spatial computing through glasses, which is fine.

Spatial computing glasses and headsets will co-exist no different than laptops/phones vs desktops with the former being more appealing, minimalist, portable/versatile that is more appealing for mainstream users with very distinct and obvious trade-offs.

Meta is showing off a $10,000 prototype they already said they will dumb down; considering how much they dumbed down Oculus Rift headset business into mediocre headsets sold at unrealistic prices (price loss leader) not even targeting AAA gamers or AAA devs in function (not even possible to play non-VR and VR game as capable as home consoles), I’m very curious what merits your confidence you have of Meta’s spatial computing hardware.

They have consistently failed to make prosumer hardware in every device category, let alone spatial computing hardware; their Quest Pro is outrageously outclassed by the Vision Pro and never appropriately accommodated game devs, creative professionals, and prosumers not even having HDR or picture quality at or above mainstream TVs and monitors.

Their headsets are too limited to enable game devs to make compelling AAA games on par and above with AAA consoles. AAA console gamers want to play games at the quality of Elden Ring, Call of Duty, Ratchet & Clank, Demon Souls, and Returnal—not have their gaming experience reduced to Beat Saber all damn day.

Meta headsets lose 14 billion a single year alone with AAA gamers devs and gamer not interested at the non-AAA gaming capabilities of the Meta Quest headsets at all that essentially are mobile-class-APU-powered headsets unable to have software compelling enough to offset the losses anytime soon.

Besides their metaverse and social media platform aspirations, Meta is banking on first mover advantages finding the bare minimum cost mainstream audiences will pay and technology advancing to steadily have it then feasible for AAA gamers to buy the product.

They want to be the first in to that point; that’s frankly no secret being bankrolled by non-spatial-computing endeavors.

That’s crappy for AAA gamers, devs, serious startups that want to be in the space that can’t compete at such unrealistic prices, and prosumers.


Apple who isn’t into gaming created a prosumer headset that actually meet established baselines for prosumers including premium home content providing premium HDR (Dolby Vision HDR).

VisonOS for the headset and future spatial computing hardware is already much better than Meta’s Horizon OSes not needing controllers to be used and so on.

For gaming it won’t be preferred as the sole omission.

Based on outcomes so far and their existing ecosystems/resources, Apple’s Prosumer AR glasses is far more believable to succeed over Meta’s.

Meta again doesn’t have the reputation nor hardware ecosystem to compare with an Apple prosumer product at this time.

They’re also too cheap to actually make compelling prosumer hardware so far.

It’s also unlikely they will be the source for gamers of compelling mainstream AR glasses for AAA gamers.

For casual computer users, they’re hoping their willingness to take billions of dollars in losses will give them an advantage with that audience that they can then capitalize winning back AAA gamers and spatial computing enthusiasts who see right through their BS proliferating spatial computing mediocrity.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

AVP is one of those products that people love to criticize in its original form but will later say "oh, everyone knew that this product category was the future".

Reid Hoffman said “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

What I find most interesting is, where I thought that the first thing Meta would actually introduce after the Apple Vision Pro would be somewhat of a challenger, it’s pretty much just as far behind AVP as their prior system was. Just like Tesla, when they realize that what they had to wouldn’t cut it, they showed off imaginary products that will never ship in that state OR will be so late to market that Apple will at least be on their second iteration.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

My only desire for AR glasses has been to provide training data such as pace, power, HR, etc in real time. I currently have it spoken to me, but this has limitations (how often do you want to be told x,y, or z?).

Every single time I ask. I know some people that just don’t like hearing a voice telling them things, it reminds them of painful childhood memories OR just doesn’t align with the way they like to live life. But for me, if I can be told a turn is coming up, or that my timer is almost up or that the call is coming from an unknown number I’m choosing that over looking at a screen or indicator.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

The Orion stole Apple's thunder. Though the Vision Pro is available for sale now and Meta's Orion won't be for some years, if you're a developer you probably have little interest in making apps for the Vision Pro given it seems the Orion form factor is a lot more compelling so why waste investing in a dead end platform. Apple should pivot hard to true AR glasses, the trade offs they made to get the AVP where it is are probably a dead end. Apple however does have the chops to pull off their own version of Orion, I'm sure it'll be better than Meta's in every possible way.

If one is a developer one would have little interest in making apps for Vision Pro (where, if your app takes off, you could sell a few tens of thousands of copies and have an audience looking forward to buying your next or telling users of the second generation system that yours is one if the first apps they should buy… “support the developer, they’ve been around doing good work for awhile”) and instead one would find developing for a platform that will not see the light of day for three years at BEST a better decision? ok

 

[Unregistered 4U]

While the weight bothers some, I take 10-minute breaks every hour and have adapted (the next gen needs to lose a few lbs though).

I think this highlights something Apple has said previously. They’re not building these for folks to live in for hours at a time (though some very well may do so). Their vision is different from Meta’s, Meta needs people wearing them constantly to make money via ads. Apple’s expectation is that people would have a need for them, put them on for that purpose and, when they’re done, take them off.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

When they provide a less meaningful update the complaints are deafening (see: AirPods Max).

The EU said electronics have to be USB-C by December 2024. We’ll see other currently lightning products also get updated with no or minor updates.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

As I understand it, motion sickness is the reason why VP processing can't be offloaded to the iPhone. The VP pass-through works by capturing images of your environment with its cameras, and displaying them in real time in the tiny screens in front of your eyes. Any lag between the image being captured and displayed contributes to motion sickness, and sending image data to iPhone and waiting for it to come back causes enough of a delay for this to become a problem.

Obviously, not an issue if you are just doing total VR and shutting out the real world completely, but if you want to be able to see and interact with your real life environment while wearing VP, then processing needs to take place on-device.

When I checked recently, there’s only one other product that has a photon to pixel time remotely close to Apple Vision Pro at 12 ms. What Apple has done here is so far beyond pretty much every tethered system out there, that people don’t even realize that tethering was only ever for solving the problem of not having a cool performant system right at the source of the motion, the source of the image tracking, etc. Once one exists, (Apple has theirs, the competition is working to get there) there’s no longer a need for a tether and, in fact, it only worsens the experience.

 

[Lynxpoint]

Every single time I ask. I know some people that just don’t like hearing a voice telling them things, it reminds them of painful childhood memories OR just doesn’t align with the way they like to live life. But for me, if I can be told a turn is coming up, or that my timer is almost up or that the call is coming from an unknown number I’m choosing that over looking at a screen or indicator.

I 'love' having voice feedback, but it doesn't work for me for all cases. It is great having pace, power, distance, etc relayed via headset on long runs where I am running by feel (which I am reasonably good at). Where real-time data would be nice is in sprints or other training sessions, for example, 400m recovery, 200m at 5k pace, where I could know if I am holding a constant pace or mildly over shooting or under shooting. In a 200m sprint, I will be lucky if I get one audio report on pace/cadence/power/etc. My memory of which sprint I did what in is pretty poor, so looking at the data afterward and trying to recall what I was thinking I was doing on sprint 4 does not work out.