Apple Glasses
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
Makes a lot of sense they would start at pass through video, they already have apps and developers for it and unlike real AR, it doesn‘t require a technical breakthrough. The kind of stuff that makes it bad is exactly the stuff Apple can fix: camera and screen quality, tight, low latency image processing pipeline etc. All stuff the iPhone already excels at.
It seems to me like Meta might have some advantage here initially, but in the long run I'm not sure how it can compete with a company that knows how to really build an ecosystem on top of hardware that it engineers end-to-end.
I imagine cost might come into play here to start. I remember growing up and never having an iPhone because they were too expensive, and most of the kids I knew didn't have one either. It was all Android until one day I noticed everyone had swapped for an iPhone. Maybe Meta products will be the Android in this field, the device you get until you make the upgrade to an Apple product.
Not sure what the use cases for AR are for consumers. Although it wouldn't surprise me if pretty soon we're all wearing some variant of this, and our natural world now has a data overlay with 'AI-powered' profiles of people we see. Like in that scene from the movie Bedazzled (2000), where people getting off a train have have thought bubbles superimposed over their heads representing their state of mind: "lonely", "lunatic", "cheated on his wife", etc.
*such as pilots who have been using ar goggles for ages
As with the iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and even ARM laptops, they weren’t the first in the market in terms of technology but they were the first to make a really great user experience. The HN crowd hates Apple’s closed ecosystem but when it comes to all of these products, the closed ecosystem was a selling point for the average unsavvy consumer.
On HN folks trash apple (closed systems, supposedly phones don't hold value etc). Reality for most folks outside of HN, Apple is just far far more trusted. Facebook has a ton more users, but I'm not sure about trust levels (though we will see if that matters, for facebook so far they have done fine).
That assumes that consumers had the choice of an "open" app ecosystem to begin with. Windows Phone, PalmOS, BlackberryOS, Symbian and Android all had closed app stores with zero interoperability.
At least for the PDA, the form factor didn't need to shift all that much to go from relatively nerdy niche accessory to daily carry for billions (smartphone). If anything, my current massive screen phone is even more ungainly than many PDA models were.
If it resembles a sleeping mask like the more stylish mockup from The Information shown further down the linked page, I can absolutely picture people in business class flights using these things eventually, ungainly as it is, if the use cases/features are compelling enough. If it is high-res enough to provide a compelling portable virtual multi-desktop experience, I imagine some software developers might be interested too. Personally I'd love to have a multi-monitor dev environment that slips into a pocket, something none of the current mainstream headsets have had the resolution to do well yet (IMO).
I don't think anyone, at Apple or Meta too, thinks these first gen AR/VR products are going to be mainstream successes yet either though. We are still in the early PDA phase of this thing. Zuck has publicly said as much; I imagine Apple may tread a similar line when the reveal happens.