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Comment by qgin | Hacker News Reader

Have to say I agree with Jony Ive on all of these points.

The idea of an AR wearable that is tethered to a fixed base station is so very lame. Why even bother with AR when you can only augment the reality that is in your office or bedroom?

Also the eye-view outer display is essential for situations where one person is using the goggles but others aren’t. How unsettling would it be for someone to look at you, be able to see you, but for their upper face to completely obscured by goggles? How could you have an in person face-to-face conversation with someone like that?

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The fixed base station is a fundamentally different tradeoff for AR vs VR.

Base station for AR would be detrimental, as you inherently want to explore and interact with the world around you.

For most VR use cases that is not the case, and I can see the argument for the benefits of a base station (higher performance) outweighing the costs (limited movement).

One solution to this for AR is using "fog computing", where your AR device may offload its computation to a node on the local network that's more powerful but also not as far away (in terms of latency) as a cloud server. Perhaps with the continued adoption of UWB 5G, those AR basestations could exist at cell towers or in local establishments - think about a clothing store running fog nodes to allow AR users to visualize wearing different clothes as they see them in the store.

I haven't read more than the abstract, but it seems there is some good research going into this. It must be years off however, as we barely have LTE networks in some locations, let-alone UWB 5G to even begin supporting this type of architecture.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9103475

Streaming 4k video per eye per user? Can I get that kind of bandwidth for general wifi, please?

This kind of throughput is quite achievable if you get a high quality 6E router. Of course you need compatible client devices too, which is a bit of a challenge right now.

If the base station was wireless and doubled as a charger/stand it likely wouldn’t even be a noticeable drawback for most VR use-cases.

Quest 2 is already a stand alone device so the base station requirement has already partially gone away

Quest 1 was standalone too.

Is it all that different from interacting with people wearing sunnies or ski goggles?

I believe it’s most likely that Apple will be releasing an untethered device. It would not be Apple if you needed a wire and a separate box.

A 4K display per eye, a powerful and efficient SoC on the latest node, and some really fine industrial design will surely be within Apple’s reach.

Everyone will have to build apps for this thing. If it’s real, it will be every bit as successful as iPhone.

Maybe it’ll tether to the iPhone. It already has all that and just needs a display

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