Nreal’s Light sunglasses, which Verizon will start selling later this month, are one of only a few consumer-focused augmented reality headsets. They’re an impressive technical feat: small for an AR or VR product, comparatively affordable at $599, and capable of full-fledged mixed reality that projects images into real space, not just a flat heads-up overlay like the North Focals.
Unfortunately, Nreal’s software doesn’t fulfill its hardware’s promise. The Light is hampered by a bare-bones control scheme, a patchy app ecosystem, and a general user experience that ranges from undercooked to barely functional. Nreal may well have shown us the future of AR, but it seems disinterested in making the experience very pleasant.
Everybody is talking about AR glasses being the next big thing after smartphones, but to me they feel deeply dystopian and creepy – for very, very little benefit over using a smartphone. I’m sure AR glasses will be very welcome in countless professional settings, but I’m not so sure it will be embraced by general consumers in everyday life.
They will not replace smartphones but remain a useful accessory much like smartwatches are. They just need a few killer apps.
One I could imagine would be a live subtitles generator for movies and conversations in a foreign language, the one, you still struggle a bit with. Computer speech recognition is getting good enough for that.
Speaking of more dystopian world, with more and more people diagnosed with autism spectrum I can imagine computer aided emotion recognition 🙂
Looking forward to hearing about how to deal with spam in AR glasses.
Also “Blue Screen of Death” might actually become a real thing …?
The org I work for has some Microsoft HoloLens second generation devices but I don’t see them used nearly enough to outweigh their cost. They sure cause management to ooh and aah though. Also setting them up gives me a headache and typing on the cursed holographic keyboard is an exercise in frustration.
I expect outside of a work context or games very few will need glasses like this. The kind of stuff pushed by things like this including smartphones adds a lot of stress to people’s lives. I imagine wearing a pair will send negative social signals.
> I imagine wearing a pair will send negative social signals.
That’s the biggest barrier of entry, until (if) they reach critical mass and their use is normalized. For that reason corps will probably heavily subsidize at the begging.
Sorry for the impertinence of this reply – I used to know a HollyB from my time using Litestep many years ago. She also was instrumental in helping get me off Windows back in 2007. My “handle” back then was marriedman (still married!)
Not trying to be creepy – just saw the name and had a flashbulb memory.
Total coincidence as she is a different woman. As a name its popularity waxes and wanes like flared jeans. I’ve only being using Linux as my default system for two weeks. Before then it was testing only.
Dang. Oh well, I was hoping it was a small world. Thanks for taking the time to reply. Enjoy your Linux migration!
VR etc was all the rage at CES in 2017. I tried everything and the most impressive was when I strolled around Mars using the Microsoft Hololens. This was not some kind of dark room. It was a trade show booth. Not sure why the augmented reality beat the virtual. MIght have been that I wasn’t trying to fool myself and just got with the view. Or maybe superimposing objects, even a planet, on actual reality makes them more real. And I was more relaxed given I could see my surroundings, but mentally placed that in the background, like street noise.
Once you have the required display technology, AR is arguably easier than VR. You don’t need the same absurdly high resolution, you don’t need high quality spatial audio to tie it together, and most importantly you don’t need to provide a complex highly detailed background. (ever notice how many of the VR games that _did_ really take off have really simple, easy to render background imagery?).
It’s also arguably much more useful in a non-consumer sense (which is actually more of a driving factor for adoption of new technologies than people realize) than VR is. For example, there are many more useful things you can do with it in, say, a warehouse or production facility than you can do with VR, if used right it would allow for much more immersive hybrid conferencing, and it has a whole slew of practical military applications (VR does too, but is much more specialized than AR in that case).