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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

> In augmented reality, interface elements must coexist with the physical world. They can't be opaque rectangles that block your view. They need to be translucent, layered, and contextually aware.

This isn’t true. You’re never going to want your browser, editor, or Slack window to be translucent.

…or your movie playback window, or Instagram, or your ebook reader, for that matter.

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I agree with your core sentiment but unfortunately we don't have a mass-producible display technology that allows for black pixels in a see-through optic (yet). It's going to be really hard to achieve.

Pass-through is the only AR approach that currently allows black pixels, but it has uncomfortable limitations compared to a see-through optic.

https://stephango.com/black-pixels

Liquid glass design paradigm only works on reprojected displays. Additive displays can't replicate the distortions along the edges of the elements for both optical focus reasons and because you can see through the element.

That's pretty much the conclusion of my article linked above, at least short term. When I worked on that AR device we experimented with a segmented electrochromic layer that could allow a mixture of see-through and pass-through, but it's far from mass-producible, and probably a dead-end approach for what Apple is trying to do.

You absolutely did want all of that until the novelty of Windows Aero wore off.

Of course, now that Apple has invented it, it will be completely different.

I see my kid doing homework and he’s got YouTube open on his other monitor. I don’t know how that constitutes “working” but maybe in the future, you will indeed have your movie playback window underneath your vibe coding UI. Sounds terrible to me, but it’s a distraction economy.

This has been possible for well over a decade: https://www.mobzystems.com/tools/seethroughwindows/

If people wanted to do this then they'd do this right now on a monitor.

> You’re never going to want your browser, editor, or Slack window to be translucent.

r/unixporn disagrees

Maybe Apple designers should stop hanging out there and reread WCAG

r/unixporn disagrees with most HIGs.

The lack of stroke outlining of text on transparency is also just going to make it unreadable particular if the background has motion in it (so worse for AR).

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