Comment by aeturnum

I think all of these things are true:

AR is really hard and anything that does it at all is impressive and could, believably, be the precursor to a revolutionary product.

All current AR tech is more expensive than seems sustainable for a consumer product. It's also difficult to develop for and has few (if any) compelling experiences. These things are endemic to early stage products, but it is also possible that they will endure long enough to cripple AR as a product in the foreseeable future.

Everyone in the AR industry is guilty of overhype. Moreso than early tech start ups in general. That said, Magic Leap seems to have behaved significantly worse than its peers.

Part of the effect of the hype machine is that it's hard to get any depiction of what it looks like to look through the lenses of the products. This comes, as far as I can tell, from the likely true idea that the experiential qualities of AR cannot be captured through 2D video and such video would be somewhat deceptive. To me, it seems like the practice of releasing visualization videos is more deceptive but reasonable people can disagree.

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It feels to me like a lot of AR discussion comes down to people asserting that one of these genres of view is true in response to someone else expressing a different one of these views.

To me, it feels like it's hard to talk usefully about the current state of the industry. The promise is very cool, the products are early stage. So many factors legitimately excuse current failings. Do people feel like we the tech is public or mature enough that we can talk about the real limits or likely arc of the tech at all, or are we trapped between hype and development?