Still kinda dorky looking but 10x better than what Snap unveiled last week.[^1] Software looks miles ahead of the AR glasses competition as well. Nice job FB engineers...keep cooking!
But that isn't the case! Snap will only rent them to you at $1200/year [0], can't imagine what the BOM is like for either of these products.
> As Meta’s executives retell it, the decision to shelve Orion mostly came down to the device’s astronomical cost to build, which is in the ballpark of $10,000 per unit. Most of that cost is due to how difficult and expensive it is to reliably manufacture the silicon carbide lenses. When it started designing Orion, Meta expected the material to become more commonly used across the industry and therefore cheaper, but that didn’t happen.
Plus Snap's core business is a mess I don't see how they could really compete with Meta on this they'll run out of money first.
It's cool to see Meta's continued work/focus in this space - a polished internal prototype is probably the right place for this hardware.
Snap is worth $20B, Meta is worth $1.5T. No comparison.
It says something that sony has the ability to fail like that and continue. Just like FB failed at the metaverse after doubling and tripling down about how it was the future of the company before it just kinda stopped talking about it.
Companies with this much cash can take risks and fail with little to no concequences, smaller companies cannot and thus often choose not compete or just HOPE that they get bought by one of these near monopolies.
While you’re correct that it does massively help, money is only a resource, which you can use to trade for a lot of things, but there are people, things and abstract concepts that money can’t buy.
Which is why it is probably better to be just constrained enough financially that your first attempt really matters to your bottom line, but have enough to be able to pull it off.
Startups have less money, but invent new fields because of the differentiated advantage that comes from being smaller and faster (among other things). This is Snap competing in the same arena against Zuckerberg who is a lot better capitalized and better at it.
It'd be one thing to do if Snap was otherwise firing on all cylinders and trying to expand into the platform of the future, but it seems like they never recovered from Apple's ATT and are blowing money on passion projects that are not competitive.
What do I know? I'm just an outsider, but I'd buy Meta and sell Snap. If you disagree, the other direction is probably a lot more profitable if you're right.
That being said I'm about the furthest thing from a fashion critic - only Kirkland Signature touches this body.
Where does Meta actually talk about things that could really be called "cool" at a society level? Or is it all just empty hype along the lines of Facebook being exploitation of social networking.
If you have a smartwatch, there's a company out there that knows every breath you take, and every move you make.
Might as well get AR in the mix now that we're here. There are lots of pure sci-fi applications that come with smart glasses.
- AR directions
- all sorts of tutorials for things where you work with your hands. Imagine how easy IKEA furniture can be!
- never forget another name
- metadata about spare parts, products, and recipe ingredients as you look at them
- incredible military applications - team awareness, situational map, aiming reticule
I'm not a fan of the data being in the hands of a large corporation, but I AM a fan of more video recordings that are not government owned (cough London, Beijing, etc) that helps shine one more light of accountability on the "powers that be".
In all seriousness, your point about Beijing and London makes sense - the horse has bolted on public filming, so every citizen having an always-on camera is probably the best and most likely outcome.
There's no good normal from some people being able to deeply track some other people using all the tools available. It should be strictly forbidden for individuals and corporations to collect and organize this information, and use by government should be strictly limited.
On the other hand, it should be perfectly normal and good for individuals to deeply track companies and governments as bodies. The lack of a society wide focus on this aspect is quite troubling.
They flooded the headset market by selling subsidized hardware at a massive loss for years which aggressively redirected funding away from abitious, interesting projects utilizing desktop levels of compute (next-gen 3D modeling and sculpting, architecture, fluid simulation) to Beat Saber level mobile game shovelware that has to be able to run on a cell phone
And you can literally use it with a PC via wifi or a cable.
However if you want to appeal to people outside a work environment something that looks like actual glasses is the way forwards. This looks like it still has a couple of years until it reaches that goal, but it seems like Zuckerberg's ambition towards XR will pay off eventually
VRChat, of all things, has some interesting experimentation going on in this space. For example, there are avatars that will link up with your other SteamVR apps to show a placeholder screen or other indicator on the avatar when you have an overlay floating window active that's totally separate from VRChat.
Exciting work! It seems like the main problems are now in miniaturizing electronics (and not optics) into a Ray-Ban form factor? Super cool.
Neither is Snap's offering. They're renting out Devkits.
With Orion, no devkits publicly available either.
Pushing normal glasses without making the subject look like dorks (nerds are unattractive) or "glassholes" (Google glass tech bros) will be a challenge.