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!
I was going to say that Snap's offering was probably cheaper or designed for mass marketing because their page looks like something you could actually buy.
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.
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.
Using caps doesn’t make this affirmation any more true.
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.
Money buys recovery from failure, which is a double-edged sword. It doesn't buy the ability to learn the right lessons, and eventually the money teaches that failure doesn't really matter, because there's always another chance to get it right.
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.
Sure, but it's a factor and it's not like Snap is doing great otherwise.
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.
don't know about spectacles but the verge's article about it quote someone saying it's about 10k to make this:
> 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.
Snap's device doesn't need a separate compute device, and I'm sure it's pretty trivial to make it smaller with such. So I would not judge based on this.
And anyway, I'm very glad to see Meta pushing towards AR, this is the good example of a company with bold vision.
The thickness is only part of the design, and the only justifiable part of it. The actual design is far more reminiscent of a cheap children’s toy than a high-end “revolutionary” piece of tech.
I think that chunkiness is kind of an aesthetic that's in right now actually, if you look at a lot of popular media there's definitely some "birth control glasses" that are considered on trend.
That being said I'm about the furthest thing from a fashion critic - only Kirkland Signature touches this body.
They innovate to infiltrate. 20ish years ago Steve Mann was beat up for invading people's comfort zone with AR glasses, then Google's AR users were "glassholes," now Meta is trying to make it cool. As much as I think AI is valuable, I hope they fail. The act of holding up a smartphone is much more explicit to signal to others they're about to lose all privacy to a centralized company. I don't think Quest is that innovative either, it's mostly first person shooters.
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.
It depends on your definition of privacy. There's a lot of people who would argue that you don't have a right to privacy in a public setting. And there's a lot of nuance here depending on the state (assuming US).
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".
The idea of having no privacy in public doesn't extend to every cause and creeper creating their own spy system. They are rarely going to focus on useful 'powers that be' issues. They are going to be all about asymmetrical exploitation. If this is let go, anyone with minimal skills and intent will be fully weaponized, some will organize as they do now for lulz or outright malicious activities like doxxing and blackmail, but amplified and "accepted" (without critique, just "cool" innovation for infiltration), and this will be another unrelenting assault on society.
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.
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.
I'm in my house. Hopefully nobody is recording me there. My smartwatch tracks those things but in theory it should not be sharing that with the manufacturer.
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
The vast majority of Quest users would never have invested in a high spec PC and Valve Index (which was like $1000 at the time), set it up with sensors and fiddled about with software to get it work. Mobile-quality gaming (Beat Saber) and professional applications are completely different markets and for the most part Quest just commoditized VR for people without the money or the means.
And you can literally use it with a PC via wifi or a cable.
Aesthetically I prefer the visor look of the HoloLens.
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
Boy, not from the outside, though. There was a guy wearing one on my last flight and it’s ugly and it’s super weird to see someone “doing stuff”. All the hand waving and stuff. I can’t imagine wearing one in public. But I’m old
The Apple Vision Pro front screen feels like an initial clunky attempt at trying to make this easier by giving an obvious indicator when somebody is off in their own world vs actually looking at you... though as UX design it's a good 10 years ahead of the hardware, since nobody's ever going to be casually wearing AVP in a coffee shop.
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.
Ya I don't know why they don't make the specs looks like normal specs. For example the master stroke of the Tesla Model S was to make it look like a normal car. The same with these devices. If they look normal and work differently they will get far more users.
Still looks ugly. The Ray Band was a success due to the aesthetic appeal of sunglass users (aviators, beach jocks look cool).
Pushing normal glasses without making the subject look like dorks (nerds are unattractive) or "glassholes" (Google glass tech bros) will be a challenge.
[^1]: https://www.spectacles.com/