HoloKit relaunched, $129 AR Headset accessory for iPhone
holokit.io
holokit.io
They have to pivot this soon enough to a cheap at-home AR thingy.
VR headsets are getting smaller at least:
https://en.shiftall.net/products/meganex
I would suspect Apple will never release something that isn’t as small as that.
The average, casual user isn't going to do that on a regular basis. It's not something you can do with kids around if you need to keep an eye on them, unlike a book or a TV show or even a game on your phone or laptop.
Fundamentally, immersion is a selling point to a very specific audience, and a major drawback to everyone else.
It’s not as simple as picking up your phone, or … well, it’s not as simple as putting on glasses.
> You have to fuck with the strap to get a nice aligned view, constantly adjust the visor, scratching your nose or adjusting your glasses requires fumbling around.
I doubt anyone didn't get VR for that reasons
Flat games feel quite immersive already. And others can easily be nearby and watch.
In real life, many tasks like flying the landing pattern or joining a busy area of lift require constantly scanning both the instrument panel and outside the plane, at various angles.
If you use a standard monitor, you’re teaching your hands to push buttons that switch the direction of view. If you use VR, you teach yourself to look around with your head.
If you are flying for the purpose of training yourself to fly in real life, or practising skills you’ll use in a real aircraft, the latter is -referanke, all other things being equal.
Based on the letters, I think "-referanke" is a typo for "preferable." Out of curiosity, do you type the 'b' key with your right hand?
It was also weird not being able to see the my throttle and yoke and all the different buttons I needed to use. I didn't have enough hours on the setup to have it all be via muscle memory yet so I needed to be able to look at my cheat sheet sometimes.
Serious simmers will usually havr a high end HOTAS and instrument panel set up too, which will reflect commonalities of real aircraft and be muscle memory.
https://varjo.com/company-news/varjo-and-vrm-switzerland-mak...
Don't discount teleportation based locomotion, either. You don't need to walk everywhere, and moving between rooms by fade-out works pretty well.
Walking around with 1:1 between VR and real space is indeed pretty cool, but I wouldn't want to do it full time in all games.
Commenting is fundamentally broken.
It's honestly not an issue and the early Valve thinking of that only room scale locomotion is acceptable is silly for anyone who's spent more than an hour in VR.
But what if that's what I want? I want VR so I can experience totally different worlds fully as if I was there. I can do that safely from my living room.
I want AR so I can live the cyberpunk dream of seeing data and other extra info overlaid on top of my normal vision while out in public.
I don't think either concept is flawed, they just have different purposes for different times and places.
I want the VR monitors, but I'm wary of having a permanent mark on my head from wearing them for 8 hours a day for days on end...
So? Plenty of successful products aren’t for the average, casual user. HOTAS controllers aren’t for instance. So what? Not everything is universal adoption or nothing. Also, predictions about the “average, casual user” will want tend to be…unreliable. Trends driven by the kind of non-average, non-casual users that tend to be early adopters can shift this in surprising ways.
Well, yeah, that’s kind of trivially true; “mainstream” and “niche” are antonyms.
This doesn't mean VR won't be successful for gaming or highly technical niche things just that getting over the chasm of early adopters/niche to mainstream isn't likely to happen. There are going to be a ton of anecdotes here on HN about how people like it but people here on HN are in the early adopter/gaming niches.
I've found that even the current pass-through on the Index has made me a lot more comfortable moving around, knowing that if I'm close to knocking something I'll get a low-res view of the real world before I hit it.
Imagine a 200 person call center dealing with health insurance claims, questions, etc. They likely have a PC, headset/phone (possibly digital) and a bunch of licenses to software that might cost an average of $1500 per person to have them be functional. It operates in a cost center part of the company, budgets are tight, investments in IT have to have an ROI to make sense. What value is there in a $1500 VR headset per person? How is this going to save that department money?
I do think AR has some amazing potential for business and I suppose VR efforts could work as a stepping stone to getting that right.
Some random thoughts that might work now that I'm thinking about it:
* A social tool for remote companies. * It might improve remote meetings/whiteboarding. * I'd probably be more likely to go to a VR trade show than a real life one.
I don't think it's going to take over every enterprise. A laptop is more than enough for a lot of work, VR would probably get in the way.
I am dubious of this claim given that large numbers of people spend hours staring at their phones every day. They may not be covering their eyes but they are surrendering all of their attention to a tiny rectangle and foregoing a lot of other more worthwhile things.
My hope for VR is that the social experience becomes so compelling that it can break most people out of their addiction to their phones. That's going to be a hard nut to crack but the metaverse will be waiting for them when they finally look up.
The phone can be looked away from pretty easily. If they can accomplish that with VR headsets/eyeglasses somehow that could be a tipping point.
> It's not something you can do with kids around
Whenever I played multiplayer Quest 2 games 99% of the voices were kids/young teenagers. Apparently it doesn't need parents to care, the kids in up their bedrooms is good enough.
If anything the problem is that good VR isn't cheaper than it already is, to hit the market for parents to buy it for their kids. The current selection of games on Oculus store is basically glorified Android games. But PC/Steam VR games I've tried like Half Life Alyx were mind-blowing.
Maybe when $2000+ PC VR setups finally mainstreams adult nerds will care. I highly doubt that's reliant on AR.
Anyone who has used VR knows it isn't even a permanent replacement for hardcore day-to-day gaming. That's why I used the Wii/Casual analogy. It's amazing for small spurts of lightweight gaming. Which just happens to be very attractive to kids/young teens (and yes non-gamer adults) who aren't hardcore gamers (Nintendo/mobile shows this is a massive market).
Spend 15min on any popular VR multiplayer game and tell me kids under 12 aren't using it en-masse.
I recommend you read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm the first early adopter market isn't the only thing that matters to a new technology but it's essential for survival.
Also, your 5 minute later post-edits are ridiculous. You add completely new sentences.
So the fact some rarely-enforced children protection laws or hypothetical cultural parenting rules might hurt VR IF the only market was merely kids in the long run is bad, sure. But that's not what I said matters in my original comment.
VR's market in the future isn't casual gaming for kids. My point is that's all it is now. And for that it's doing a great job and has a real lively market to fund the tech. Your fears haven't born true for early adopters (because it's fundamentally a hypothetical mainstream critique), so it doesn't really matter, as long as it's sufficient fuel the tech til it bridges the gap and the tech matures.
(Edit sniping is your problem, my goal isn't to win fast-paced internet arguments but to communicate my points as well as I can)
> It's not something you can do with kids around
I think the author of that comment meant that if you have little kids, you need to keep an eye on them, and playing with a headset that blocks your peripheral vision is not going to be something a parent can do in that situation.
That comment didn't mean to say that kids would not play VR. It was suggesting that parents wouldn't.
This is why OP missed the point. Because I didn't agree that that was an important point he a) got emotional for being disagreed with b) assumed that I thought it wasn't true. But I only ever said it didn't matter, not that parents or regulations dont have power in this dynamic.
Evidence points to Quest 2 being very popular among kids and their casual gaming platform via Android-esque VR games has provided a strong and sufficient market from which multiple companies can mature the technology to a wider market.
It was a faulty premise to dismiss the technology, because it fundamentally mischaracterizes how technology normally mainstreams (by first having a real and successful initial early adopter market from which you adapt and mature to mainstream markets - not betting on early adopters to BE the mainstream).
Although I will agree I probably should have said "yes you're right" so OP didn't feel I misunderstood. Altough if he wasn't so quick to win an internet "fight" he might have let me explain.
Then slow down and take a breath before hitting the reply button the first time. Pausing and then rereading and proofing as needed rather than fast-paced posting with fast-paced follow up edits is the way to go. This is coming from someone who also used to very often tweak my posts after initial posting.
It is a problem for everyone who reads the comment thread. Please either wait to post long enough re-read and edit, or indicate which sentences have been added later. (Edit: the latter is commonly done like this.)
In the future I will take this into consideration re: using "Edit:" for people who reply before you even notice.
I think VR developers would be happy to have children's market as big as Nintendo's
You can’t even pick up a beer while playing a game. That’s a deal breaker.
For someone who played college-level cricket, this is a dream come true for me and the sensation of hitting the ball in the middle of the bat is mind blowing.
But, here's the kicker. In real world, If I had play 120 pitches (baseball equivalent), I'd have to wait for 4 hours. In VR it could be done in 30 minutes.
I've already lost 7 pounds and feel energetic.
I can't imagine how playing sports, music, concerts in the next 5 years is going to be in VR accelerating the skill-mastery process.
People who diss VR is the same kind who diss AI. Mixed Reality / AI will enhance productivity of everyone leaving the luddites far behind
Most people can’t exercise for four hours a day while ignoring their environment, effectively outside of their home.
Whereas if you had glasses that let you do AR thing, you could do that while keeping an eye on your kids or on what you’re cooking or while doing some chores or while brushing your teeth etc
What you described sounds very cool! But could you do it with young kids or a household to run?
The V in VR is there for a reason, the virtualization of experience is the core principle. The person you are replying to is using it to virtualize Cricket. It is replacing a real Cricket game with a virtual one. This has value because, I'm guessing, they haven't been able to play Cricket for a long time due to some set of constraints in their life. VR makes this former pastime available to them again because they don't have to leave their home, they don't need to buy or rent equipment (other than the headset and game), they don't need to find a local group, they don't need to schedule their time around a set date. All they have to do is put the headset on and jump in a match. Think hard about these differences. Ask yourself, what does it remind you of? Where has this happened before?
But you still didn’t address OP’s point. Immersive VR is like being out of the house. You can’t keep an eye on things.
Most people living regular lives have a limited “out of the house” time budget, and would like to spend a good chunk of it on in person experiences or errands or work.
Actually this analysis suggests work has the highest potential to bring in VR, as most people already budget 8-10 hours of “out of house” time for work, so VR isn’t competing with anything except the office environment.
Like the initial PC revolution, many non-enthusiasts will be introduced through corporate.
As far as carving out time, VR can easily replace TV Time, Internet Time, Remote Facetime/Phonecalls, self-improvement time.
Mixed Reality is the final platform that ends all other platforms.
Every headset I've tried fits over my glasses. I've had several different frames over time as well.
There really is no guarantee for that. There have been a lot of techs supposed to disrupt everything just to flop miserably.
> in the next 5 years
I got a free vive in 2015 when they launched it in LA, promising a world wide revolution by 2016, 7 years later and still VR is nowhere to be seen. Just like fully autonomous teslas would be there "in two years" in 2012.
I'm very cautious with people promising revolutions "really soon". Crypto, VR, "AI", 3D TVs, 4D cinemas, self driving cars, it's all the same shit, rinse and repeat, "Bro! you gotta buy it now and invest everything you have in it RIGHT NOW! or you'll miss every opportunities!". All we get is the same as with everything else, very slow incremental evolutions, and that's when the tech doesn't straight up disappears
I will not hold my breath. I tested the first (admittedly rudimentary) HMDs in the mid 1990s. VR was f-ing hot back in the days among those of us interested in "computer graphics". According to commentators, VR would have disrupted our lives over the next a few years. Here we are.
The only necessary tech that isn't driven by a large existing market are lenses. That's a pretty good deal for VR hardware, you just have to focus R&D money on one area while getting the rest practically for free (yes I know a lot of work goes into integrating those other components but it's nowhere near the same as having to develop the tech in the first place).
Until the software gets moving with something truly interesting vr is pretty much a gimmick at this point.
I hold out small hope that when Nintendo and maybe Sony get really serious about vr, then we’ll get to some truly fun, unique and new game mechanics / experiences.
Immersion isn’t really the problem in that case, the experience just needs to be distracting since your primary goal is to sweat. VR fitness is the killer app.
It's not too different from having Google driving instructions. You don't immerse yourself in them. But when driving it would be nice not to move your eyes to the small phone screen but instead see it though your VR lenses while at the same time seeing the road ahead through it. Keep your eyes on the road, but also get alerts and instructions without having to let your eyes off the road.
Gets most of the value of AR without having to wear anything. Like… imagine being able to have a recipe projected right on to the counter top or stove door.
I think AR is more useful at least to begin with, it helps us in real reality, not in some virtual reality which requires lots of people to be in the SAME virtual reality as you are to be useful. Whereas everything and everybody around you already is in your augmented reality.
In the era of remote working how insane would it be if you could just carry a set of glasses and have infinite monitor space anywhere you go ? And once people are using it 8 hours a day for work - the stigma around using it for fun goes away.
You really don't. People who haven't played VR don't seem to understand how easy it is to lose yourself. Your brain quickly adjusts to the lack of peripheral vision, bad graphics, low contrast, etc. and you quickly find yourself leaning on things that aren't really there or hitting walls because you forgot that you've wandered off.
I'm always reminded of this when I revisit a game I remember playing as kid. The graphics and sound _never_ live up to my memory of them. Brains are great at filling in those details.
Sounds perfect for a flight.
The main problem is that the current VR device form factor is so intimidating for most people that they won’t even bother putting it on to try it. Instead, they’ll just make a lot of bad assumptions about a product that they haven’t actually tried yet for a good amount of time
But, form factor and weight are just some of the things that influence customer experience.
Apple’s other efforts, such as retinal authentication and automatic, motor-driven pupil distance adjustment remove other points of friction that interfere with enjoyment.
Apple identifies many rough edges in HW and SW that hold back a category.
Then it makes difficult compromises, sanding down a combination of them enough to meet release consideration.
Also be a nuisance to everyone
Or like people filming me (which is luckily not allowed where I am) without consent? Talking about nuisance.
Disregard for culture and obvious social media reactions.
The problem is the products themselves are usually garbage due to the bureaucratic/"management" driven sales process that adopts the tech, where product development is driven by saying "yes" to every customer's demands.
The good consumer products figure out what people want for a demographic by listening to them (or being them) - but not actually letting them design the software itself by doing everything they ask. Yet there's still plenty of low-quality enterprise software which is miles better than previous 'processes'.
https://techcentral.co.za/the-cellphones-of-the-1980s/191544...
So I can help answer the question of why it looks this way? Optics :)
Technical details are in the patent for the cardboard version from 2017:
I find it much more likely that they will use external facing screens that recreate the appearance of the wearers face to onlookers and so reduce the perceived anti-social nature of opaque goggles.
Honestly that sounds horrifying and straight out of some Black Mirror episode. Possibly it comes with an app that makes your external face smile and covers up the bags under your eyes?
To your question - we’re only talking about eyes, not the mouth and whole face. Beautification does seem like something to be sold though.
I think it will flip up. They will do what you said but they can only do that for a few hours a day before the battery dies, and worse, if the battery dies, you can’t see anything anymore. So they need a mechanism that lets you keep wearing it when it’s dead. If you have to take it off when the battery is dead, it will end up in the closet next to your other headsets.
I’m guessing they will have a design that is fashionable and comfortable to wear when flipped up and off.
There is only so much magic one can squeeze out from optical trickery. Especially at a price point like this.
Plenty of people would though if it would work well. It doesn't though. And sticking your phone in front of something really isn't going to work imho. But I would definitely wear them outside as interim solution, not the entire day, but normally I walk to places (4-10 km/day) and a lot of that is boring and spent thinking of on my phone or both. I would wear them there.
The TCL RayNeo X2 looks pretty ok, however, i'm not sure what it really does. It says it will send out to devs soon, so it means there are apps and the reviews during CES don't look bad, but there is no pricing, specs etc. At least not that I could find.
There's no leaks or concepts of what they're actually doing with the AR ones as far as I know though so not a clue what they look like. If anyone can get those right it will be Apple with their ability to do high performance tiny compute.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-01-08/when-w...
It's expected to be released before WWDC.
According to the article, an AR/VR headset has been an R&D project at Apple since at least 2015.
All companies working in the XR/AR/VR/ghost-in-the-snowcrash-shell-gargoyle space need to do in order to develop something widely accessible/affordable, mass-producible and mass-market adoptable while operating within the constraints of currently viable, high yield, low loss rate fabrication feasible tech is.... shoot for wearable display glasses that are in the product line's slimmest tier simply sunshade size, and at the beefiest, a ski-gogglesque form factor. They do this by stopping trying to jam everything and the GPU-plated kitchen sink into the headset.
Restrict design scope of the HUD-glasses to a binocular retina-or-better-resolution MEMS-based display, and maybe a few small, lightweight multispectral sensors and an accelerometer for environment mapping and multi-axis positioning.
Everything else can be connected via a clipped on snagsafe/magsafe cable from a waist, upper arm or torso wearable primary device unit encompassing main battery, SoC, storage, etc; and this could feasibly be the user's next-gen upgrade smartphone.
I’m not sure if I’d like to walk around the streets wearing them though - would be incredibly annoying to other people and a risk of being stolen.
The hard part of AR is the shared experience part. It's close to creating a cross-platform MMO game.
While I enjoyed watching movies in VR, it's just more comfortable to lay down on the couch and watch a movie without a headset on.
A TV is like a piece of furniture, or a decoration like a painting. As compelling as it is, you can choose to ignore it, make eye contact with and talk to someone else in the room wether the TV is on or not. It's casual.
I imagine too what an outrageously high pixel count a VR set would have to have to render a virtual TV with the same resolution as a real one.
And even aside from the above, I really can't see myself putting something on my face and dropping out of my environ for anything more than about 5 or 10 minutes. It's just weird.
Yup. It might take decades to get there, but I think we'll get there.
> And even aside from the above, I really can't see myself putting something on my face and dropping out of my environ for anything more than about 5 or 10 minutes. It's just weird.
I'm envisioning the equivalent of a pair of spectacles. People wear spectacles all day every day without _too_ much issue.
What you describe sounds like a single person experience which is fine but watching a show or a movie can also be a social experience and very often is exactly this. Seeing other people’s reactions and sharing space is a huge part of it. You can’t do that in VR.
Personally I think they'll be replacements for mobile phones. This will only happen if the devices start to become indistinguishable from a normal pair of glasses and allow for prescriptions as well.
Audio will either be through bone conduction or small speakers like how Bose's Audio Glasses [1] do it now (I have a pair of these actually, got them for free at a developer hackathon they hosted once a few years ago, never use them mainly because I don't wear contacts and need prescriptions)
Ideally it could even pick up subvocalization to be able to compose messages in quiet situations without rudely having to speak out loud, if you're the type that cares about that (I certainly do)
We might still need some small handheld device paired with it, maybe it has a simple keyboard on it or maybe just a number pad that also serves as 4-directional buttons for traversing menus and things in your view"
Current AR workflows have tons of moving parts, are harder to test, and have all kinds of unreliable points of failure that are difficult to overcome (like finding a flat plane to use as an anchor and then hoping your content doesn’t show up backwards or upside down). It’ll improve over time for sure, that’s clear, but the current tools are not as easy to use as they probably should be.
In my mind, AR glasses will make the world as shitty as most clickbait webpages. Ads EEEEEEVVVVEEERRRYYYWWWWHHHEEERRRREEE. Notifications all the time. Virtual billboards trying to grab your attention.
I can't think of the obvious use cases, except for virtual monitors, that are all that compelling.
Map navigation? Ok, well, it's not that bad now in non-VR
Info on people in your view? Maybe, but if think protecting your privacy is bad now you'll need much less of it for that to actually work.
Virtual pets running around your room? Seems 15 minutes of wow and then done. Plus the hard part of designing them to interact with your environment vs a pre-designed environment.
Games? Same problem as above, they have to adapt to the actual world vs current games where designers can design and build levels and worlds. So 1 or 2 Pokemon Go type of games and then you'll go back to playing PS6 or VR.
Porn? Same problem. The 3D video won't match your sofa, chair, living room, bed.
Virtual UI? People are already complaining that screens in cars are not as good as knobs. do I really want to have to put on my glasses to adjust my knobless stove?
All that said, I'd probably have made similar arguments against smartphones and been just as wrong :P
If AR can’t solve this, then you won’t have to worry. It’s a fundamental function.
example: in the video an actor is sitting in a chair, youre in a room with no chairs. What does it show?
example: theyre in an open 20x20 foot room, no furniture, your in a 10x10 foot room on your bed. When they walk across their room you'd seen them first walk througb your bed and then walk through your wall
etc...
If I’m in a room with no chairs, there would be no chairs unless one is added visually.
They wouldn’t walk through my bed because they aren’t in my room.
> If I’m in a room with no chairs, there would be no chairs unless one is added visually. > They wouldn’t walk through my bed because they aren’t in my room.
If you're sitting on your bed with your AR googles there is a bed in your room. If they are standing in their room they'll be standing or sitting through your bed. They have no concept of where your bed is because your bed doesn't exist in their room.
Tons of AR demos try to show this feature. Tons of companies are working on it. Most believe it's a mass market feature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0
https://youtu.be/uVEALvpoiMQ?t=55
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PG3tQYlZ6JQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd2GK0qDtRg
But it's unlikely to work because each person's surroundings don't match every other persons. One's at a desk, One's at a cafe, One's in their bed, One's on their soft. They aren't each positioned in a way they can all appear in each others AR.
Maybe this will make it clearer. Imagine you're on your bed laying down. You want to AR video conference with your friend. They're in the bathroom. Where does their AR project your body? Your body is laying down. There's no place to project your body in the bathroom that fits you lying down.
The scenario you’re imagining won’t be an issue because I don’t think AR will allow my “AR presence” to go anywhere that my body is not. AR is about augmented my experience of the reality my body is experiencing, not experiencing ‘realities’ in other locations.
To whatever extent that intentional restriction breaks down, we will have to accept that non-bodily presences cannot fully understand and interact with the environment (and will likely engage with animations to do so).
For your specific bedroom/bathroom scenario, I would choose simple talking heads (floating in space) akin to current expectations for a video chat. There wouldn’t be an attempt to match the speakers to each others environment by default, but if you wanted to do so, yes - one of the speakers would probably need to match their body position such that it can match the environment on the receivers end (so the person laying down would need to stand).
Generically, I think AR will be restricted to the local environment of my body, and anything related to my digital presence traveling to a location different than where my body is found will operate under VR rules (which will be understood as a distinct set of rules/affordances/expectation than AR). We will avoid many problems by not mixing the paradigms.
All photos appear to show AR overlaid on the world in front of the user, while the design of the headset is like a teleprompter mirror so you're looking at the world directly, with ghost of AR reflected at angle from phone above.
1. The dork factor is still in play here. I don't see this being popular by any means, so there needs to be a killer app.
2. I need to see a nice AR game like Pokemon GO integrated with this. I imagine that's the first/best killer app.
This is where I think Glass got it wrong. They made it feel exclusive when they should've been giving them away.
Waving a stick around and shouting fireball while wearing a goofy headset is, at present, still unacceptable.
Whoever gets the AR glasses that look like glasses out first wins the game.
After watching the HoloKit press, though, I should be thankful for silent and grouped up as opposed to running around in a crowded area being an annoying jackass.
I guess I mention this because I suspect that without phones, we might have chatted with one another, got to know one another while we waited for the bus to arrive.
Oh well.
If I'm an employee on a company bus, I'm just as likely to be a (mostly) silent meeting attendee on a status meeting as listening to an audiobook or podcast. Sometimes I've done this and just communicated via meeting chat to give feedback/add to meeting discussion.
Without phones, I'd probably be WFH so I could attend the meeting.
Was it socially acceptable to use a brick sized phone?
Tech evolves, I am sure the size of the glasses will reduce.
A lot of infrastructure and data would be needed before it reaches a critical mass and mass adoption follows. The more people using it, the more data there is in the system, the more people want to use it.
Another really great feature would be captions for conversations going on around you - a big help for the hearing impaired, and maybe even helpful to ordinary people to keep better track of the conversation flow.
The number of people from young kids to grandmas running around in groups was _insanely_ cool to see. I'm sad there simply wasn't enough content to keep it up the drive. I wanted to do missions/dungeon crawls/talk to NPCs etc.
This would have made the go experience 100x more fun... can you imagine a Charizard standing on top of my local mall?! omg. All of us using our captures to take over an objective.
We're nearly there.
Looks interesting. Has anyone here tried it?
Use ARKit/ARCore for tracking.
A few lines of code and you are all set.
Looking at tech specs there is no touch controls. Input is either by using CV hand tracking or sending motion controls from an Apple Watch. Basically they are using Apples SDK for everything.
Is it more than a premium version of Google Cardboard? I can't tell. The "Technical Specs" mention "optical lenses" but otherwise mention no hardware details--well, other than the bring-your-own items (iPhone, Airpods, Apple Watch)...
Cardboard is VR, not AR.
The cardboard is a VR device where you could only see your phones display.
This uses a peppers ghost setup to let you see the real world , and the phones screen is used to overlay holograms in the space in front of you.
If you’ve ever been to DisneyLand or any place that has hologram ghosts etc, this is essentially the same principle.
And in case some are not familiar with Pepper's Ghost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper%27s_ghost
On the upside it disabused me of the idea that AR was any closer to ready at a relatively low consumer price point.
Per typical AR product, the preview videos were wildly better quality than the actual experience.
Spectator mode was also an incredible idea.
Kudos to HoloKit's design team!
We'll know they're onto something if people are messing with these in Dolores Park when the weather turns nice in April.
Which brings me to the biggest issue; input. Speech is often awful as input, especially when in public or noisy environments (no, airpods pro don't filter out noise nearly well enough). It's ok for casual things like checking the weather or replying 'yeah thanks' to an email, but for actual work, speech sucks. Now most people won't be doing that anyway, so who cares? I care and I know many other people I know do; even as the input for phones, so that's a large enough group to warrant experimentation. I experimented with a one hand chording keyboard and it works well; it doesn't take a lot of time to learn, it is quite fast, especially mixed with speech input (create long text with speech and fix it with the chording keyboard for instance) and it seems perfect for AR; if only the the little joystick and a few buttons makes a massive difference over the clunky speech/pointing interfaces. I just wish there were more options; the one that's there (Twiddler) is too expensive.
I'm now trying to work with a split keyboard as input, but the problem really is that those have no pointer. Otherwise it's really quite great (if you don't care how it looks of course, but it's early days), because if you touch type, it's not slower than when you are sat down, almost immediately after trying it (they are qwerty).
While there are many companies experimenting with input for AR/VR, and I have tried all publicly available demos/releases of such input, it's all clunky and slow. Touchscreen and speech are faster, but nothing beats a keyboard and a mouse; I think a lot more research could be spent on that, but as most people will be using devices (including computers with keyboards and mice) for consumption only, there is no financial incentive?
Congratulations to the team. If and when they release an Android version I'll buy one straight away.
Juding by the comments they should perhaps market this more for home use and less for out in public. Still, I think this has the potential to be definitely very fun and possibly very useful.
It looks like they have much better software than we had at launch, though.
The experience for phone-based headsets is really pretty good. The issue is that it’s a really hard sell for consumers at that price point for seemingly a piece of plastic, and the price point is necessary for the optics unless you have massive volume. The other issue is of course the bulky form factor.
They never got a real foothold on games, though.
This would allow using a [PI/Whatever] to interact with the systems avail to the OBD, slurp that and display onto the HUD-film on the windscreen...
With the ability to display HUD info in even the most analog of vehicles...
(I havent figured out how to make the HUD cheap or safe based on this comment - but in higher-end options, flex OLED film layers on the glass... or a small projector which simply projects onto a semi-opaque area in the lower-center section of the vehicle, with a simple device, pico projector (with a BRIGHT light) onto a smei-opaque sticker above the dash.
Full screen HUD integration is cool, but expensive.
but we have all the tools and resources to make this happen....
Just make sure that Apple 'iWindscreen/shield' never makes it into the wild....
run the PI in the machine, and track your bullshit in a new way (as tied in with vid cams...)
but thats just me and my what ifs...
Hope it does well, but I can't really look into it until they open the SDK. The "curated partners" thing doesn't inspire much confidence.
Ultimately this is very google cardboard like and passive so $129 is quite expensive.
I built a fun toy like this in the early 2000’s for $10 using foam board and a $5 sheet of teleprompter glass.
Ultimately anything like this has failed to capture the market because people just don’t want to have their phones out of reach and/or risk their battery using the camera/tracking.
Is it supposed to run existing iphone AR apps too?
I think they have this shape since it’s quite simple optics to have the iPhone screen be a “reflection” on the glasses while you can still see straight out through it. Kinda like looking out a window at night and seeing both your reflection and the outside at once.