They could make smartglasses and release them tomorrow, but would that have mass appeal across future generations? It's the same thing as a smartwatch, just on your face.

I'm not usually one to make a definitive stance, but this is one of those times. It's public knowledge given the many devices, patents, and research out in public view. Apple cannot bypass the laws of physics, and there are many physical limitations with AR today even if they've made multiple breakthroughs.

Meta themselves are not going to be ready to release their AR glasses until 2027, assuming the date doesn't slip.

The technology for consumer scalable AR glasses doesn't exist yet. That's why Apple is going the headset route for now.

> What is it with super rich corporate types trying to shove this down my throat.

Well they also shoved PCs and cellphones down our throat. People don't ask for entirely new technologies - people are only capable of thinking of iterations on existing technology. You know, faster horses and all that.

> It gives me headaches and motion sickness, just like 3D TVs did. And I'm not alone. So it's not going to take off.

They're not twiddling their thumb and whistling in the other direction while people come to them with this feedback. They are actively fixing these issues so that eventually a product will release where you can use it without a problem.

If they reach that goal, then your presumption of it not taking off doesn't work anymore.

VR in the 1990s lasted what, two years? Total $ investment in the hundreds of millions at best? No large corporation releasing headsets?

That's wildly different to today. It is still a niche platform for sure, but it's still here and hasn't gone in year three, and has tens of billions of dollars in investment across many large corporations, with a lot of advancements that are being made.

As for AR, it's never been tried before as a consumer product, so there was no previous attempt.

> Whether that was Atari Pong, a ZX Spectrum or a NES, it wasn't ever a market that people "didn't care about".

I'm talking about PCs, so the ZX Spectrum as mentioned above, and others like the C64 and IBM clones in general - these had the additional barrier of seeming to have no real use in the home beyond just a narrow selection of usecases. This was the general consumer consensus - either that or indifference.

You can see that here:

Being seen as in search of a use: https://www.academia.edu/320362/1980s_Home_Coding_the_art_of_amateur_programming

Many PCs collected dust: https://wayback.archive-it.org/5902/20150629134551/http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf01313/patterns.htm

They were seen as having no compelling use in the home: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=yS4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA66&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

It was often considered longer to do tasks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycVyGb5ID90&t=228s

Another report in the low usage rates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H07xxyfLySA&t=761s

Another report on the apparent lack of usecases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8REddtaRG3E&t=1101s

> Same with TVs, to be honest. I don't know what makes you think the "limited programming" had anything to do with it, it's actually almost impossible to find someone of that generation who DIDN'T have a TV.

What generation? I didn't specify a timeframe, but I meant from the mid to late 1920s and 1930s - there just wasn't much enthusiasm for TVs in the home.

> People know exactly what they want and what they'll use them fo

As evidenced above by how people had no idea what they wanted with PCs, this isn't how things usually are. VR is the same, in that people see it only as a gaming device, but the most actively used apps are social apps, which most people without a headset think have no use in VR or don't even know such things exist.

> MR is a bollocks term attributed as some kind of new extension to VR and AR as if it's something different to AR. It's not. In fact it's so woolly that there's no real definition of how it differs to those two, or what it adds to either.

MR has been defined since the 1990s as the spectrum from which VR/AR exists within. It constitutes a device that does both and is indeed different than AR as it is a superset and includes a third term - AV (augmented virtually, augmenting virtual worlds with real objects) which will likely be an important feature for a lot of future VR users in the future. Why? Safety, allowing people to still feel highly immersed while keeping an eye on their sibling, partner, dog, food/drinks, keyboard for typing.

As for pure AR, no one wants/uses AR (as a wearable) because there isn't a single worldwide consumer AR device out there. The market is at best, in the Apple I stages and is awaiting an Apple II consumer launch.

MR hasn't failed and AR hasn't failed. They are both very early on - optical AR especially.

The tech can't progress if they don't push for it. How else do you think technology develops to be acceptable for the masses?

Time solves very little. It's only really active investment and product iterations that are responsible for mass market viable technology advances.

> We had sci-fi desires of smartphones for decades, we just didn't call them that

Yet most people didn't want a cellphone until the late 1990s. Turns out that humans universally reject all hardware shifts, with a chance of redemption when the tech has matured. People didn't like early brick cellphones, they didn't like CLI PCs, they didn't like early TVs with limited programming.

As Steve Jobs said (paraphrasing), the goal is to build products that people will want before people realize they want it. Apple started out as a PC company building out a market that the masses didn't care about until 15 years later, a market that was considered dead, a fad, in search of a use, many times throughout its emergence.

VR will either be accepted or rejected when the tech has matured. When 90% of the planet doesn't know what VR even stands for in 2023, you can't expect them to make a rational decision. When most people right now can't imagine how VR will evolve beyond higher resolution, their opinion carries little weight.

> Ironically, instead all this pissing about you could make quite normal VR etc. far more mainstream - it's more viable this time round than ever before.

> But nobody wants this mixed reality bollocks.

Good Mixed Reality is an objective upgrade to every VR user. It makes VR safer and easier to use even if you don't use any MR-specific applications.

Zuck hasn't expected any market takeoff until the mid to late 2020s, so the jury is still out.

AR glasses haven't even had a worldwide consumer launch yet, and given the many companies gearing up for a launch later this decade, in what way is it a failure?

It would be 2D though, which is unnatural/less engaging for real-time communication and much less interactive.

The Quest 2 is a success. It outperformed every expectation put onto it, even internally by Meta.

Of course it's still a niche device, but Meta wasn't expecting different until Quest 4 or 5 and beyond.

Mainstream. It still took longer to become ubiquitous, as only a minority of homes had them in 1992, but it had passed a 25% household adoption rate, which from what I can tell, is a figure that tends to get used for judging mainstream success.

Here's an interesting set of statistics showing the rough sales of the emerging PC industry: https://web.archive.org/web/20120606052317/http://jeremyreimer.com/postman/node/329

> Tbh I think analysts were full of crap and way off the mark, as they often are.

The annoying thing is that all these VR companies have been telling people from the start not to expect it to be mainstream even in 2023, and that includes Zuck/Facebook all the way back in 2015.

Truth gets distorted. The media picks up on all these analysts who don't understand anything other than mature technology growth patterns, and then that all gets reported across all the mainstream media outlets, and then everyone reads that and takes it as gospel for actual sales figures and targets being missed.

Talk to an engineer at any one of these VR companies and every single one of them will say that VR is at best, as mature as an early 1980s PC. It took until 1992 before PCs took off, and longer for them to hit the majority of homes. That's the kind of timescale at play here - it's always been the timescale for the majority of hardware shifts, but again, the truth gets distorted and history is rewritten in people's minds to where new hardware has to be a fast shift otherwise it's a failure.

HoloLens is actual AR, and Apple only ever calls ARKit-related features AR, which is true - that's mobile AR.

Other than Google, I've never heard of anyone in the AR industry try to classify Glass as AR.

The usecases, the tech, the hurdles that have to be crossed are just fundamentally different. It's a bit like a calculator versus a computer. They might technically both be calculators, but a computer is exponentially more complex with entirely different usecases (and at a greater magnitude).

Google Glass is a 2D HUD. It's as if you were to take a smartwatch and put it on your face - that's the limit of the functionality you can provide.

AR deals with actually overlaying information into the real world.

It can definitely cause nausea with today's tech. That was one of the complaints for HoloLens IVAS in military testing.

> A Google Glass-like device with a small lumbar battery pack might work.

Well that has nothing to do with AR tech, so it would be performing a different function at that point.

Google Glass is completely unrelated technology to AR. That was a 2D HUD - the equivalent of a smartwatch for your face.

There are very few attempts so far that get close to a pair of sunglasses with AR, and those that do have severe limitations. Snap's AR spectacles only has a 30 minute battery life, Vuzix Shield is only monochrome, and Nreal Light is tethered. All of these have a tiny field of view, and the only known way to achieve a large field of view with AR thus far is a much larger/bulkier device.

Seriously, if you think this is bulky, look at what a very wide FoV AR device looks like: https://www.roadtovr.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/leap-motion-projet-northstar-3.jpg