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by culturestate 1349 days ago
> I'm not aware of any attempt at AR glasses by Google. Google Glass wasn't AR…

Trying to treat augmented reality, mixed reality, assisted reality, and <insert other non-virtual reality here> as technologically distinct verticals with clearly defined boundaries feels like an exercise in madness.

At any rate, Google announced[1] a few months ago that they were planning to start trialing new augmented reality glasses in public.

1. https://blog.google/products/google-ar-vr/building-and-testi...

1 comments

These are meaningful distinctions at both a technical and practical level.

Google glass created a passive screen independent of the environment. This allowed the hardware to be really simple but essentially turned it into a tiny hands free floating screen because it couldn’t block most of your vision without preventing you from walking around.

Augmented Reality maps out the environment so it can selectively replace part of your vision with what it wants to show you without blocking important things. This lets you say designate a large chunk of a wall as a TV but if you turn away the TV stops blocking your vision.

At this point the limitation of augmented reality is really more on the software side of things. Building hardware that in theory adds NPC style names over peoples heads at a party is straightforward, writing software to identify people and insert their names after someone introduces them in conversation is probably decades away.