Comment by tootie
7 months ago
I remain convinced that AR glasses will never ever be mainstream no matter how good the hardware is. They just don't solve any actual problem. Interacting with UI using voice or gesture is just way too hard.
7 months ago
I remain convinced that AR glasses will never ever be mainstream no matter how good the hardware is. They just don't solve any actual problem. Interacting with UI using voice or gesture is just way too hard.
They could still be useful as a dumb display without voice or gesture. Imagine being in an airplane and wanting to use your laptop. You'll be hunched over with terrible posture. With a pair of AR glasses that support displayport alt mode, you could plug in your glasses and sit with proper posture, your screen displayed in front of you as a virtual 40" display, while you touch type on your laptop sitting on the food tray. Perhaps you're in bed and want to watch a movie. You could pop on the glasses, plug in your phone, and enjoy while while fully reclined, achieving the most comfortable least effort movie viewing experience. Maybe you're traveling and staying in hotels where you want to get some work done. Programming on tiny laptop screens sucks if you're opening more than 2 files at a time, but what if you could just pop on your glasses, plug them into your laptop, and program on a virtual 40" display?
My understanding is the current tech is not sharp enough for serious productivity, is too heavy for extended wear, and has a short life due to overdriving tiny OLEDs, so I'm not ready to purchase one yet. But some day those problems will be solved and I'm absolutely going to jump on that.
The thought of an airport full of people all seated with perfect posture, all looking ahead but not really seeing, tapping away at their oh-so important work, feels both worse than the current status quo but also somehow no different. Maybe it’s the posture thing.
You can already do this, and I did it last week on my flight with my Xreal Air.
Yeah, that's the brand I've been watching most closely. How would you rate the sharpness of the display for text editing / coding? Like if you opened some large code files on your glasses and desktop monitor, and adjusted both their font sizes to have the same legibility + feel, do you fit more text on the glasses or your desktop monitor and by how much?
This is the one aspect that is hard to find info about online. Everyone talks about the weight and what size the virtual display is, but if I am going to seriously use it for productivity then I need at least 3 files open side by side, fully legible, with 100-character-wide lines at the bare minimum to be considered.
Either way, I'm not going to purchase until they solve the longevity problem, but I am curious if the sharpness is at the point where I can stop worrying about it.
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As someone who's been avidly following and sampling VR/AR since the 90s, in recent years I've changed my opinion. While I'm not as confident as you seem to be, I do now think it probably never goes into widespread all-day consumer use. Although, I do believe certain gaming, entertainment and workplace use cases will become much more common.
I always wished for AR glasses. I described it like playing a MMO with player names overlaid above their heads.
I have an incredibly hard time remembering faces and names. Close to disability level. People I have known for 20 years and interact with monthly can take a bit for me to recall their names and it requires a ton of mental tricks to do so.
I used to go to a decent number of trade shows, and the number of folks who casually knew me and my name but I couldn’t place was embarrassing. And crippling for business purposes.
I always thought if I had someway to overlay a persons name over their head it would level the playing field and allow be to avoid a lot of personal embarrassment.
Now that the future is here I’m not so sure. One of those things I want for me but not for thee.
I can see how this would be beneficial for you. But I also get the feeling that those people would rather you can’t remember their name than have you doing facial recognition on them. It’s one of those solutions to social problems that is so unsocial it just changes the problem. Instead of “that’s the guy that always forgets my name” it becomes “that’s the creep with the AI glasses!” (No offence). One of those is much more preferable.
Totally agree. It only works if you're the only person who has the tech and no one notices you're using it :)
Yes it is highly economically inefficient.
People seem to underestimate how wonderful it to be able to touch and tap an interface and how minimal effort is exerted.
oh i think we will see voice becoming a much more popular interface in the very near future, now that it’s actually getting very good
Highly doubt it. As a species we have gotten accustomed to talking through text as opposed to voice/audio over time.
People prefer it. Pure and simple.
I think it's helpful, perhaps even necessary, to differentiate between different kinds of text.
Let's start with text intended to convey information. Good documentation-type text that acts as a one-way communication channel is an example of this. A small number of writers and contributors to something that can be read by thousands or more can be incredibly powerful and can be incredibly information dense and valuable if written well.
Text intended to entertain? Well, that's just art and people will choose to engage in that way when they prefer the medium itself, so that's really just personal preference and enjoyment.
Text as the de-facto replacement for voice/face-to-face feels like something that's been forced into a lot of situations now. It's beneficial (or really required) when it's the only option such as for long-distance communication, and favours slow-changing content. But I think in a lot of cases we've been forced into having to use text over voice for raw human communication (thinking of course about remote working now).
I think text has a lot going for it. It can be incredibly information dense, it's easier for writers to take time to prepare something well, it's persistent, it's searchable, it's easy to make available historically. But I'm not convinced that it's a blanket replacement in every way. As the equivalent of voice it's also just slower.
As for video telephony, well David Foster Wallace had a bit to say about that [1]
[1] https://ochuk.wordpress.com/2015/08/20/my-favorite-pieces-of...
Then how come in face-to-face interactions people generally communicate using speech rather than text?
Clearly there's a disadvantage to using text in that situation, and I think it's that it almost always takes longer to express thoughts/intents using text. ISTM a sufficiently advanced computer voice interface would have the same advantage.
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As a species?? You’re just talking about young people. And that’s just because texting was cheap.
Lots of my friends send voice notes these days. I prefer them. Especially if they’re auto transcribed so the person on the other end can choose how to consume them.
I want an HUD mini-map that displays directions for navigation. That solves an actual problem for me (having no sense of direction).
I'm not so sure there is no problem to be solved. Being able to see the world around me annotated visually has massive potential - I for one would love the Google Translate camera feature that lets you translate text seen by the camera in real time and overlay the translated text on the document but built into a pair of normal looking glasses, freeing my hands etc.
While I accept some will take issue with calling it an "AR device", the current Meta RayBans have sold very well with major YoY growth and I only expect them to get more popular as they get more capable and add more "AR"-esque features in future versions. I see them already as a first step on road to real AR products much, much more than I do the Quest line.
They will become mainstream because the advertising industrial complex will see the opportunity to have a paid subscription model to reality with ads from the moment you open your eyes to those on the free-tier.
Realtime on-demand satnav in ar, onscreen messaging, news updates etc, the facial recognition is just one aspect, having automatic connections with people looking at you across a room signifying interest.
This is dystopian to me but I don't see how it doesn't eventually become mainstream.