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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

The accessibility of this product is going to be transformative in industry. There have been similar AR headsets for woking in some industrial sectors, but this makes it possible for all companies to develop apps specific to their work place. Every factory, every distribution centre, every construction site, every industrial site, every hospital, can have this integrated to guide their workforce in complex tasks.

Imagine this for surgeries, or complex construction tasks, even just finding items in a warehouse.

This is going to be massive in the workspace, thats where I think people probably underestimate it.

We may all end up with one of these - or the none "pro" version - at home, just as we have iPads laying around. But many of us are going to end ups waring these for many hours a day during work.

Taking of a headset when we go home will end up being a joy.

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>This is going to be massive in the workspace, thats where I think people probably underestimate it.

I don't think companies are going to spring this much for a headset and laptop until there's very obvious benefits, but maybe I've just been short-changed with shitty equipment my whole career.

Companies trying to get people to go back to the office, then ordering them VR headsets will be the height of tech irony.

Hot desking will be much easier when people will be wearing their computer AND monitors.

You can further reduce furniture and physical office costs

Apple also isn’t the only one with an XR headset. Meta’s is considerably weaker, but it’s $999

Google Glass tried to pivot towards industrial use (eg, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IK-zU51MU4 ) - it didn't seem to go very well.

Are we really going to compare a Google product with an Apple product? It's night and day.

Speaking as a total non-expert here: assuming workspaces _look_ good, I think this will entirely depend on software. What will it be like to use this with a keyboard? Will the OS be as siloed as iOS?

This morning, my mac wouldn't boot. I tried to write on my iPad instead. It was a nightmare: too cumbersome to move between apps, Zotero nearly unworkable, hard to navigate different file versions. If the OS works more like iOS than macOS, I can't imagine it being as useful as computers save for very specific applications.

For me 100% of the excitement is about the bajillion business ideas I've had hoping that VR would become more popular, when it just simply didn't get there.

Industry is where I'm a lot more excited.

The price is to high for companies.

Laptop budget is 1-3k.

And people steal expensive shit. Alone the stealing is a deal breaker alone.

And we have working cheap AR glasses.

>Alone the stealing is a deal breaker alone.

Judging from the video it doesn’t work outside anyway so you’ll be fine.

I REALLY don't want a doctor performing surgery on me with this thing on their face.

You think you don’t until one day there’s a stat that AR assisted surgery is 50% more successful.

Ask yourself - do you like it when your surgeon is using CAT scans, MRIs, blood/protein testing?

Do you like it when your surgeon is wearing magnification glasses?

Do you think fighter pilots with AR huds with tactical info perform better than fighter pilots with just their eye?

I genuinely can't tell what posts are satire or not in this thread.

Tons of minimally invasive procedures are performed through the Davinci surgical robot where the surgeon is literally hunched over with his head buried ina computer screen. As long as there is some medical benefit, I don’t see this sort of technology interaction as being something new.

What about $3500 says "accessibility" to you? You're just re-vomiting out all of the same promises VR companies have been making for the past half decade. No company is going to spend $3500 on a tool that easily breaks for low stakes jobs and is untested/unreliable for high stakes jobs.

I work in construction. $3500 is a paltry, pocket change amount of money compared to project budgets.

Standard single-building commercial / institutional new builds can be tens of millions to low hundred million, "big" projects are often north of a quarter billion dollars, and well over a billion is not unusual for so-called "mega projects". Risk (from defects / mistakes) is often roughly proportional to budget. The placement of seemingly minor and easy to miss elements at the initial critical stages of a concrete pour in a high rise, for example, is pretty high stakes with rework costing hundreds of thousands to potentially millions. We have processes for mitigating that of course, but none that approach it in such a direct and observable way as AR, and none are incompatible with being done alongside AR. Paying $3500 + software for something that helps mitigate that risk in a totally new and complementary way is very very interesting to many companies.

edit: To be clear, I'm not convinced that this particular device is revolutionary compared to those that already exist, which have their own challenges. I'm just objecting to the idea that there isn't a market for it at that price even WITH challenges.

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