Apple is rumored to be working on two versions of Vision Pro, however a new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman alleges the Cupertino tech giant is aiming to beat Meta to the punch with a pair of AR glasses. Citing someone with knowledge of the matter, the report maintains Apple CEO Tim Cook has put development …
This seems like a tech that would be hard to get right? There are a lot of trade-offs involving cost, weight, resolution, processing, battery life, etc.
For my part, I would probably use AR features rather sparingly to maintain my sanity, but they could be very useful in certain narrow applications. Whether these would be sufficient to justify the price tag is uncertain. I also tend to be rough on glasses, so that would be a worry.
The most useful applications I can think of that would run permanently (while wearing them) would be stuff like name tags for people if you are forgetful, labeling roads in front of you with their names or maybe the destinations in that direction at an intersection and similar low intrusiveness applications. Certainly nothing that could be considered a killer application.
Yeah, I suppose they could also be useful for translation when travelling someplace where you can’t read the language, provided it’s reasonably accurate and not too laggy?
In terms of occasional use, I was thinking they could be good for loading speeches or music/lyrics when you’re up on a stage. But while that seems like it ought to be a fairly trivial feature to implement, as both a software developer and performer, I could see this being more challenging than you think to get a good experience out of that sort of app.
For sure, I mean, we already have had google lens for almost a full decade. Phones already do real-time overlaid translation with nearly no lag through the camera. The glasses can literally just run that same app. Also does real time audio translation.
And for the google ted talk, he was indeed using them as his teleprompter.
I’d prefer a Mandalorian helmet with a removable physical display inside. OK, walking in such a helmet is a bit weird. But better than bigass glasses, since a helmet can at least be supported with something on your shoulders, have weight and pressure distributed better.
What do AR glasses look like in your imagination?
It’s pretty hard to tell in real life if someone is wearing a stylish frame or AR glasses. They are a bit thicker than normal glasses need to be, but not as thick as glasses that are just thick for no reason other than to look a certain way.
Is that on the market or just a dream?
Anyway, a transparent display is just as bad as a transparent terminal emulator window. Only good for looks.
A transparent display is necessary for glasses based AR. The parts where stuff is displayed obviously aren’t transparent, but when a pixel is off, the screen is transparent in that spot. There have been transparent displays for decades, and smart glasses for at least 5 years, but AR glasses are relatively new, yes. Smart glasses and AR glasses look relatively similar to regular glasses. AR glasses are a little more obvious when they are being actively used, as other people can see the section that isn’t transparent. But smart glasses don’t have the capability of advanced graphics and are more like a heads up display.
https://youtu.be/gElClXpg4J0?t=2m44s This is a partially pre-staged demo of the ones google is doing, but it does at least show the look of the glasses. And metas second gen ones after orion have slimmed down a bit too. What I have seen of apples looks like they are also going to be pretty slim. But I haven’t seen anything past concept stage yet for them, so hard to say how close they’ll get to what they are aiming for in the concept.