Form factor for AR is literally like nuclear fusion at the moment. I don’t know when they are going to get it looking like normal fucking glasses, but until then, no one is going outside with this shit.
They have to pivot this soon enough to a cheap at-home AR thingy.
VR is, IMHO, a fundamentally flawed concept. To immerse yourself, you need to block out your peripheral vision and everything else.
The average, casual user isn't going to do that on a regular basis. It's not something you can do with kids around if you need to keep an eye on them, unlike a book or a TV show or even a game on your phone or laptop.
Fundamentally, immersion is a selling point to a very specific audience, and a major drawback to everyone else.
Accounts of the work suggest ski goggle like size for the first release.
But, form factor and weight are just some of the things that influence customer experience.
Apple’s other efforts, such as retinal authentication and automatic, motor-driven pupil distance adjustment remove other points of friction that interfere with enjoyment.
Apple identifies many rough edges in HW and SW that hold back a category.
Then it makes difficult compromises, sanding down a combination of them enough to meet release consideration.
It's ridiculous! Even more so because the underlying patented materials tech has been timing out on the shelf gathering dust for over a decade.
All companies working in the XR/AR/VR/ghost-in-the-snowcrash-shell-gargoyle space need to do in order to develop something widely accessible/affordable, mass-producible and mass-market adoptable while operating within the constraints of currently viable, high yield, low loss rate fabrication feasible tech is.... shoot for wearable display glasses that are in the product line's slimmest tier simply sunshade size, and at the beefiest, a ski-gogglesque form factor. They do this by stopping trying to jam everything and the GPU-plated kitchen sink into the headset.
Restrict design scope of the HUD-glasses to a binocular retina-or-better-resolution MEMS-based display, and maybe a few small, lightweight multispectral sensors and an accelerometer for environment mapping and multi-axis positioning.
Everything else can be connected via a clipped on snagsafe/magsafe cable from a waist, upper arm or torso wearable primary device unit encompassing main battery, SoC, storage, etc; and this could feasibly be the user's next-gen upgrade smartphone.
Plenty of people would though if it would work well. It doesn't though. And sticking your phone in front of something really isn't going to work imho. But I would definitely wear them outside as interim solution, not the entire day, but normally I walk to places (4-10 km/day) and a lot of that is boring and spent thinking of on my phone or both. I would wear them there.
The TCL RayNeo X2 looks pretty ok, however, i'm not sure what it really does. It says it will send out to devs soon, so it means there are apps and the reviews during CES don't look bad, but there is no pricing, specs etc. At least not that I could find.
Apple are apparently working on this area, they've got 2 products coming out. The VR headset (with passthorugh) likely this year, and an AR set of glasses (with options for prescription lenses) which will do the whole projecting into your field of vision thing.
There's no leaks or concepts of what they're actually doing with the AR ones as far as I know though so not a clue what they look like. If anyone can get those right it will be Apple with their ability to do high performance tiny compute.
Even worse is their vision of people playing complete idiots in public places --yeah, I'm just gonna do virtual fencing in the middle of a crowded street and make myself vulnerable to assailants. The park, yes, that works but a busy street, are they just out of touch with reality?
No one wanted to wear glasses when they first came out, or use umbrellas or ride bikes. Everything is embarrassing at first until it becomes normalized.
Honestly, I've seen less compelling AR applications than I've seen VR ones. Between Windows Mixed Reality, Pokemon Go and the AR Lowe's app, there's not really a whole lot of compelling AR use-cases. VR at least has an entertainment niche, which gave us the likes of Beat Saber, Half Life: Alyx and an IMAX experience in the comfort of your sofa. Neither one seems poised to succeed IMO, but the push for AR adoption seems to be a top-down decision, not one driven by profound demand.
I'm somewhat skeptical though I'm sure I'll be proven wrong.
In my mind, AR glasses will make the world as shitty as most clickbait webpages. Ads EEEEEEVVVVEEERRRYYYWWWWHHHEEERRRREEE. Notifications all the time. Virtual billboards trying to grab your attention.
I can't think of the obvious use cases, except for virtual monitors, that are all that compelling.
Map navigation? Ok, well, it's not that bad now in non-VR
Info on people in your view? Maybe, but if think protecting your privacy is bad now you'll need much less of it for that to actually work.
Virtual pets running around your room? Seems 15 minutes of wow and then done. Plus the hard part of designing them to interact with your environment vs a pre-designed environment.
Games? Same problem as above, they have to adapt to the actual world vs current games where designers can design and build levels and worlds. So 1 or 2 Pokemon Go type of games and then you'll go back to playing PS6 or VR.
Porn? Same problem. The 3D video won't match your sofa, chair, living room, bed.
Virtual UI? People are already complaining that screens in cars are not as good as knobs. do I really want to have to put on my glasses to adjust my knobless stove?
All that said, I'd probably have made similar arguments against smartphones and been just as wrong :P
I think augmented reality is hard. Practically speaking VR only needs to create an image, while AR needs to create and register an image in space and time.
All photos appear to show AR overlaid on the world in front of the user, while the design of the headset is like a teleprompter mirror so you're looking at the world directly, with ghost of AR reflected at angle from phone above.
If Pokemon GO had this during its hay-day the dork factor would have been socially acceptable.
The number of people from young kids to grandmas running around in groups was _insanely_ cool to see. I'm sad there simply wasn't enough content to keep it up the drive. I wanted to do missions/dungeon crawls/talk to NPCs etc.
This would have made the go experience 100x more fun... can you imagine a Charizard standing on top of my local mall?! omg. All of us using our captures to take over an objective.
I get where you're coming from, but I think we all forget how much we looked like dorks out playing pokemon go. The difference was we were dorks in large groups. If you and a friend are doing this together, you're no longer a dork. You're going your own way.
This is where I think Glass got it wrong. They made it feel exclusive when they should've been giving them away.
I can see the killer app being something practical, like being able to look at a recipe and watch a video for food prep while I’m doing food prep. Or being able to look at an engine bay and diagnose am issue and see parts identified as I look and point at them.
In fall 1999 the wife of one of my co-workers call me and 4 other co-workers all dorks because we were using cell phones. Now I'm sure she's more addicted to her's than her husband.
I find this product fascinating. The design looks ugly, but I can see how they got there. Mixing the real world and iPhone display in the way they are is super interesting. As is the decision to leave the edge of iPhone for touch input. Also interesting to see them leveraging Apple technologies so heavily. I can't really see this gaining any real market, but I like some of these design choices.
Agreed. Looks like they're using a half silvered mirror for the real world pass-through which was a technique used by early arcade games like Space Invaders that projected black and white graphics over a painted background.
HoloKit, originally a Google Cardboard-like AR device for the iPhone, has been relaunched as a more premium $150 iPhone accessory. Unfortunately no SDK available anymore (for now at least).
> HoloKit, originally a Google Cardboard-like AR device for the iPhone, has been relaunched
Is it more than a premium version of Google Cardboard? I can't tell. The "Technical Specs" mention "optical lenses" but otherwise mention no hardware details--well, other than the bring-your-own items (iPhone, Airpods, Apple Watch)...
I bought one and regretted it as there is a strict no return policy. My purpose was possibly using it for AR development but I found the experience not much better than Google Day Dream, as far as I can remember, and possibly worse because the hard plastic molding made it harder to position your phone. Also I missed the Daydream remote.
On the upside it disabused me of the idea that AR was any closer to ready at a relatively low consumer price point.
Per typical AR product, the preview videos were wildly better quality than the actual experience.
I saw a bunch of these types of things at a Japanese gadget show in 2018. One interesting idea that one had colored rings to wear. The colors made it easier to do finger motion tracking.
I predict the first successful AR product for mass market consumers will be simple glasses that block real world ads with basic rectangles or pixelation.
Your own personalized moments in time play back at Times Square. Or subtlety getting me to learn Spanish by injecting it on things… actually hang on while I parent that last one.
This is doing all the right things and I think I'll get one, though I think their product videos are doing a disservice showing people playing in crowded areas. Show people playing in parks surrounded by people bored on picnic blankets. If it's in a crowded area, show assisted navigation.
We'll know they're onto something if people are messing with these in Dolores Park when the weather turns nice in April.
Is this kind of plastic phone holder always the first step for something breaks into the market? VR had that everywhere after the Oculus Rift dev came out and things were hyped up; I picked some up at the airport because there were huge stacks of them next to the cash register. It was very fiddly to get your phone in without pressing all buttons and messing it up so you had to take it out because you cannot configure it while in the holder.
Which brings me to the biggest issue; input. Speech is often awful as input, especially when in public or noisy environments (no, airpods pro don't filter out noise nearly well enough). It's ok for casual things like checking the weather or replying 'yeah thanks' to an email, but for actual work, speech sucks. Now most people won't be doing that anyway, so who cares? I care and I know many other people I know do; even as the input for phones, so that's a large enough group to warrant experimentation. I experimented with a one hand chording keyboard and it works well; it doesn't take a lot of time to learn, it is quite fast, especially mixed with speech input (create long text with speech and fix it with the chording keyboard for instance) and it seems perfect for AR; if only the the little joystick and a few buttons makes a massive difference over the clunky speech/pointing interfaces. I just wish there were more options; the one that's there (Twiddler) is too expensive.
I'm now trying to work with a split keyboard as input, but the problem really is that those have no pointer. Otherwise it's really quite great (if you don't care how it looks of course, but it's early days), because if you touch type, it's not slower than when you are sat down, almost immediately after trying it (they are qwerty).
While there are many companies experimenting with input for AR/VR, and I have tried all publicly available demos/releases of such input, it's all clunky and slow. Touchscreen and speech are faster, but nothing beats a keyboard and a mouse; I think a lot more research could be spent on that, but as most people will be using devices (including computers with keyboards and mice) for consumption only, there is no financial incentive?
Does this have an embedded microphone for audio input? I quickly skimmed the tech specs and it looks like the answer is "no" (presumably if you want that, the intention is that you use AirPods/some other Bluetooth input device).
I wouldn't be surprised if it just fell back to the iPhone itself when you didn't have AirPods. It'd be a pretty crap audio experience (both input and output) in comparison though.
Very interested in this. Tho I feel a bit sad as I had an idea for this precise product years ago and built some crappy cardboard prototypes but never quite got it far enough along to make anything of it. Understanding optics was something I got stuck on. The "damn, that could've been me if I'd worked harder" feeling stings.
Congratulations to the team. If and when they release an Android version I'll buy one straight away.
Juding by the comments they should perhaps market this more for home use and less for out in public. Still, I think this has the potential to be definitely very fun and possibly very useful.
We originally launched the Mira Prism in this market in 2017 before pivoting to enterprise. https://www.mirareality.com/
It looks like they have much better software than we had at launch, though.
The experience for phone-based headsets is really pretty good. The issue is that it’s a really hard sell for consumers at that price point for seemingly a piece of plastic, and the price point is necessary for the optics unless you have massive volume. The other issue is of course the bulky form factor.
Worth remembering that both Google Glass and Microsoft Hololens found a very niche market on training and technical assistance on industrial machines maintenance.
It feels like AR hasn't really gotten much more advanced in the past decade. This looks like a HoloLens demo from 7 years ago. Feels like the whole space has stagnated. I know Apple plans to release something soon, but will it really be a big leap? I'm not so sure. Obviously, the M chips will help it, but it still has some fundamental flaws as an idea. Though I find it more exciting than VR.
one interesting 'hack' that could be done with an AR headset's output would be its ability to project onto a film which is on the inside of a windscreen, and interacting with the OBD (or whatever the EVs have) and giving a HUD of the available data it received.
This would allow using a [PI/Whatever] to interact with the systems avail to the OBD, slurp that and display onto the HUD-film on the windscreen...
With the ability to display HUD info in even the most analog of vehicles...
(I havent figured out how to make the HUD cheap or safe based on this comment - but in higher-end options, flex OLED film layers on the glass... or a small projector which simply projects onto a semi-opaque area in the lower-center section of the vehicle, with a simple device, pico projector (with a BRIGHT light) onto a smei-opaque sticker above the dash.
Full screen HUD integration is cool, but expensive.
but we have all the tools and resources to make this happen....
Just make sure that Apple 'iWindscreen/shield' never makes it into the wild....
run the PI in the machine, and track your bullshit in a new way (as tied in with vid cams...)
Really interesting setup. Can see quite a few industry-specific applications for this in my area where we'd consider Google Glass but is simply too closed down / too expensive at the moment.
Hope it does well, but I can't really look into it until they open the SDK. The "curated partners" thing doesn't inspire much confidence.
I feel for the poor souls who were accidentally captured on the recordings - they don't look too pleased. I do worry that one of my kids is going to get trampled by an adult who can't see because he's too busy slaying a dragon. We have already had a lot of near misses with people on e-scooters!
Not a very original or clever form factor. At least design it more like the Mira Prism (https://www.mirareality.com/) where the phone position is closer to your head and have a large open FOV. I get that they want to expose the phones back camera for tracking - but use some fancy mirrors or something?
Ultimately this is very google cardboard like and passive so $129 is quite expensive.
I built a fun toy like this in the early 2000’s for $10 using foam board and a $5 sheet of teleprompter glass.
Ultimately anything like this has failed to capture the market because people just don’t want to have their phones out of reach and/or risk their battery using the camera/tracking.
it seems they really wanted for iphone to think that it in the correct position, like if it was in the user hand. Otherwise placing phone horizontally, flipping image and using some kind of periscope for the camera would make a more compact and much less "dorky" looking device.
Is it supposed to run existing iphone AR apps too?
> seems they really wanted for iphone to think that it in the correct position
I think they have this shape since it’s quite simple optics to have the iPhone screen be a “reflection” on the glasses while you can still see straight out through it. Kinda like looking out a window at night and seeing both your reflection and the outside at once.
Existing AR apps lack stereoscopic support and lack interaction model needed for this. But wouldn't be hard to add support for this. Basically just a presentation and UI level change.
You are probably not the target audience if that confuses you. Modern "zoomer" design takes a lot of inspiration from geocities and the webdesign that was popular before they were born.
jesuscript|3 years ago
They have to pivot this soon enough to a cheap at-home AR thingy.
VR headsets are getting smaller at least:
https://en.shiftall.net/products/meganex
I would suspect Apple will never release something that isn’t as small as that.
zdragnar|3 years ago
The average, casual user isn't going to do that on a regular basis. It's not something you can do with kids around if you need to keep an eye on them, unlike a book or a TV show or even a game on your phone or laptop.
Fundamentally, immersion is a selling point to a very specific audience, and a major drawback to everyone else.
michaelgold|3 years ago
So I can help answer the question of why it looks this way? Optics :)
Technical details are in the patent for the cardboard version from 2017:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20180011327A1/en
bredren|3 years ago
But, form factor and weight are just some of the things that influence customer experience.
Apple’s other efforts, such as retinal authentication and automatic, motor-driven pupil distance adjustment remove other points of friction that interfere with enjoyment.
Apple identifies many rough edges in HW and SW that hold back a category.
Then it makes difficult compromises, sanding down a combination of them enough to meet release consideration.
napier|3 years ago
All companies working in the XR/AR/VR/ghost-in-the-snowcrash-shell-gargoyle space need to do in order to develop something widely accessible/affordable, mass-producible and mass-market adoptable while operating within the constraints of currently viable, high yield, low loss rate fabrication feasible tech is.... shoot for wearable display glasses that are in the product line's slimmest tier simply sunshade size, and at the beefiest, a ski-gogglesque form factor. They do this by stopping trying to jam everything and the GPU-plated kitchen sink into the headset.
Restrict design scope of the HUD-glasses to a binocular retina-or-better-resolution MEMS-based display, and maybe a few small, lightweight multispectral sensors and an accelerometer for environment mapping and multi-axis positioning.
Everything else can be connected via a clipped on snagsafe/magsafe cable from a waist, upper arm or torso wearable primary device unit encompassing main battery, SoC, storage, etc; and this could feasibly be the user's next-gen upgrade smartphone.
tluyben2|3 years ago
Plenty of people would though if it would work well. It doesn't though. And sticking your phone in front of something really isn't going to work imho. But I would definitely wear them outside as interim solution, not the entire day, but normally I walk to places (4-10 km/day) and a lot of that is boring and spent thinking of on my phone or both. I would wear them there.
The TCL RayNeo X2 looks pretty ok, however, i'm not sure what it really does. It says it will send out to devs soon, so it means there are apps and the reviews during CES don't look bad, but there is no pricing, specs etc. At least not that I could find.
esskay|3 years ago
There's no leaks or concepts of what they're actually doing with the AR ones as far as I know though so not a clue what they look like. If anyone can get those right it will be Apple with their ability to do high performance tiny compute.
RF_Savage|3 years ago
There is only so much magic one can squeeze out from optical trickery. Especially at a price point like this.
unknown|3 years ago
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gfodor|3 years ago
mc32|3 years ago
digitaltrees|3 years ago
gnopgnip|3 years ago
colordrops|3 years ago
amelius|3 years ago
Haga|3 years ago
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stranded22|3 years ago
I’m not sure if I’d like to walk around the streets wearing them though - would be incredibly annoying to other people and a risk of being stolen.
smoldesu|3 years ago
gernb|3 years ago
In my mind, AR glasses will make the world as shitty as most clickbait webpages. Ads EEEEEEVVVVEEERRRYYYWWWWHHHEEERRRREEE. Notifications all the time. Virtual billboards trying to grab your attention.
I can't think of the obvious use cases, except for virtual monitors, that are all that compelling.
Map navigation? Ok, well, it's not that bad now in non-VR
Info on people in your view? Maybe, but if think protecting your privacy is bad now you'll need much less of it for that to actually work.
Virtual pets running around your room? Seems 15 minutes of wow and then done. Plus the hard part of designing them to interact with your environment vs a pre-designed environment.
Games? Same problem as above, they have to adapt to the actual world vs current games where designers can design and build levels and worlds. So 1 or 2 Pokemon Go type of games and then you'll go back to playing PS6 or VR.
Porn? Same problem. The 3D video won't match your sofa, chair, living room, bed.
Virtual UI? People are already complaining that screens in cars are not as good as knobs. do I really want to have to put on my glasses to adjust my knobless stove?
All that said, I'd probably have made similar arguments against smartphones and been just as wrong :P
m463|3 years ago
Terretta|3 years ago
All photos appear to show AR overlaid on the world in front of the user, while the design of the headset is like a teleprompter mirror so you're looking at the world directly, with ghost of AR reflected at angle from phone above.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
jaChEWAg|3 years ago
r00fus|3 years ago
1. The dork factor is still in play here. I don't see this being popular by any means, so there needs to be a killer app.
2. I need to see a nice AR game like Pokemon GO integrated with this. I imagine that's the first/best killer app.
irjustin|3 years ago
The number of people from young kids to grandmas running around in groups was _insanely_ cool to see. I'm sad there simply wasn't enough content to keep it up the drive. I wanted to do missions/dungeon crawls/talk to NPCs etc.
This would have made the go experience 100x more fun... can you imagine a Charizard standing on top of my local mall?! omg. All of us using our captures to take over an objective.
We're nearly there.
madrox|3 years ago
This is where I think Glass got it wrong. They made it feel exclusive when they should've been giving them away.
eric-hu|3 years ago
gernb|3 years ago
jjfoooo4|3 years ago
notnotjake|3 years ago
tjmc|3 years ago
pdnell|3 years ago
Looks interesting. Has anyone here tried it?
bee_rider|3 years ago
thinkling|3 years ago
Is it more than a premium version of Google Cardboard? I can't tell. The "Technical Specs" mention "optical lenses" but otherwise mention no hardware details--well, other than the bring-your-own items (iPhone, Airpods, Apple Watch)...
secretsatan|3 years ago
jelling|3 years ago
On the upside it disabused me of the idea that AR was any closer to ready at a relatively low consumer price point.
Per typical AR product, the preview videos were wildly better quality than the actual experience.
surprisetalk|3 years ago
Spectator mode was also an incredible idea.
Kudos to HoloKit's design team!
gernb|3 years ago
manscrober|3 years ago
TylerE|3 years ago
w-ll|3 years ago
xwdv|3 years ago
SV_BubbleTime|3 years ago
madrox|3 years ago
We'll know they're onto something if people are messing with these in Dolores Park when the weather turns nice in April.
tluyben2|3 years ago
Which brings me to the biggest issue; input. Speech is often awful as input, especially when in public or noisy environments (no, airpods pro don't filter out noise nearly well enough). It's ok for casual things like checking the weather or replying 'yeah thanks' to an email, but for actual work, speech sucks. Now most people won't be doing that anyway, so who cares? I care and I know many other people I know do; even as the input for phones, so that's a large enough group to warrant experimentation. I experimented with a one hand chording keyboard and it works well; it doesn't take a lot of time to learn, it is quite fast, especially mixed with speech input (create long text with speech and fix it with the chording keyboard for instance) and it seems perfect for AR; if only the the little joystick and a few buttons makes a massive difference over the clunky speech/pointing interfaces. I just wish there were more options; the one that's there (Twiddler) is too expensive.
I'm now trying to work with a split keyboard as input, but the problem really is that those have no pointer. Otherwise it's really quite great (if you don't care how it looks of course, but it's early days), because if you touch type, it's not slower than when you are sat down, almost immediately after trying it (they are qwerty).
While there are many companies experimenting with input for AR/VR, and I have tried all publicly available demos/releases of such input, it's all clunky and slow. Touchscreen and speech are faster, but nothing beats a keyboard and a mouse; I think a lot more research could be spent on that, but as most people will be using devices (including computers with keyboards and mice) for consumption only, there is no financial incentive?
nmfisher|3 years ago
zamadatix|3 years ago
ClassyJacket|3 years ago
Congratulations to the team. If and when they release an Android version I'll buy one straight away.
Juding by the comments they should perhaps market this more for home use and less for out in public. Still, I think this has the potential to be definitely very fun and possibly very useful.
josephpmay|3 years ago
It looks like they have much better software than we had at launch, though.
The experience for phone-based headsets is really pretty good. The issue is that it’s a really hard sell for consumers at that price point for seemingly a piece of plastic, and the price point is necessary for the optics unless you have massive volume. The other issue is of course the bulky form factor.
diego_moita|3 years ago
They never got a real foothold on games, though.
partiallypro|3 years ago
samstave|3 years ago
This would allow using a [PI/Whatever] to interact with the systems avail to the OBD, slurp that and display onto the HUD-film on the windscreen...
With the ability to display HUD info in even the most analog of vehicles...
(I havent figured out how to make the HUD cheap or safe based on this comment - but in higher-end options, flex OLED film layers on the glass... or a small projector which simply projects onto a semi-opaque area in the lower-center section of the vehicle, with a simple device, pico projector (with a BRIGHT light) onto a smei-opaque sticker above the dash.
Full screen HUD integration is cool, but expensive.
but we have all the tools and resources to make this happen....
Just make sure that Apple 'iWindscreen/shield' never makes it into the wild....
run the PI in the machine, and track your bullshit in a new way (as tied in with vid cams...)
but thats just me and my what ifs...
icelancer|3 years ago
Hope it does well, but I can't really look into it until they open the SDK. The "curated partners" thing doesn't inspire much confidence.
royletron|3 years ago
mrbuttons454|3 years ago
jimmySixDOF|3 years ago
https://docs.projectnorthstar.org/
peterept|3 years ago
Ultimately this is very google cardboard like and passive so $129 is quite expensive.
I built a fun toy like this in the early 2000’s for $10 using foam board and a $5 sheet of teleprompter glass.
Ultimately anything like this has failed to capture the market because people just don’t want to have their phones out of reach and/or risk their battery using the camera/tracking.
walrus01|3 years ago
psychomugs|3 years ago
system2|3 years ago
dvh|3 years ago
rednerrus|3 years ago
codesnik|3 years ago
Is it supposed to run existing iphone AR apps too?
vineyardmike|3 years ago
I think they have this shape since it’s quite simple optics to have the iPhone screen be a “reflection” on the glasses while you can still see straight out through it. Kinda like looking out a window at night and seeing both your reflection and the outside at once.
notnotjake|3 years ago
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