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Comment by cweiss | Hacker News Reader

This speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of the two products. Oculus Rift is about bringing hyper-immersive 3D to the wearer, Google Glass is about moving the Google interface to the eyeball. It's like comparing a 4k TV to a Chromebook. Both are outstanding products, but there's little actual value-proposition overlap. I would hate to think that the Facebook board was equally ignorant of the differences and didn't just buy into "Google has a thing for the face, we need a thing for the face! We're Facebook after all!"

I'm less worried about folks being turned off of VR - That Oculus has such great traction means that other big tech manufacturers won't be too far behind emulating their display technology and coming out with competing products at lower pricing than the VR. At least one of them will actually be decent enough to sell well.

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I completely understand the difference between the two products. I've used both, though own neither.

They are two very different products but I maintain that they represent two different approaches to the same problem, pushing us past our current understanding of what I/O devices are. Google Glass is a push into the unknown, Facebook may not agree that it is in the right approach, but you are kidding yourself if they aren't looking at Google and wondering why they are not pushing I/O bounds as well. They're both looking for "the next smartphone", trying to determine what that will be.

The industry has been turned off of VR in the past by botched executions, and I am afraid it can happen again.

In the future, both will be important and will likely merge. If someone can make goggles which can switch between immersive VR and AR, they will do well. I think approaching this from the VR side rather than AR could be tougher and best in the long run.

Oculus has will be the thing that teenagers use to hang out online in the future. Something like Second Life will replace Instagram which replaced Facebook which replaced tying up the landline talking for hours each evening with the BFF.

I also think that the technologies will eventually merge, but due to current physical limitations in display technology I am not convinced that this is imminent. I'd guesstimate it at 15+ years. Adding and subtracting to incoming light, and doing it so that you can convincingly blend the two (allowing you to convincingly overpaint something that is bright in the real world with something that is dark in your virtual space while also allowing you to overpaint something that is dark in the real world with something that is bright in virtual space) is a difficult problem to solve. Probably some sort of hybrid LCD/AMOLED tech could do it.. but I haven't even heard of prototypes for this yet.

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