Trust Is Built in Drops and Lost in Buckets

Negativity? Yes Facebook was negative for 20ish years and as a result of their behavior technical people don't like them.

This is not something, we are wrong about even if your "negativity here" silently suggests that.

You reminded me of something, please read this article: https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/leave_my_br...

It is helpful for becoming negative to negative companies where they deserve it.

IG Farben had great technology (for that time) but needed change of name and half of century of good service so they have been removed from our memory as producers of Cyclone B. Now they are known as Bayer. And my neighbor (concentration camp survivor), while he was alive, wasn't buying Bayer products and he was quite vocal about it. Any of them, regardless of technology, different people, different products,... Guess why. Will you say he was negative?

Thats why FB was renamed and I am eagerly waiting what they will be like after 50 years. Until then, they will not be anywhere near my devices and even less filtering my sight.

> IIncredible amount of negativity here.

It's FB. They're not popular. I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole, because I expect it will be absolutely stuffed with user surveillance.

The technology they've packed into these things is amazing - it's an incredible achievement.

But, that said, there's also plenty of room for negativity around the actual product conception. It may have niche applications, but it just doesn't seem that most people need or want AR for everyday use - it's a solution looking for a problem. For gaming VR seems a better fit than AR, and same for Metaverse in general.

AR seems a bit like Segway two-wheelers - cool and fun, but with limited actual use. I could see AR glasses being used in the same way as Segway's end of life use for tourist city tours, or for other similar rent-to-use entertainment experiences.

> next consumer electronics platform

I really hope this isn’t the case. We have enough screens around us as is, the last thing I want is screens pressed up against my eyeballs

"negativity" or people who are stating their perspective on a product.

Was there a lot of engineering, novel problem solving, and even new invention? Yes.

Does that matter to customers if it comes together in a product that they don't feel is good enough? No.

For a site focused on tech and startups there is an awful lot of whiteknighting for companies who should know and do better.

Agreed. I was commenting [1] on how this could be one of the posts where HN is totally wrong about looking back 10 years from now, similar to the Dropbox post.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41656380

I agree, just because you don’t like a company or you don’t have a use for the device doesn’t mean that it can’t be a good step forward for tech in general, and for those who will find a use for it.

The problem with waveguides are the manufacturing defects are on the micron level, and you need to get those channels perfect - then produce the same pattern a few more times for other colors, and hope they all perfectly line up.

I don’t see 3D printing being a solution here for a very very long time

I agree, though it's hard not to be negative. My first thought after "oh cool" was "how long until this thing languishes and gets discontinued?" The recent history of AR devices doesn't exactly do Meta a service.

I wish I didn't have to be so negative because these are cool, but it's Facebook. Surveillance and ad tech that cause brain rot are what they do for a living. At this point they could just sell versions of these products that aren't subsidized by evil, and they still choose not to do so. This means no matter how much they talk about the future of AI being open, no matter how nice their AR glasses are, I can't do business with them. Everything facebook does is burdened by being facebook and I for one am glad at least one demographic won't let them forget it.

I think the hardware and idea is great. But I simply can't ignore the fact that it is made by Facebook, which is basically the posterchild for modern addiction optimizer adtech business.

The last company I'd want to put right in front of my eyeballs for any extended periods of time is Facebook.

Some people have morals and ethics and believe that its not okay to just do what facebook does without taking responsibility.

You build a platform which allows you to share fake news and pay to win shit to billions? You make sure the algorithm makes you as much money as possible?

You know who made sure facebook fixes this? Politics, not suckerburg.

I wonder if and when Apple releases smart glasses that take pics and videos too how society will react? It goes against Apple's whole privacy ethos.

This would be like Telsa coming with new tech. Tesla / X-Twitter & Facebook / Meta are companies I will never financially support. They make money off propagating misinformation and their CEOs are not decent human-beings.

The negativity goes both ways. I wonder if Mark Zuckerberg will think we're "dumb fucks" for buying this new gizmo.

From using various VR systems, a hololens, and reading reviews of the vision pro I really feel like hand gestures are a bad way to interact with AR systems. They might work in a pinch (heh) but some sort of small controller that can act as a pointer and has a button or two is superior in every way.

It's interesting that meta went through the effort of bundling an accessory but stuck with hand gestures anyway.

The EMG wrist band is the most exciting part of this release, IMO. That strikes me as a great solve that pushes into software a lot of hard problems that were solved with hardware previously.

This is very interesting. The company that looks most poised to capitalize on a product like this is still Apple.

Wireless compute puck = iPhone Wrist band = Apple watch (although most people wear it on their non-dominant hand)

From the videos it looks like Meta adopted Apple's UI of a horizontal handle bar underneath a window for interacting with a piece of content.

Considering that the 100 degree field of view of the Apple Vision Pro is already noticeable, 70 degrees seems really limiting.

the wristband reminds me of the Myo armband, this thing you could wear to control a computer

did meta buy them out?

Way more informative and interesting than the press release.

> Micro LED Projectors

Is that true? Last time I was reading about holographic lenses, it was a flat white laser backlight fed into a waveguide (the hologram part), and filtered through an LCD. An actual LED projector would have darker darks, but I would much rather have a higher resolution..

It's definitely helpful to hear about the waveguide production problems. Obviously, that's going to be the greatest hurdle; after all, they are manufacturing a completely unique object with very small feature sizes.

> I think I've called it a smoking crater where ten billion dollars used to be.

It’s less of a waste of money if it paints Facebook as a technology leader and distracts lawmakers, and helps give the company mind space among the tech press.

In fact the metaverse may have started out as DC strategy [1].

Facebook Inc. is old and boring, catering to a predominantly older cohort and becoming “Big Social” by buying up anything promising (Instagram, WhatsApp). But Meta Inc. is a scrappy pioneer at the forefront of American tech that’s creating the future™. Be harsh with them at your peril, is the implicit message to lawmakers.

If you look at it as a PR / Corporate defense strategy, a billion is actually cheap.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/24/faceboo...

The Verge's article[1] mentions that the consumer version planned to be a few years out won't have silicon carbine lenses, and that those lenses are responsible for the majority of the cost of the Orion device due to extremely poor yields. Sounds like they're pretty great otherwise so maybe they're return to it at some point in the mid-future.

I agree regarding the undertaking - enormously costly, but if they can make it "just glasses" it might actually end up as the "next computing format" Zuckerberg was looking for. (Even in that case though, whether it was worth the investment/Meta can stay on top I don't know.)

[1] - https://www.theverge.com/24253908/meta-orion-ar-glasses-demo... (ctrl+F for "silicon carbide", it's the last mention)

I think it's fair to assume this is where the VAST majority of the Reality Labs spend was going ... cutting edge R&D on getting this kind of form factor, whilst some others (who perhaps lack object permanence) thought it was all going on Horizon.

Aswath Damodaran did an analysis on Meta valuation. He found out that even if all the 10s of billions being invested give 0 in terms of revenue it doesn't have much impact on its stock value and in turn companies value. So, I think it would be stupid for Zuckerberg to not invest in Metaverse unless he is missing some better opportunity.

Facebook lost this wave of mobile smart devices (anyone remember the Facebook phone?)

This $10B bet is that they're the leader of the next wave where smart glasses replace smartphones.

$10B? Closer to $50B now. They're spending about $3-4B per quarter at the moment, and their guidance last earnings call was spending in RL would only tick up in the coming quarters.

Given that this is AR, not VR, and that AR has never even been as popular as VR outside a few industrial niches, I don't think this should change anything in your estimate of the value. Despite all the hype, the only thing that XR has ever been mildly popular for has been VR gaming. AR glasses can't do that well, since everything is transparent, instead of making you feel like part of the game world, so I would personally bet these will be as DoA as a consumer mass market product as the Holo Lens was.

> I've long been a huge skeptic of the whole Metaverse project/undertaking, I think I've called it a smoking crater where ten billion dollars used to be.

Following your train of thought, we can assume that even with skepticism, if the price is right, people will buy it, just as we purchase many other gadgets. While the market size may be smaller than that of mobile phones, it could still become appealing once people start seeing their neighbors and friends using it.

Nick Clegg (public affairs guy at FB) is currently lobbying to get VR headsets on schoolchildren. I can't think of anything I want less than my kids wearing those things while in class all day.

https://nickclegg.medium.com/how-the-metaverse-can-transform...

I definitely think that's worth worrying about. Eye tracking too; it's shocking how much can be learned about a person from it.

The chart here is... well, eye opening:

https://newatlas.com/science/science/eye-tracking-privacy/

Am I worried about a a mega-corp programming all the nations children? Yes! But lets not forget that programming of children already exists. TV, social media and ... parents and grandparents and teachers. The raw technology adds nothing. The software implanted we certainly need to think about.

Cocomelon are already focus group testing their addictive hypnotic kids videos. They don't need millions of kids to develop this crack for kids, just a dozen or so.

I don’t think ad placement for children should be the primary concern.

Unless I’m misunderstanding the current state of the technology, it’s possible today with a little effort to put my biometrics in a feedback loop with (say) GPT-4o, and use those measurements to rapidly produce and refine an increasingly horrifying series of images, personalized to my lizard brain reactions.

That’s gross, but the same technique could be applied more subtly. Imagine the worst things people suspect about TikTok’s algorithm, but with biometric feedback on its individual effectiveness.

> optimizing ad placement

I don't know about anyone else, but I will never buy AR glasses with ads. That's a deal breaker for me.

It's far too late to be worrying about that, Meta has been hoovering up information about children for more than a decade now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo

We already put a phone in their hands by kindergarten... I think any kind of flashy tech in front of kid's eyes is almost always bad.

If it’s Facebook for sure. I’m still waiting to see if Microsoft has actually changed or is just doing a very long PR stunt. A lot of Balmer execs are still there. Putting a new head on the fish doesn’t necessarily prevent the rot.

As cool as these are I’m not sure a lot of adults (at least in Denmark) is going to put these things on children. Facebook isn’t exactly a popular brand these days, and even though Instagram made it rather big with kids from the previous ages I think the next generations will be less likely to get on the Meta platforms. In part because what you’re asking about here has been revealed as something Facebook does.

It’s all based on anecdotal knowledge, but at least in my little bubble of the world nobody wants their children on Meta if they can help it. Which is a little bit hypocritical considering a lot of the same people don’t mind using Google, OpenAI, Microsoft products and so on. For some reason Facebook has taken the brunt of the dislike and I think a lot of my colleagues might actually feel better about their children being on TikTok than any sort of Meta product.

Not that you can really avoid being included on the Meta platform if these things start filming you in public.

Problem is not children having access to it. It is more parents outsourcing parenting to YouTube/TikTok or Meta. If parents still take responsibility on how much and where the child spends their time, it is no different than any other tech gadget. People are concerned about new tech since the time of Guttenberg.

I think that's a realistic scenario. They will certainly attempt to use the data accessible by XR devices to make ads more effective. Actually succeeding at doing so seems realistic to me, too.

Whether the legislature has notably limited data collection for ad purposes by then - probably not.

we need protections for children. An argument can be made that adults are responsible for their data, perhaps protections here are also needed, but children can't be held responsible. I would not want my children's data being harvested for some multimodal model; these days even toothbrushes are iot devices. Where will the data harvesting begin to end?

well its gonna have to exist and do damage before we can regulate it. c'est la capitalisme

Meta spends a lot more money trying not to read children's data than actually read it. You can't even bid to serve ads to people under 18 on Meta.

They are as small as the technology can be made today. Meta knows that they are still too big. Zuckerberg said on stage that they will attempt to miniaturize them further and this is not a consumer product today.

Making them as small as they are is an incredible feat actually. They are better than Hololens in every respect and Hololens is absolutely massive in comparison. There are at least 5 cameras, two HD projectors, an IMU, microphones and speakers in this thing plus the chips and batteries to run them all continuously for two hours.

I was an early adopter of the Galaxy Note which looked outlandishly large and goofy, back when people still spoke in awe of how Jobs made the 3.5" iPhone to fit the human hand naturally and no other form factor could possibly be right.

Fast forward today and nearly every phone looks like a galaxy note. Turns out when the utility is there, people will adapt.

It still seems like an improvement though. They could be mistaken for very unfashionable glasses. That’s so much closer to what people want, than Apple or Microsoft’s headsets.

Actually it is a little bit annoying, people might actually get away with wearing these things, which means Facebook spyware might be entering everyday life. I’m glad I’m too old for parties.

Thick rims like those are considered high fashion right now. It's the opposite of goofy and says a lot about the audience here that you're all oblivious to this fact.

Wanna see the first prototypes for mobile phones? And even then it's really good compared to a Quest, but def. not good enough if you're going to wear this on the daily

My first thought was Bart Simpson becoming a nerd that one time

https://img.cohan.dev/qFlL7.jpeg

I think adding a rubber nose and a fake mustache would make them perfect!

Yup. My first thought was that they look like "BCGs".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GI_glasses

In the army, they were BCGs - Birth Control Glasses.

US military used to issue glasses like that, which were known as Birth Control Glasses...

This is common with everything new tech. The first laptops, the first phones, the first iPhone, the first iPod and so on started out large.

I don't know, right now I'm more interested in the capabilities of these glasses. But the video showing people's reactions to using them... That's what seemed a bit strange to me. Or you sat "goofy".

It's because the lenses aren't transparent OLED displays like the ones LG is making. The images on the "screens" are literally being projected by small projectors fitted into the frame onto the lenses.

The Meta ones lack the obligatory sellotape over one side though.

That's why this AR sunglasses bid is absolutely the wrong move.

Someone needs a lesson about the uncanny valley. Short story: unless you are all the way at the top go down, not up. Lean into the goofiness that your limitations demand. Make a decent new thing, not a strange old thing.

they need a big glob of white tape right over the nosepiece.

The problem is that these companies keep wanting to put processing in the glasses. The glasses should only have the minimum circuitry to send, receive and render very high definition video. All the processing should be done in another device (like the arm band) that is carried nearby (like the wireless microphones they use in TV or concerts: https://www.amazon.com.mx/UHF-Wireless-Microphone-System-Kit... ). That way you are not CPU constrained.

I would say have a "cache level" like combination: * very low/few computation done at the glasses level * medium computation done at the brick unit level * hard/intensive computation done in the cloud.

Agree with the sibling commenter here, this stance baffles me. Google have been caught breaking the law on data collection enough times at this stage that there's absolutely no reason to ever assume they aren't being as invasive & insidious as they can be in their products.

I think people seem to give Google a free pass because so much of their presence in our lives is implicit/invisible but they are so much more embedded than Facebook could ever be.

I take a totally different position than you do. If I can't think of a technical reason Google can't get data from something, I assume they do. Why do you think otherwise? Google's full of exactly the same rapacious MBA types that Facebook is, and has the exact same obligations to its shareholders. They're essentially the same business (trap users in your services to mine their data and show them ads). I honestly see very little difference.

That is kinda like saying "I pay for FB ads and WhatsApp business, and these things doesn’t advertise at me".

Google has "build an ad profile about every human being" in their DNA just like Facebook, employing similar creepy tactics with Gmail and Chrome.

Guess what? Most people who end up buying this product won't care about any of these.

(P.S. Apple is much worse than you think. Look up Apple's first party tracking.)

> Facebook just strikes me as a fundamentally different company. Even if I were to pay them for these glasses I would have no confidence that it wasn't just a gigantic suckhole being fed into their slush fund of data.

I agree, and to that I would add the way they've been contributing, if not actively engaged, to push reality-denying propaganda from hostile third parties, including state actors.

The fundamentally different aspect is also at the user end - you need fb account to run these gadgets, spend money associated with this account and when someone tries to “hack” that account (because it is public), you loose it without a chance to ever get back the account or money. There is no way how to contact any living person for support, most you can get is their faq. I cannot imagine such situation with gmail.

My first thought was, “does Meta have a user base anymore that would be interested in this?” Who is their early adopter demographic?

Someday old people will use VR for escape but only when they are the late adopters. Zuckerberg has lost his damn mind. But don’t tell him that, I want the full Willie Wonka experience.

I wouldn't be so sure about google not being inherently about getting all your data. apple I'm not so sure.

People with the Meta Quest 3 seem happy enough.

I've used Facebook for years and the worst that's happened is they've tried to show me some ads. I can live with the forces of evil knowing I've put up "hi mum, here's my hol pics" etc.

I actively avoid Facebook URLs because I don't want to see all my unread Messenger/Facebook notifications.

Data collection is not only bad because of advertising; that's the most visible annoyance to us, but I'd argue that the kinds of data collection that Google (and especially Apple) enable can be orders of magnitude more harmful (things like client side scanning of content, location tracking even with the phone turned off and these all-knowing AI datasets that are just a query away from learning the most intimate things about you).

but those products that I pay for aren't vehicles for advertising and I don't think Google would ever try to make them that.

Advertising is 80% of Google's business. If you think those things aren't being factored into their ads model.... Idk what to tell you.

I wouldn't buy something like this that I can not control.

And yeah, I do expect that if Google sells it, there's a chance they will allow me to control it, but if it's Facebook, there's no chance at all.

But in either case, the product is too intrusive to concede control to those companies.

This looks to me like a consumer product, so it you should compare it to Google's similar products, not enterprise ones.

Does Google stop tracking you when you pay for Youtube Premium ? When you buy a Pixel phone ?

Like you, I do think that in general Facebook is an evil company, more than the others mentioned, but I don't think that if Google were able to produce a similar consumer device, they would track me any less

I remember Meta (your old Meta not the new Zuck's Meta) had an amazing section of the site where you could submit and see sort of like Kickstarter proposals for use cases and I always wondered where all that creative devkit type passion went. Probably on a couple hard drives in a lockup.

visor.com is close to shipping too (Vision Pro in a smaller package at 1/3 the cost, aimed at virtual monitors)

The Magic Leap headset already uses essentially an LCD layer to add per pixel shading to add darkness.

Even still, modern displays are so so good that an additive display is a massive step down.

Damn! That's a throwback. I remember reading about you guys in an airplane magazine once and getting hooked on the concept. I always wondered where y'all went...

> The main thing letting down tech today is how open the platforms are for external developers.

You mean how closed they are? Apple was bad about this, but I think Meta is pretty good with helping spatial / game devs? Am I wrong about that? I don't work in the space, it's just my impression

What do/did you use your Hololens for?

I tried out the first gen version at a meetup and it was really nifty (the latency was fantastic), but I just couldn't work out what anyone would use it for in real life, it seemed too limited to be useful.

apparently they did something weird with the glasses to bend the light and increase your FOV, I'm not sure what that means but it looks intriguing.

If they get the hardware right, apps should surely fill in with better use cases over time. The Verge demoed a better scenario where orion picked up on food ingredients in field of view and displayed a smoothie recipe using them.

[1] https://youtu.be/mpKKcqWnTus?t=236

I think the preferred term is contentpreneur now, not influencer.

Pretty sure the talking “neckbeard” is a video chat..

Even if it turns out that the only application of this is to show ads (which will not be the case), the hardware alone is a monumental achievement of engineering.

I would love to see ads on these, at least once. In contrast, I've never had any interest to even try Apple's VR headset. This is one of the most well-put v1 products ever.

Avoid the MKDBHC trap (or however it's spelled). Innovation beats cynicism, every day.

Further evidence to the truth of this:

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.

–Jeff Hammerbacher

Oh lament! for what, not just the future, but the present, could have been.

Edited to add: But! Even as I have just written that and stand by it, I just don't know if humanity could have done it any other way. One must sell their soul to 'the green', even just a little, to have the time and space for the kind of creativity that will create a better future. Will we forever have to wade, neck-deep, through trash to find each tiny piece of the puzzle that, when enough pieces are put together, forms at least a picture of a brighter future?

It's so sad they felt okay with unveiling these with the horrible aesthetics and no guarantees anywhere in plain sight on privacy.

I wouldn’t say large phones were so much accepted as forced on people.

I hate my iPhone mini 13 because it is too fucking big for my giant hands.

However, at this point, carrying a phone is basically mandatory, and it (and the giant se3) were/are the smallest workable ones on the market.

But many cities in the real world already have ads everywhere. If anything, a modified AR device could allow you to detect and remove those.

This reminds me a Futurama quote: "Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 20th century? Fry: Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky... But not in dreams."

As others already mentioned, the real space is already full of all sorts of advertisements. I personally can't wait for an AR uBlock.

Especially if monetization becomes a priority...

These are entirely different tech skill trees. Meta has been acquiring research companies and empowering researchers to invent cutting edge solutions like micro-led projects and Waveguides whereas the Vision Pro is a traditional VR headset architecture.

Similarly Google has invested in 3D displays that use lightfield displays, with Project Starline.

One would assume Apple has many lines of research towards AR glasses, but nothing is publicly known.

Meta plays the asymmetry game. Apple and OpenAI are secret shops. Meta Orion and Llama can benefit from being more open.

People are generally assuming Apple is also developing these internally. They just don't show off their tech until it is ready. But I would love to know where they are in comparison with respect to weight, size and field of view. I know it is not obvious unless you are very in the scene, but 70 degrees field of view here in this form factor is a massive breakthrough. Most similar glasses are struggling to do 45 degrees.

I'm sure Apple has prototypes like this internally. Apple clearly thinks AR is the way to go, and even tries to avoid calling Vision Pro VR. I think it's simply the tech isn't ready yet, and Apple isn't the type of company that develops in public. When we see what they have to offer, we'll be able to buy it within a matter of weeks or months.

Vision Pro could even be a red herring to get apps developed, so when their true mass market product launches it will already have thousands of native apps.

At $10K per pair in the first dev batch and the consumer version price still unknown, it's not surprising that this was not a reasonable option for Apple. It's going to be interesting to see the actual price and the specs once these glasses are launched.

Vision Pro is an XR device not purely AR.

So there are many things very important to Apple e.g. running apps, creating content, watching movies etc. that AR glasses are completely useless for.

Never really understand why people keep comparing AR to XR. Very different use cases.

100 grams is still quite a lot of weight to have on the bridge of your nose. My glasses are ~22 grams and I can notice them after a full day.

Yeah it’s “cool prototype” vs debugged assembly line, manufacturing process, customer complaints, etc.

It's not cost; waveguide displays are not great.

For #4, I don’t think scaling should be a major issue as the tooling industry has been manufacturing at scale for decades now. The only real difference is the customer

1. Quest has had a wireless connection to PC for 3+ years and it's fine for fast paced games like Beat Saber.

They brought you React so that there'd be plenty of bloat at runtime for their trackers to hide in. Seems consistent to me.

The person who made this post is likely not an engineer and is more focused on content and public perception than load times.

The "GIF" is a video. You are watching a bunch of advertising videos. 115 MB isn't really very much in that regard.

It must not be fun to see every new technological improvement as a horrific thing

The "horrific" end game you mention here doesn't even result in seeing more ads.

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.

[0] https://www.spectacles.com/lens-studio

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

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.

FWIW, Orion is not for sale.

Exciting work! It seems like the main problems are now in miniaturizing electronics (and not optics) into a Ray-Ban form factor? Super cool.

The tech industry is so focused on strapping technology to our faces

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.

Yes this is buying them time, not an actual product announcement but press treats it as though it were a consumer available product.

> This tech is cool, but there's a worrying trend of important tech companies creating larger than life PR announcements without anything I can actually get my hands/eyes on

Funny thing is a company called Micronics actually recently launched an actual Kickstarter campaign for something they planned to ship to consumers, then they decided to sell to some enterprise company instead and cancel the campaign.

So even stuff that was advertised as for consumers isn't safe from never actually happening

Well, the announcement is necessary because Snap has a similar product that's out now, and ostensibly Google is making one also. Apple probably will be 2-3 years behind perfecting their version, as is their MO.

It also invigorates current devs for Quest by showing them what their apps could run on in the future

I’d rather wear 5th or 6th gen glasses than 2nd or 3rd gen cybernetics implants when those come. I’m going to be very late to that game, because getting hacked could have pretty dire consequences. You can just take the glasses off.

You've actually got it backwards.

There's a reason that mice and keyboards are faster and more accurate than touchscreens, and it's that there is a physical+visual feedback occurring that our brains are used to processing when handling other physical objects. Touchscreens have no haptic component (or they have a vibration that is disconnected from the action that you're actually doing on the screen), so you're relying entirely on visual cues. It's slower and less accurate. Compare max WPM on physical vs touch keyboards, for instance.

Moving to AR/VR is even worse, because the lag time is much larger than on a touchscreen, and in the case of VR, your hands are completely hidden.

The touchscreen might be better than you're giving it credit for. Direct interaction (vs the indirectness of mice, keyboards, gesture) is one benefit that I can't see done better any other way. I think people will always have some kind of handheld touchscreen as a result.

> Can you imagine how goofy you'd look sitting at a coffee shop and just sort of staring into the middle distance and talking, as you take a Zoom call?

Honestly, people used to say the same thing about Bluetooth hands-free devices years ago, and now no one even bats an eye when someone talks using AirPods.

I definitely see the appeal.

A vastly larger screen where you don't have to crane your neck down to read the news? That sounds amazing for my daily commute, and so much healthier for my neck and shoulders.

And visible directions while cycling would be amazing, when it's unsafe to glance at your phone. (Audio directions aren't nearly as good, and wearing headphones/earbuds while cycling is illegal in a lot of places as well.) A heads-up display in your car should be safer too than looking down at the screen.

And if people are having video calls while walking, that doesn't seem any goofier or creepier from audio calls with earbuds, where it already looks like somebody talking to nobody.

What's weird to me with the call example is I can receive a video call but I can't respond with a video of me.

And I find being on a video call with someone just on audio very creepy.

If I'm not a weirdo for that, then it's distinctly worse than a hands free voice call, which we already have

> Can you imagine how goofy you'd look sitting at a coffee shop and just sort of staring into the middle distance and talking, as you take a Zoom call?

While I agree with you, you could also say the same thing about mashing a black square with your thumbs at a coffee shop or walking around a grocery store with little piece of plastic in your ear and talking to someone.

If you get the opportunity to try the Meta glasses, you will quickly see that it's more than just a gimmick, and they don't even have any display

Because you're thinking of the possibilities from a very narrow angle (communication, passive media consumption, and productivity).

The educational potential for AR is absolutely incredible. Imagine being able to look down at a breadboard, and have it overlay explanations, diagrams, current flows, etc.

Imagine putting a person in front of you who is juggling (mills mess, box pattern, etc) and slowing it down to exactly see how to learn it.

Imagine being able to practice drawing by putting a model of any human in the center of your room, and walk around it as you sketch on actual canvas.

Imagine being able to head to the nearest open soccer field, and throw down a bunch of ninjas throwing ninja stars at you, and you have to physically duck and weave while running full tilt down the field.

These took me 10 seconds to think of a bunch of things that I would personally want assuming the AR glasses can eventually overcome bright light, good battery life, etc.

I think the real killer use case of AR glasses is when multiple people have them and can look at shared 3D content. The TV show "The First" (sadly cancelled) did a good job of showing use cases for this.

I am one of the people who own and enjoy using an Apple Vision Pro. A year ago, my wife and I welcomed our daughter to the world. Having a device that can be interacted with hands-free and produces no outward light has been useful more than once in the last year. A front-facing camera pointing at the world around me lets me share my girl with family far away in a first-person POV. There are use cases beyond Zooming from a coffee shop for which devices like these are welcomed innovations and definitely appealing. And that doesn't even count that I just genuinely like working with my headset on at my desk. I'm a spatial thinker, so arranging things I need around me makes sense.

> I don't personally see the appeal of hands-free as a paradigm in most cases. Do we really want people talking on and looking at Zoom as they walk around the office? Or as they drive? Or as they are out shopping

I can see this being extremely useful, especially if the person on the other can see what you're looking at. Interactive remote troubleshooting!

> Can you imagine how goofy you'd look sitting at a coffee shop and just sort of staring into the middle distance and talking, as you take a Zoom call?

No goofier than someone talking through their airpods.

I remember when the iPad came out and everyone was making jokes about it. No one would image a phone would be a primary computing device. Don't know if glasses are the next major step, but a handheld phone being a computing device is a transitory thing.

Would you actually take a call while running? I wouldn't.

Use my meta ray bans many times a week since last October ..just in Banff canoeing and was able to continue rowing while filming.

Watching content & or working using smart glasses doesn't make sense to me but using them to ask it count how many ppl in a room, keep the score of my pickleball game or whatever game that involves using vision to keep score and many other innovative ideas are useful to exciting prospects personally.

Yet overall my Ray bans are a great pair of sunglasses that let me take pics or video either hands free or not. They need improvement when using to talk on phone and upon a year of using them smart glasses I don't think will replace the smartphone as u cant take selfies with them.

> Can you imagine how goofy you'd look sitting at a coffee shop and just sort of staring into the middle distance and talking, as you take a Zoom call?

yeah, I do that daily with xreal glasses. Never met more interesting people like this. As I can see normally but with a very large screen, people sit next to me , want to try and often buy them themselves on the spot. I also don't have to carry an annoying laptop.

>Do we really want people talking on and looking at Zoom as they walk around the office? Or as they drive? Or as they are out shopping? I also see ESPN and YouTube, so yeah... this thing better detect when you're moving at speed and disable video apps.

People already do that using mobile phones. With glasses there is at least some visibility of things in front of you.

you start with wearing these at home

I mean in the full dystopian setting, it’s always doing facial recognition and labeling everyone you see with names, profiles, credit score etc. It could do a little more digging and tell you exactly what a person would respond to while making a sale, what they’re worried about, what they deeply care about etc. Information like that, person to person would change society.

Has anyone made a tool for that yet? Maybe use llama, provide all of a person’s online profiles as context and ask it to determine the persons fears, weaknesses etc.

But what if while you are talking to someone it automatically displays a subway surfer video next to their face /s

Putting stuff in front of your phase is a more natural interface than having to hold a rectangle you look into. But the friction of phone screens might be quite healthy to society.

On the other hand in blue collar work this is invaluable. Basically the same market every other AR headset is going after: overlaying plans or live sensor data over your viewpoint, being able to share a common viewpoint when troubleshooting with people remotely, sending out low-skilled people on support calls with experts directing them remotely, etc

> This will probably be an unpopular opinion, but Meta is in the right direction and has to go on an Amazon type arc to align their employees with their vision.

It's not just unpopular, it's just wrong.

Even if Zuckerberg's vision is good (and there's no reason to think it is, because he famously doesn't understand human beings and has never come up with a single product idea that became popular), he clearly has no ability to execute.

Spending $50B in a few years with almost no revenue to show for it has to be the biggest business failure of all time. Can you name a bigger one? Sure, Musk has destroyed roughly that much value on paper, but Zuckerberg actually set that much cash on fire building the Metaverse that no one asked for and no one uses.

Expensive, ugly vaporware with poor specs from Facebook makes you think Apple is behind in this space?

I can't tell if you're saying that they were incorrectly negative, or incorrectly positive?

In my experience, everyone hates Dropbox, and especially that it's always popping up asking you to sign in, and that it's preinstalled on fresh Windows installs whether you want it or not.

People in the west walk with cameras in their hands all day - both in public and in private. I doubt it gives anyone pause.

> increase the time & activities involving wearing glasses

Many glasses wearers have their glasses on for all their waking hours. That might even be the most common scenario. I can't see for shit without specs. I don't wear them in the shower, but that's about it.

As a fellow glasses wearer, my first question was - will these ever be usable by people with poor vision? A quick google search indicates ~63% of US adults wear prescription lenses.

Because if I could have heavy context and help around everything I’m seeing, not using them would mean a massive disadvantage in life.

> to show you ad-supported floating product descriptions in-place as you shop

Just so we're on the same page... you do think this is a bad thing, right?

"the look and feel of a regular pair of glasses... as depicted on any cartoon caricature of a nerd". It's really impressive if they fit that much into the frame, but they're thick.

I hate to knock the design when the tech is so cool but it seems like this would be exactly the occasion to go for a futuristic cyberpunk-visor look, as opposed to dork glasses.

The older I get, the less I want Facebook to get older

usually the older you get the more you need glasses :o)

To add to my above- I have spent a lot of time researching AR glasses tech that would allow for this that could potentially be available even as old dev kits to buy, and the tech is out there in a much smaller form factor than what Meta is needing here to get them the full color, high res, 3d display.

To just get floating text, all you need is a micro laser projector in the arm of the glasses pointed at a section of the lens that reflects and focuses the projection onto your retina, at a virtual focus so that it appears in front of you.

Google bought a company that was making a dev kit of these a few years ago (I believe it was called North and the glasses were called Focals). But, as we know, google does this all the time and then kills shit. So I was happy at first because google said they were going to use this to do exactly what I describe above as their first killer app for the glasses. But then... nothing.

Vuzix is another player in the game but with micro-led displays via waveguide instead, and they seem to actually be selling product, but at something like $800 it's just too much to try out just to do my own dev work for.

While we don't know who is making the components, check out https://www.enovix.com/ for batteries. Samira is from Meta and previously worked on XR... https://ir.enovix.com/management/samira-naraghi

Quest 3 is 515g, Orion is <100g, so pretty good! But 3-4x a normal pair of glasses

It has a battery in it (the puck is compute). It lasts 2 hours at the moment.

100g, has a battery, but still a power puck

It's an interesting product but they are 25 degrees monochrome half VGA resolution head-locked HUD vs. 70 degrees full color HD world-locked holograms. These are in completely different categories.

You could make a case that nobody needs more than a monochrome HUD but I think there will be a place for both categories of products in the future, until eventually the hologram version is miniaturized enough to make the HUD version obsolete.

Why do you need, er want, to see an avatar while talking to someone while walking?

I disagree with this sentiment. Form factor has been the driving force behind the adoption of computing devices throughout history—look at the PC or the smartphone. Each one marked a new era. Glasses seem like the preeminent form factor for a computing device, short of a direct neural interface.

The smartphone enabled always-available computing. Glasses will enable always-on computing.

I don’t know a single person who is interested in anything like this, including massive gadgets nerds. Who’s the target market? The Verge reporters?

This article says 70 degrees:

https://www.theverge.com/24253908/meta-orion-ar-glasses-demo...

the verge's article says 70 degrees

That level of detail needs a few hours of scanning and a few dozen of terrabytes of data, along with processing that data to create a model, and then a rig to power that model. Anything less than that, and the uncanny valley creeps up FAST. There's been work on using scans from an iPhone, but with realistic avatars it's really all or nothing.

The point of AR is all the new stuff you can do with it. For example, imagine running facial recognition on it to remind you the name of someone you met once a year ago. Or having your map route overlayed as a blue trail like a videogame.

Without new future apps, it’s just a toy but with them, it’s the next iphone.

The light weight nature of these is interesting for an application like electronics repair: an app which could live-search chip serials and pinouts as you look over a board (or pull a digital microscope feed up onto your vision in one eye while you work) could be quite the productivity booster.

>This category pushes the boundaries of what's possible to do with computers, and has the chance to elevate productivity to a completely new level.

It probably has something to do with mass-production for a mass audience (not that they'll even succeed here). Look at the success of smartphones and compare their capabilities to full powered computers. They want to make it up on volume, so you have a quantity over quality dynamic of iOS-ified lowering of productive capacity.

>When I'm moving or spending time with friends, I try to put away all devices, and expect everyone to do the same. Also, I hate notifications and pop ups, and definitely don't want them on my face. On the other hand, when I'm alone, I want to immerse myself in CAD, programming or games, and I want to use the most capable devices and software. Only PCVR and Vision Pro are devices which might elevate the experience beyond of what we have today.

Yea, very respectable usage of technology and I relate completely, but our type is a minority of the addressable market. So toy-computers is what will be produced. This is the pessimistic reality of "democratization of technology". It makes you miss the glory days when the main target market for computers was more advanced users. Offerings for that segment could be a larger portion of sales and would thus get focus from product development that would lack today's lowest-common-denominator designs.

It's hard to say for sure because this write-up is much more marketing than technical, but they probably mean it uses holographic optical elements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_optical_element

These are more or less "true" holographic elements, because they rely on wave optics and interference. But the pattern is fixed at manufacturing time, not varying with the image that's being displayed. And the image being displayed to each eye is still 2D, not 3D.

Basically, an HOE can act like a system of lenses and mirrors for collimating the image from each eye's display and making it appear at a comfortable viewing distance -- but is much smaller and lighter.

The displayed images are not light fields, just regular stereo 3D. However, the waveguides are holographic. So it's technically correct. And the displayed images will look like the hologram projectors seen in popular movies like Star Wars, so it's not misleading either.

No true hologram afaik. They mentioned waveguides. Looks same tech lineage than hololens / magic leap.

I think Microsoft was first using holographic buzz word for these non-holographic displays

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens

“holographic device”

They backed the wrong horse RE "The Next Big Thing", and they're being stubborn about admitting it IMHO. Sunk costs and all that.

I think everyone was obviously aware that "the metaverse" and VR was obviously not what the world needed, yet they pivoted the whole company to it while they totally missed AI taking over ~everything else. Yes yes llama leak/release etc, but I am not really seeing them making any product efforts in the AI space (e.g. no ChatGPT competitor). Apple fell for it too somehow and spent gazillions on a VR headset that no one will even remember in 18 months, which is interesting how two parts of FAANG totally totally totally predicted the market completely and entirely wrong. Group think? Corporate sabotage? Corruption/fraud? It beggars belief, really it does - this was so obvious to anyone yet these two huge huge tech companies went all-in on dorky VR that will go the same way as 3D TV/movies (remember that?). Amazing really.

Zuck has invested billions in this idea over the course of a decade. I think it's way beyond some "product managers".

They know that they don't want to be empty handed and scrambling to acquire when someone stumbles upon a killer app

Another comment on Meta advertising and marketing: I, and everyone else I know, do not want to live in world Meta advertises. It’s awkward, sterile, and not believable. Even the images in this article have the “Meta flavour” which I find very offputting. Their video marketing is even worse.

Contrast with Apple, who do this perfectly.

I’m convinced that this is impacting their sales. The Meta Portal was an excellent product for example, but the marketing was dreadful, so it flopped.

you find it funny that you can't read something you chose to block from yourself?

the verge's hands on has more info: 2 hours, 98g, 70 degrees

https://www.theverge.com/24253908/meta-orion-ar-glasses-demo...

"I think we still have some room to grow there in terms of aesthetic for the majority though."

So does Meta and it's the reason they aren't actually releasing this as a product. They just showed us where they're at and gave us an idea on where they want to go in the next few years.

A preference for 1950s Buddy Holly glasses would be a fashion choice, because such glasses are rare today. It loses all of that appeal and becomes a commodity when it's the only choice for a product category.

Mark said they need to iterate to make it more cool, and that's why they won't release this just yet. It looks like it's going to be a dev kit

I'd be pretty surprised if they didn't. It's gonna be the battle of the walled gardens for a while before something open emerges.

why?

The world has changed a lot in the decade since Google Glass, the stigma around public recording of video is pretty much gone.

> Glasses that let you record people without their awareness / consent?

I think in this instance it's probably "let Meta record people and associate the data to their shadow profiles". Doubly creepy.

> I think the best play here would be to release them without any camera functionality at all, or the connotations will be that weird, sweaty guy that no one wants to sit next to on the subway (see: Google Glass).

Sergey Brin sitting sad in the corner after reading this

> Glasses that let you record people without their awareness / consent?

Thats basically all cameras. AR is coming, whether meta makes it work or not.

There are ways around this, but they either require a massive public backlash, or actual regulation that requires explicit and provable permission before non-anonymised pictures/captures can be taken.

There's dozens of different styles of camera glasses available on Amazon today for a fraction of the price, with completely concealed cameras. I think that train left the station years ago.

well they're not going to be sold to consumers (apparently they cost like 10k-ish to make)...but i'm curious how they'd do motion tracking without cameras though...

If they do it like their current Ray Ban glasses, there's an LED on the front that lights up when it's recording. People will no doubt disable it though.

> Glasses that let you record people without their awareness / consent?

I get it, it's icky. I feel the same way. Nevertheless, this is already a thing.

I wear my Meta glasses all the time and use them to record all the time. It's fine, you're already surrounded by people who brandish their phones to record everything.

I agree with you, but to play devils advocate: beyond the physicality of the device (whether it’s uncomfortable or ugly), how does this change the relationship between you and your information in a way that phones and smartwatches don’t? If information is already instantly accessible, how does a pair of glasses with the same capabilities change the acceptability of the concept?

> I think where these products fall flat is the fact that people don't want a computer strapped to their faces.

A winning strategy for a V1 product imo is a minimalist augmented reality overlay for life applications that a person's phone will do most of the processing to generate.

Google Glass but proper augmented reality rather than a simple HUD.

I’ve heard this promise so many times that I’m just a bit skeptical.

The $10k figure is interesting because if they wanted to I'm sure they could sell these to tech elites and celebrities for that much (essentially, the Tesla approach). Presumably the software isn't there yet, but it seems like a missed opportunity to me - imagine getting all the A and B list celebs wearing them. Perhaps it's just not realistic until another iteration but it seems tantalisingly close.

I hadn't heard of these, they look good, but the gap between smart glasses with monochrome HUD and AR is quite large. Neat display tech though.

Vaunt, not vault.

Assuming the video is real, it is conceivable the display is a combination of light screening and light emitting.

Insane as in “how can Meta be so crazy as to commit themselves to AR still just because it’s in their company name” or as in “insanely good”?

Genuine question!

It's a prototype...

That is exactly what Meta acknowledged, and this is not a product that is going to be released to the public anyway.

It feels like most people aren't actually reading. They are showcasing the current technological improvements. They did explicitly say its not enough and are just a prototype to showcase what they have so far.

I like wearing chunky glasses -- they fit my face well.

These things look at least twice the thickness of anything I'd ever consider wearing in public, in any circumstance.

> they think “this is enough”

That is literally the opposite of what Meta is saying. In fact they aren't even releasing this pair because they know it's too chunky.

They are explicitly saying that it's not enough...

> those are some chunky looking glasses that I do not imagine anyone wants on their face

You realize this is a prototype and not available for sale to the general public... right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFB7q89_3U

I mean, these things are probably close to the physical limit for how small and light they can possibly be.

Without relying on a tether, there's only so much you can do. You have to put some compute, battery, and optics somewhere. The optics in particular will always be fairly large just due to the physics of light and lenses.

The only way I can see us sidestepping these problems is by putting the optics somewhere else and using a fiber optic tether. Even then, you still need some optics in the glasses to project onto the display lenses.

Maybe someone will figure out how to do a transparent OLED display on the lenses directly. Even then, you've cut the bulk required for optics but you still need somewhere to put the electronics. A tether is really the only way to go if your concern is form factor.

Context: I'm a former CTRL Labs & Meta employee.

"neural" was a somewhat contentious term to academics, but it's the easiest way to describe to consumers. Academics consider neural interfaces to be directly touching the neurons, whether an invasive BCI, or an invasive device touching part of the peripheral nervous system. Technically this is a "neuromotor" interface, motor meaning detecting muscle, rather than neuron, activity. This makes academics happy but confuses some people, so neural it is.

What do you mean by "monitoring muscle contraction events only"? Not trying to argue with you, just understanding how the technology is being perceived.

If I hold your fist/fingers and you try to make gestures, how do you expect the device to behave? I.e., if you think of a movement and signal that intention, but are not capable of carrying that through, because of someone else's hand, a mug, etc.

Might not be related but "Nazar" means vision in Hindi.

I really want those glasses. I think AR will be great.

Or Mad Hatter's ones from "The Batman" cartoon series...

According to Zuck people actually do like wearing tech on their face if it has the right form factor, hence the Meta Raybans selling well.

reading this comment with my Meta glasses on

>VR gaming failed.

It may be niche, but it's not a failure to me and I appreciate the market. Most of my gaming is in VR and has been for years. I treat it like my steering wheel and pedals or anything else. I have a dedicated room for VR/my simrig.

For the market that want's it, it works incredibly well. Could be better, but I get being a niche developments are going to come slowly. I'm in the lucky minority I suppose in that I have no issue using it. None, not so much as a hint of nausea even far back as the original devkits. I slip the headset on in under 5 seconds, I play for anywhere from 15 minutes into the hours and I slip it off again in the same amount of time. I understand not everyone is willing to entertain that, but it's no skin off my nose. It's still one of the LESS involved hobbies I have in terms of effort honestly.

I'm probably more willing to entertain wearing technology on my face because i'm a motorcyclist and my headsets are sure as all get out lighter than my helmet is. And then after the helmet I gotta get into my personal oven aka leathers etc etc. So im probably just used to engaging in less passive activities requiring more than the bare minium I suppose. Different strokes for all us different folks I suppose.

don't you want it to tell you that you're looking at a pineapple?

They only say "holographic." Based on other products/projects (Intel's Vaunt), I assume projectors/lasers are on the sides, and a holographic reflector is on the back surface of the lens.

There's a link above with much more details: https://www.theverge.com/24253908/meta-orion-ar-glasses-demo...

  [The display] features Micro LED projectors inside the frame that beam graphics in front of your eyes via waveguides in the lenses. These lenses are made of silicon carbide, not plastic or glass. Meta picked silicon carbide for its durability, light weight, and ultrahigh index of refraction, which allows light beamed in from the projectors to fill more of your vision. 

  Through careful dispersion control in the excited propagation and diffraction modes, we design and implement our high-resolution full-color prototype, via the combination of analytical–numerical simulations, nanofabrication and device measurements... Our MOE waveguide utilizes only a single glass layer for the whole RGB spectrum, reducing unwanted diffraction and with higher efficiency. Our single-layer implementation also brings compactness and lightweight operation, while simplifying the MOE fabrication and yield.

The "doesn't look too dorky" benchmark for me is the XReal Air line. They're a few years old now, and they aren't exactly AR glasses in the same way, but you'd expect the headline of this iteration of tech to be better looking. Not worse.

I wonder what's actually in the frames. You wouldn't put bulk there if you had any other choice.

I agree, founder mode in SV doesn't seem to be much more than creating something with good UX and proceeding to ruin it by attempting to turn it into a "platform".

you might be able to order hypernova, a slimmed down version of this, next year

heavy on the might

>I would love to have a set of AR glasses.

I've been wanting this for a long time now, but really just for cycling. It would be incredibly handy to have some AR glasses connected to Google Maps, showing a moving map in my field of view as I'm biking through the city and telling me where to turn. Even if it's really nothing more than a separate screen (sort of like Android Auto) for my phone, that's all I need for this. If I need to interact with the UI, I can pull over and get out my phone; I just want the glasses so I can see the moving map (along with changes when I take a different turn than prescribed).

I wish I was surprised that you're getting downvoted for, quite literally, asking for open standards in new tech. I would have thought HACKER news would be more receptive when, on the first page, there are stories about having trouble getting young people to maintain open source projects and linux distros.