Apple is rumored to be working on two versions of Vision Pro, however a new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman alleges the Cupertino tech giant is aiming to beat Meta to the punch with a pair of AR glasses. Citing someone with knowledge of the matter, the report maintains Apple CEO Tim Cook has put...
I think the fundamental problem with the AR glasses is something that can't be overcome.
I think its easy to see the utility to owning a pair of glasses that look good and provide real time information as desired for what you are looking at or hearing.
HOWEVER, I think very few people will want the product these co.panies will make. This will be a method to throw ads literally in front of your eyeballs. Enshitification is too big of a thing now and so any new product is tainted by the expectation it will rapidly turn to garbage at a high price to you.
Also, while we may think we can be trusted, we dont trust anyone else having all that info, I dont like the obvious privacy implications that these can present. Filming with them is also terrifying.
Google already made AR glasses and they failed. Not because the product was bad, but because AR is stupid and has such a niche case that it's practically worthless.
I would love to have a good pair of ar glasses to play games on my Steam Deck with. Connect a controller, and not have to hold up the heavy Deck itself.
But given Apple's propensity for walled gardens and lock-in, and Meta putting manipulative spyware into everything they make, these hypothetical glasses won't be coming from either of those companies.
I think this is a case where the imagination is much, much better than the reality.
For the mobilization of technology, miniaturization has had a lot of benefits, not just in the technology, but in the accessibility. Having a desktop computer instead of a mainframe was huge. It brought the computer to the home. Laptops becoming viable was huge again. It untethered the computer from the wall. For most of the planet, we're still in the midst of the massive leap that is smart phones. It put a computer in the pocket of billions of people.
Beating that is hard. Smart phones are the most accessible, most powerful devices most end users have ever used. We take that for granted, and we take the time it took to get there for granted. It took 25 years of desktops to get real, decent laptops (personally, I'd say mid 90s). It took 25 of laptops to get real, decent smartphones (again personally, I'd say ~2010ish).
Like it or not, we have another decade to go probably before the technology is there for the next evolution in personal computing. But the problem we have really is that there's not another leap as far as accessibility is concerned. Smart phones work places where laptops can't. Laptops work places where desktops can't. Desktops work places where mainframes can't. Smart phones can work anywhere. Taking the computer from the datacenter, to the home, to your backpack, to your pocket is huge. Is the next step from the pocket to your wrist? To your face? Is it worth it? Is it really that much better?
They would have been done by now but they're still figuring how to throttle the batteries from afar so folk'll have to buy new and improved ultra next-level glasses after their current pair "dies".
This AR obsession is utterly baffling to me. There are so few real applications and the hardware requirements are insane so it's not something that will get widely adapted anyway. Sure in a decade or so it might have matured enough to have shed all these issues, but AR/VR feels like a really out of touch thing to prusue, especially if you look at the garbage ideas they have on how to use it - virtual meetings??
I get movies and games on these, possibly even some recording and porn, but these are not their B2B wet dreams anyway.
Being able to keep a screen in front of the user at all times is the goal. This is one step closer to replacing the eyes Cyberpunk style.
This is why Siri and Apple Intelligence is so important to Apple, getting away an actual keyboard will make this more addicting. They can decide what to show you before you even start thinking about it!
Corporations would love being able to not only know where you are at all times, but now they have the tech to see exactly what you see!
I’d be interested to hear from the youngest generation (15-20 YO) to hear if they care about this at all.
I’m approaching 50 years old and had been an early adopter most of my adult life. Growing up from the 1980s through 2000s, there was a near-mainstream narrative that we were living in a unique era of emerging technologies. It was exciting and we were anxious for anything new.
It seems to me that nothing is really new and there is nothing exciting, if not interesting, about technology today.
I’ve actually been stripping down the technology from my life as it’s become too distracting to get things done and has prevented personal growth and the formation of memories. For one example, I recently subscribed to a print magazine because I prefer a tangible object that I can associate with in and of itself (and choose to own and collect).
Looking at analog trends like vinyl records and film photography and cassette tapes, it seems like people are at least trying to incorporate tangible objects into a modern lifestyle. Then you have the trend of the dumb phones which indicate people are becoming more aware of the detriments caused by an always connected lifestyle. Thankfully, some car manufacturers are returning buttons to their cars in response to owner feedback about everything being a touch screen.
I mean, I’m not a multi-trillion dollar organization with different departments studying the feasibility of future products but I do wonder if something like AR glasses are already more of our past than our future.
I think there’s a more than reasonable desire for a device to help you through your day - especially in foreign countries. But do you think you want that to be glasses or something else?
Lastly, this reminds me of the prediction from Michio Kaku in Physics of the Future about augmented reality contact lenses. Should we at least accept AR glasses as first step towards contact lenses? Do you think society would accept these 20-40 years in the future?
Honestly, this is probably the next game changing tech. There are lot of uses for AR. Size, style, and battery life are probably the biggest issues to overcome.
This seems like a tech that would be hard to get right? There are a lot of trade-offs involving cost, weight, resolution, processing, battery life, etc.
For my part, I would probably use AR features rather sparingly to maintain my sanity, but they could be very useful in certain narrow applications. Whether these would be sufficient to justify the price tag is uncertain. I also tend to be rough on glasses, so that would be a worry.