What Apple should have done
https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/meta-ray-ban-launch-new-ai-glasses-high-tech-features
Team up with Oakley and make smart shades. Cheaper, widely adoptable, and all the functionality you could want. Apple could do a million times better than the Facebook/ray-ban partnership in the article.
Hopefully Apple wakes up.
The vision pro as is - is just another cumbersome headset. Sure, it’s more refi Ed and more powerful than others, but it’s still a bulky thingamabob that you strap onto your head. There may well be viable niche cases where that’s the best way to do something. Possibly.
But for it to be something that will enhance your life, instead of forcing your life to revolve around it, it would need to be glasses/sunglasses. Everyone wears shades and a lot of people wear glasses.
Huge missed opportunity. Homely the vision pro gets refined to something like this in the bot-too-distant future.
Comments
These do AR overlays so the quality isn't very good because the environment light isn't matched to the digital content. The first one is standalone so poor battery life and low performance. The second is wired to a smartphone so essentially just a viewer. Both very low price.
Although Apple's setup is bulky, it allows for photorealistic blending between environment and digital. It's immersive enough to allow for room-size digital content. It's stable for pixel-perfect motion tracking. It's powerful with M-series processors so can handle AAA VR games.
Over time the form-factor will improve. I expect there will be large improvements within the first 3-5 generations to the point they are close to AR glasses in terms of comfort. I didn't think they would make a separate AR glasses product but that might be a possibility.
It feels like these products are missing some important technology advances just now. To produce the iPhone needed new types of display, glass, storage, chips. These AR/VR products are being assembled from smartphone parts and they really need a new type of display/projection technology. Until that comes along, this is all they can make to provide an immersive VR/AR experience.
Non-AR smart glasses like Ray-Bans aren't all that useful, just an upsell over normal sunglasses.
AR smart glasses are useful but need to offer much better quality visuals and battery life to be usable outdoors and worthwhile using indoors.
VR/AR headsets aren't intended to be used outside so I think the bulkier form factor is ok for now, it's more about comfort than aesthetics.
If it was priced under $1500, the current Apple Vision Pro would be a day 1 purchase for me, having a personal 3D IMAX theater would be amazing. $3500 is a bit much for a headset that would be used maybe an hour or two per day.
There can potentially be different designs in future too. Strapping something to the back of the head isn't ideal but if it could be attached to Airpods Max on a swivel, that could be more comfortable because there wouldn't be any pressure on either the front or back of the head and could be moved up/down easily and could use the Airpods Max batteries (with optional pack plugged in).
Wait. The internet is full of such suggestions.
TALKING ABOUT WHAT APPLE COULD DO. Not what meta did.
Your amazing idea is unimaginative trash, and all the caps lock in the world won’t change that.
https://wccftech.com/apple-ceo-tim-cook-saw-ar-glasses-as-a-key-objective/
That says they needed chips running at 1/10th the power of current Apple Silicon due to heat. They could just have a wire like the Vision Pro battery and they wouldn't need the processing hardware on-device:
That would be able to render AR objects in view. It wouldn't need cameras for passthrough video so no bandwidth issues over the wire but it still needs a lot of the sensors for hand and eye tracking, which would make the glasses quite bulky. This would just be for productivity apps and video, not immersive environments. The AR overlays would likely be semi-transparent, not able to be fully opaque like Apple Vision Pro so movies and productivity would need projected against a dark, matte area like a black curtain. Apple could sell a 100" darkened cloth or panel like vanta black as an accessory and it can track the movie to the shape:
This can be folded up for taking on vacation.