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Comment by kikkia | Hacker News Reader

If use for solely VR Gaming, and you don't care a ton about the privacy aspect, it is a hard sell against a new or used Q3. However, for myself personally I love the idea of it as a device I can tinker with and have full control over. I would love to also replace my laptop with it while traveling. Especially with a small wireless keyboard it has a good chance to replace my laptop for tinkering/gaming on the go.

With the price increases it is likely not a good value for an average person, but for myself and some other tinkerers I think it is very acceptable.

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> hard sell against a new or used Q3

That depends. Having had a Quest 2 and dealt...nay, put up with with Meta and their god awful ecosystem you couldn't pay me to touch another one of their headsets. I'll take an open linux based one over a Q3 any day. That alone makes the price difference worth it to me. Throw in the foveated streaming and the vastly superior quality and latency of streaming and it makes for a fairly decent offering.

Doesn't wearing a headset in public have antisocial "Glasshole" vibes?

Honestly, people who cowork in public already give me the ick. Maybe immersing yourself in a headset is just a physical manifestation of the digital immersion that is already plaguing public spaces.

I don't think that's what GP means. They are likely using it in private settings.

To be clear, wearing a full VR headset has an "I am an idiot" vibe.

Im not too familiar with the term Glasshole, but on long dark plane rides, if I want to use my laptop I feel like a lighthouse, even with lowest screen brightness. If I look like a dork with it on while doing some light gaming or movie watching, that is an OK price to pay to not disturb others around me. But if you are talking about just general out in public, then it absolutely gives dorky vibes. On the train, or in a coffee shop or something, a laptop just looks much less conspicuous.

Is the Glasshole thing more geared towards recording people in public? This headset has 1. bad cameras but 2. a much better privacy posture than meta.

The Glasshole thing comes from when Google Glasses were new (sort of the ancestor to the modern Meta pervert glasses). When you saw someone wearing Google Glasses, you could see the camera pointed at you and that the screen was on and doing stuff. It made a lot of people uncomfortable.

I put my laptop in dark mode on a flight. Further, you could add one of those privacy screens for more

What's icky about taking a laptop down to the park and getting some work done while surrounded by nature?

Although, I do agree, I would find it odd to go down to the park and see someone wandering around with a VR headset tuning out the world and waving controllers around. I'm more addressing the "cowork in public spaces" part of that. I think their statement about "while traveling" is more like while seated on a several hour plane trip or relaxing at a hotel or things along those lines. Not like wearing the device while ordering a latte or something along those lines.

I don't really get the ick about wearing these kinds of things in public, but, having tried to wear XR glasses in public has shown me that the bigger issue is that these things are at a whole other level of distracting compared even to phones. It'd probably be worse with a full face headset, since at least with glasses you have your full field of view.

Even despite pinning the display in a corner, I noticed I was very distracted when crossing streets. Made me stop wearing them like that, instead prefering to carry them in my backpack and use them on train rides or flights.

At least with my phone I can just slip it back in my pocket when I need to pay attention to my surroundings.

I don't think using a display when walking around is a good idea or even just safe to do. On the other hand, I think it makes perfect sense to have something a like a fighter jet HUD - important information in static places (time/location/notification status/etc.) with possibly some highlights (showing where is the next bus in AR, annotating things when you look at them, seamless translation of text, etc.).

Yeah, I used to think that it'd be fine if the content was pinned off screen but turns out it's worse because I find myself looking away from where I'm walking.

Never see these kinds of complaints when people do with the Apple Vision Pro.

The “glasshole” vibe wasn’t antisocial; it was an understandably human reaction to the fact that you couldn’t tell whether the wearer (and/or google) was surveilling or recording you any time they so much as glanced in your direction in public.

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