[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.