[Miraste]

This seems like a tech-community-only opinion to me, the same thinking that is currently killing Magic Leap. If you want to build a mass-market AR headset, you should have one priority: make it look like glasses. People like eye contact. People don’t like looking like alien telemetry pods are eating their eyeballs. Once you have that, then you can worry about things like resolution, fov, and color reproduction. The only companies I’ve seen understand this are Snap and Amazon, with the caveat that they forgot to make the glasses do anything useful.

I suspect this is why Apple is having such a hard time with their headsets. Above all else, Apple doesn’t release products that are dorky.

[bajook]

I don't think there is a market for AR on a consumer's face except like a side display like Google Glass. I think the market for AR is in industrial operations, military, etc. where people won't care what they look like.

[indigochill]

Besides which, the military is historically a leader in tech that sometimes makes its way back to the civilian world. Notably, the internet was originally ARPANET, funded by the DoD, and the TCP/IP protocol was designed with military considerations in mind (e.g. designing a protocol that would be resilient to failures in parts of the network).

A company that secures a steady contract delivering AR equipment to the military will then have the runway to polish the packaging until it's palatable for consumers.

[stickfigure]

I want product reviews as I look at items on shelves in stores, without holding my phone in front of my face the whole time.

[Someone]

Many people already more or less have that: Amazon.com, at home on their couch.

I wonder whether there still will be stores selling things you want to spend time to choose between options by the time that tech exists.

[duped]

> If you want to build a mass-market AR headset, you should have one priority: make it look like glasses.

I so vehemently disagree with this because it's the same category of thinking that keeps XR in the dark ages.

The capital "P" Problem in XR is content. Behind every major innovation in content consumption technology has been content to consume. As of yet, there is no such content for XR, and the one thing Magic Leap did (and this was a few years back) was to invest in people to create content for their platform and dev tools to make it.

You can have the ugliest piece of garbage tech tethered to a desktop PC, and people will pay to use it if they get to experience some piece of content created by a team of artists that can't otherwise tell the stories or convey emotion as effectively in any other medium.

Throughout the history of consumer media you find that a successful medium is determined by what art is created upon it, not by its technical aptitude. There is always something better, but what makes it useful is what artists can do with the limitations of the medium today.

That's why we see this pivot to the nebulous "enterprise" (without real success). It's because they haven't found artists that can create real content yet, at least nothing people want to experience. The most successful so far was LBE (location based entertainment) which was seeing good growth pre-covid.

[Miraste]

I agree with you where VR is concerned, just not AR. This is why I don't like the term XR, it conflates markedly different devices. The Quest 2 is good enough that content is becoming its biggest problem, and if it gets some really killer games or social apps it could gain serious traction. It already has way more satisfied users than the entire AR industry, because AR hasn't reached that "good enough for content" milestone.

I follow VR more closely than AR. It has a ton of examples as to how people will not pay to use ugly garbage tethered to a desktop PC. This is why Facebook's pivot to standalone headsets has been so successful. PC tethered VR apps look better, are more interactive, and are vastly larger and more in depth. No one plays them, because a slick single device is more important than every other factor. When I used to demo PC VR apps to people, they'd be blown away. They'd ask how to get one, I'd explain the PC and the base stations, and their faces would fall. No one ever bought one. When I do the same demo with the much worse apps on the Quest, people buy Quests.

Magic Leap's investment in content is another example. What good did that investment do? None, because the Leap itself was too big and clunky for people to buy.

[mdoms]

> Above all else, Apple doesn’t release products that are dorky.

https://www.apple.com/nz/airpods/

[Miraste]

“Being cool” is the biggest appeal of AirPods. As pointed out elsewhere on the thread, they made wireless Bluetooth so fashionable celebrities wear them in Zoom calls. Before AirPods wireless Bluetooth was not cool. AirPods are a carefully engineered phenomenon that Apple will be seeking to replicate with VR/AR as much as possible.

[jayd16]

Airpods shows what Apple marketing can pull off as far as defining what cool is. No one would have though Bose Airpods were cool.

[parkerhiggins]

Friendly reminder that AirPods alone are a bigger revenue line item than Netflix.

[mdoms]

Yes, and they're dorky as all hell.

[codehalo]

Can you recommend an audio device that you are sticking in your ears that differs significantly from AirPods that is not dorky?