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Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

I think the AR experience will be far more dependent on rock solid tracking and pose estimation, ergonomics of the headset, fashionability of the headset, ability to work in many light conditions, and killer initial apps, than display resolution or FOV.

Focusing too much on the display itself completely ignores the other aspects that inhibit adoption. An AR display that had a resolution of 100x100, could only display a green HUD, but was completely invisible inside a normal pair of sunglasses or glasses, would completely trump a super high quality fibre scanning display that was incredibly nerdly and unwieldly looking.

AR is pointless if you can't take it outdoors, if it's in-the-home only, you may as well go with VR.

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I agree that the incidentals like tracking and form will matter a lot.

I think however there is no "proof of existence" of any software or capability that would compel even early adopters to use a 100x100 display, even with all the other physical issues being polished to a high sheen.

Looking down at your phone or smartwatch seems far more likely.

The "maybes" that people frequently suggest require a staggering amount of unwritten software infrastructure (sometimes up to and including sentient AI).

FOV is pretty important. It's difficult to feel like you are in an augmented reality if you have to tilt your head just to see the full object in front of you.

Maybe you could get by with little helper things, but that's just a fancy HUD and not really AR.

Outside of entertainment, who cares if you feel like you’re in the environment vs being able to do useful things with it when you want to or need to? Using AR purely for entertainment doesn’t seem like such a revolutionary thing, really, especially when we have ok VR. I see some potential advantages for sure, but enough to make it a mass market nust-have device? I personally don’t see it.

Much of the affordances of AR will require a higher FOV - irrespective of use case.

E.g.: Tagging objects, directions and buildings with tracked information, following characters in the real world etc.

Long term a complete immersive solution - where virtual objects persist in the real world, will absolutely be more useful and compelling than both VR and limited FOV AR. Such a solution would literally be able to selectively replace and amend elements of reality as needed / desired. Although we can't fully predict it's uses, it seems self evident there would be many more than a poster sized slice of AR will allow.

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