[FatalLogic]

>"they pretty much killed off our project.” That project was CastAR — augmented reality glasses which Jeri Ellsworth is now working on as a separate project, having been handed the legal rights to do so by Valve.

But how many billion-dollar companies would do that? Just give the rights to the ex-employees? I think most other companies would have not. So, in that sense, Valve is unusual, even if it's not the oranizational utopia that was promised.

After she left Valve, she and partners did get at least $15 million funding from outside investors to develop the AR technology, but after several years of trying, it didn't work out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CastAR

[TheAmazingRace]

I'll be honest. Jeri did a ton of whining when she didn't get her way when Valve decided to part ways with her. It was ultimately a business decision for them to abandon AR, and she took it too personally. She is very good at hardware and a wicked smart engineer, but she should be thankful she was able to keep the rights to everything when she left Valve.

[justin66]

That's a pretty incomplete telling of the story. Tilt Five is in business and selling the product after the founders bought the tech back from CastAR (after the VC people ran it into the ground).

[FatalLogic]

I can't edit my comment now, but here's a good review of the Tilt Five

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbjjCn1zJq8

[moomin]

Unfortunately, no-one’s investment in AR or VR has worked out. Even the “winner” (Oculus/Meta) has found the market to be disappointingly small.

[const_cast]

Well that's because AR and VR are strictly worse for most use cases as compared to traditional human computer interfaces.

The mouse, keyboard, and monitor is pretty much just right. Highly productive, you can go super fast, with extreme information density.

VR and AR are obviously much slower to navigate because physical worlds are slow to navigate and that's what they're mimicing. We might assume a 3D world has more information density than a 2D screen... But 90% of the time it doesn't. I don't have eyes on the back of my head. And, usually, I'm going to be staring at a 2D thing.

[doublerabbit]

I only have 2mb ADSL, each world on VR Chat is something about 300mb+ in size not including VR Avatars. I'll join a world with folk, and they'll jump worlds before anythings loaded.

I wear glasses so I have to use special lenses to enable me to see in-game. These costed an addition 150 euros.

The XREAL Air 2 look appealing but I am unable to buy inserts for. This make's them useless to me.

> "While we plan to offer lenses for the Air 2, its updated frame design makes self-assembly of the lenses too difficult"

If where we lived in a fantasy world where everyone had a 10Gbit connections, perfect eyeballs. Yeah, it'd be great tech, practical too. But those without are left out like left-handed folk.

My Valve Index is sitting untouched behind me. I bought this in 2021, Why can't companies offer a version for those with a prescription? One size fit's all doesn't work here.

[ralphc]

There's a "Mega Replay" store near where I live, it has second-hand electronics, games and DVDs. The biggest section in electronics is the VR goggles, a lot of people have given up on them.

[brainzap]

it lives on as Tilt Five