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Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

VR and AR are a solution looking for a problem. It's admittedly a cool tech demo. I enjoyed my time playing Half Life: Alyx and The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners on my Valve Index before I decided to sell it out of disuse.

The article says that Apple has a glasses product and a VR/AR product that sounds similar to a Quest Pro.

So if we look at the glasses product it immediately runs into a lot of issues. Do I want to be wearing glasses? Do I already own glasses? Do I like how glasses look on my face? Wearable tech is very personal especially when it's sitting on your face. At best this is a product for industrial environments.

Then the Quest Pro-like VR/AR product...separate battery pack in your pocket, need I say more? Now compare that experience to an Oculus Quest for $300. It doesn't really matter that the Quest is a less capable product, it's at the right price point and form factor and its strong sales show it.

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I don't think it's a solution looking for a problem. I'd be willing to put them on at work and see which pins on a piece of hardware do what instead of looking back and forth between a datasheet. Lots of examples exactly like that, especially if the glasses are fed sensor data so the temperature/pressure appears right beside the area it is measuring.

Like I said, industrial environments. A small niche group of people and businesses who could use some information in front of their face as they do hands-on work.

Estimates of the size of this market were in the single digit billions of dollars for Google, who bailed out of Google Glass recently: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/18/google-glass-enterprise-mark...

For comparison, the iPhone makes $200 billion in revenue every year. Apple Services (Music, TV+, etc) make something like $20 billion every quarter.

Apple does not enter many businesses that only have the potential to make $1-2 billion.

How is this feasible at all? Not only all the tech for the AR device to be light and have decent battery life, but the software you describe would need optical recognition of what you're looking at, then match that to the manual of the object to tell you what the pins do. All on a device with significant size and heat constraints.

For early generations I'd imagine you'd have to plug them in via usb (which would still be fine for my use case I was describing). Processing done on a different device, get some type of AI to summarize datasheets and match it to pins. All of which probably doesn't sound good to you but I'd still prefer it over turning my neck and scrolling back and forth.

But like the parent poster pointed out, I'm now talking about niche industrial uses, not widescale adoption.

Agreed. The technologies will have their uses, like entertainment, training, education, and therapy, but it will never meet mass adoption for practical reasons like price, safety, and power consumption. I'd be curious to know why so many people think otherwise.

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