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Comment by OgsyedIE | Hacker News Reader

Read this years ago and reread the first two chapters just now. Brilliantly written and within the conceit of "what if technological and aerospace advancement continued beyond the materials limits to the thermodynamic limits and private entities became exponentially emancipated from states and the old moral panics never re-emerged" the content of the book is almost all good but for one thing that we now know to have aged horribly. That thing is augmented reality.

Every augmented reality device more advanced than subdermal hearing aids to have ever been built has found only a very small minority of users who actually enjoy the damn things. Most of the human race doesn't like augmented reality technology, smart vision, heads-up displays or VR in any way.

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That's just because those technologies haven't advanced "beyond the material limits" yet.

VR is amazing, but I don't play much with mine because its such a hassle to set up, manage the cables and having to wipe off the sweat during the warmer months. The same goes for everything else, once I can get for example map AR that projects directions for me and its a small clip on that goes on my shirt or whatever else, then that's going to be a game changer.

VR equipment is amazing, what we're missing is VR centric Linux distributions, for the ecosystem to benefit from creativity of the commons. Right now odds are that if you can afford playing in VR, you probably are too busy with other business to get creative with it.

A VR centric Linux distribution is not going to solve the fundamental problem of people getting sea sick from doing 3D stuff in VR, of how sweaty and disorienting wearing the damn things is, of the cables getting in the way and the minor inconvenience that displays of text are almost completely unusable due to insufficient resolution.

The hardware still needs to gain an order of magnitude in several dimensions.

Apple Vision Pro can display legible text, and the pass-through camera's resolution is also enough to read printed text. At least, that's what I read about it.

At this point, the only dimensions to improve would be weight and price.

However, motion sickness is a real problem. With sufficiently good pass-through, it might not be that bad, but in my Quest 3, I get motion sick after 15 minutes at most when gaming. It's a bit better in pass-through mode, but most software doesn't seem to support it.

> Apple Vision Pro can display legible text, and the pass-through camera's resolution is also enough to read printed text

It's not even close to sitting in front of the cheapest full HD office monitor, not to speak of a modern 4K screen. I don't think anybody seriously writes text for a living with a Vision Pro in front of their eyes right now.

Maybe they'll fix all the other problems those headsets have, and the average consumer will accept a regression in image quality - just like when we transitioned from CRT monitors to LCD screens (it took something like 15 years until LCDs caught up with the best CRTs available).

> (it took something like 15 years until LCDs caught up with the best CRTs available).

I actually think colours still feel wrong.

Have you tried chewing on a ginger root beforehand?

Modern room-scale setups go miles towards dealing with the seasickness (at the cost of constraining your active space to a room-scale, so you have two abstractions for motion).

I agree it's about how people tend to allocate their focus. But I think it's more about dopamine than money.

I can't even be bothered to leave my terminal and work in a browser. The idea of trying to wrangle so many degrees of freedom as VR has... It just doesn't sound like something I'd ever get around to volunteering for because progress would be too slow to be rewarding.

Linux happened at all because people were content to work in text. High fidelity environments are just too much work for too little gain. Sure, some folk bother with a gui, but even fewer would bother with a 3d one.

What so far seem to have aged badly is the concept of devices interacting with your brain directly (unless massive cultural engineering), augmenting thoughts or whatever. Would you give permission to Apple, Google, Amazon or Microsoft to put thoughts directly in your consciousness? Ads and political manipulation are 2 things that the current us see as immediate and very probable misuse of that capability.

I would not but I think the general public is not against the idea. Most people interact with social media on a daily basis, for example, and it certainly has a strong effect on users thought process.

A little bit different than actually having a chip in your head doing these things, which I do think most of the general public would be very skeptical abiout, particularly as doom and gloom have overtaken much of the technical optimism about the future. And corporations are seen as leading us to a dystopian outcome.

Have you checked your screen time lately?

I would love to have a HUD that could remind me of stuff and add extra information to my surroundings.

The closest we've had was Google Glass but the tech isn't quite there yet to be able to have a powerful yet light device.

> Most of the human race doesn't like augmented reality technology

Exactly. The technology is the problem. I'd love to use augmented reality and I always did but not if I have to wear a helmet (it weights a lot, subjectively and maybe objectively) or contact lenses (I can't wear them anymore) or glasses without prescription lenses or anything else that has been more or less technologically viable up to now. Make it as easy as smartphones or earpieces and everybody will use it. How? No idea.

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