114
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
114 points (96.7% liked)
Technology
70002 readers
2012 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
This AR obsession is utterly baffling to me. There are so few real applications and the hardware requirements are insane so it's not something that will get widely adapted anyway. Sure in a decade or so it might have matured enough to have shed all these issues, but AR/VR feels like a really out of touch thing to prusue, especially if you look at the garbage ideas they have on how to use it - virtual meetings??
I get movies and games on these, possibly even some recording and porn, but these are not their B2B wet dreams anyway.
In theory, there’s a Million awesome business applications for it.
Let’s say you’re in construction and your glasses tell you exactly what to build where and how.
You’re a waiter and the glasses tell you which table ordered what, needs attention, etc.
You’re a network engineer and the glasses show you on every port which device is connected.
And don’t even get me started on the military applications.
Of course we’re not there yet. But that’s why they’re so obsessed with it. They want to be the first.
In the current US political climate, giving everyone glasses with always-on cameras run by big tech companies seems particularly dangerous.
I agree. But unfortunately, nobody gives a flying fuck.
I think for the most part society has gotten used to being on someone’s camera when in public at pretty much all times.
It’s something I used to think about, now I just, don’t.
Everyone has been looking for the next big hardware thing. It looked like it might be foldable phones for a little while but I reckon AR Glasses are the ultimate endgame until they start making bio implants.
Imagine being anyone anywhere whipped like an Amazon worker. Will the waitress have to piss in bottles? Bad for tips I think.
Even lightweight glasses can be irritating and the extra weight from steel v plastic is noticeable. There will never be ar glasses or goggles that are comfortable to wear all the time.
How does the construction app know what needs to be constructed and how?
How does the waiter app know which table ordered what, needs attention, etc?
How does the IT app know on which port every device is connected?
These things are all real hard to know. Having glasses that display the knowledge could be really nice but for all these magic future apps, having a display is only part of the need.
As somebody who wanted google glass back in the day and thinks AR glasses would be really really cool, this is ultimately where I end up on it, and with a lot of tech in general: the primary usefulness of any of this shit is in accurate and relevant information, and that’s the part of the equation that these big companies are definitely NOT in the business of producing. In fact, they seem to have discovered a while back that inaccurate and irrelevant information being blasted in your face is the real money maker. And now with AI/ML producing so much/filling in gaps, I just can’t imagine that it’s going to get any better.
That being said, I think the tech is so cool. I’d love to travel to a new city and be able to get directions around to different sightseeing spots and real time star ratings above all the restaurants instead of anxiously glancing at my phone the entire time. If we ever get to that level of goodness I’m in, but I have a lot of doubts that it’ll ever be more than another attention-seeking thing attached to your body.
If you have all that info you could probably remove the human from the equation and automate it.
As for the NPC-Waiter 🤢
All of this can be done with AR on a mobile phone.
Only when you need to do this AND have both hands free do AR glasses become necessary. So surgery, bomb refusal or something niche like thar.
This might be the dumbest take I’ve heard today.
Everything your smartphone does your laptop can do, too. Therefore, smartphones are useless!!
Everything AR can do that your smartphone can do today will be a hundred times more convenient because you don’t have to carry a slab of glass with you all the time. You just have to wear glasses. Like I already do anyway.
The only reason for smartphones to still exist in a world where AR is compact will be if we can’t figure out a way to efficiently input data without annoying everyone around us. As soon as that problem's solved, nobody will be using smartphones anymore.
This might be the dumbest take I've heard today.
You're forgetting that AR headgear requires to WEAR THAT THING ON YOUR FACE AT ALL TIMES
No matter how compact (don't even start talking about some techbro "all conteined in a lens" type of shit), there will absolutely, always be people who will refuse to wear it. (Ask any former glasses user who went for contact lenses)
A phone you glance at and is in your pocket only when you need it is a million times more convenient than something that goes over your eyes all of the time.
Your world where external compact computing devices (phone/tablet/smartwatch/a slab of glass) are no longer needed is mostly constructed out of flatulence of the technology brotherhood.
Sounds like a robot would just steal your job if that was implemented well. (And that is a big IF) Meanwhile you would pay off your AR glasses by watching a constant stream of ads for months.
overlaying ads on literally everything could be the end goal.
Apple is not that strong in the overlaying ads over everything department though.
I’d really just like some glasses that simulate multiple monitors without needing special software. That’s all I want
Yep, and that seems to be the route Apple was going. Screens you can place anywhere in your visual field.
Gotta need some insane resolution for that right? And 1000hz refresh to make things good I guess.
I mean for text editing, coding etc.
Yep I've played with virtual monitors in VR space and I don't even like watching movies on them, the loss in resolution and the way the dynamic aspect of it (using a moving screen to simulate a static screen) makes it a shitty solution. Eventually it'll be good enough to watch TV in but I can't imagine doing serious work in it.
Quest 3 lens and displays actually are nice to look at, I coded for 5 hours in it the other day, and the only glaring flaw was the weight. My forehead hurt afterwards from the pressure, and I wasn't even using stock strap. The stock strap on quest headsets is known to be terrible. Tbf I only have a 1080p monitor for comparison bur its nice.
If you tried on anything lower than a Quest 3 with Virtual Desktop, you were right.
Quest 3 was the first VR headset to make virtual screens worth it. The clarity of pancake lenses cannot be overstated. The Quest pro technically had them too, but it wasn't quite good enough in some of the other aspects.
A Quest 3 with Virtual Desktop has replaced my TV and monitor because it was an upgrade to both. Even if all I did was placed those screens statically exactly where they used to be in real life. But of course, they can be anywhere, any size. The screens are 4k 120hz, good enough for pretty much anything. Once you get to about 80 degrees field of view, every pixel of a 4k 60hz signal can be temporally represented. Your head micromoves enough that you aren't missing any detail between each frame of the reference taking up two of the headsets frames. And when playing a game in actual 120 fps, you won't notice that you aren't seeing every single pixel directly physically represented every single frame, it looks good. Worth doing. 4k still looks much nicer than 1440p, which can be fully properly represented at that size and framerate.
Using anything other than Virtual Desktop, there is no need to set a monitor any higher than 1080p since they can't even draw that well enough to be properly represented. Virtual desktop is the only one that uses timewarp layers. If you were around for Carmack, you'll know that was always his first advice to every piece of VR software he reviewed, "please use timewarp layers for anything you want to look clear face-on" it's a huge difference.
Interesting. Ok, I will give it another go at some point. I had an Oculus Rift and there was a ton of promise but the tech was just not ready.
Oh yeah, for sure. The rift was great for it's time, but it is straight up comparitively garbage compared to what is out now. Wireless is now even more stable than the rift was at tracking, and the screens are so high res and they can decode at such speed that a wireless feed is almost as low latency and is much higher fidelity than what the Rift could do. There are still wired headsets that would be more clear nowadays, but with Virtual Desktop, the downsides to streaming wirelessly are pretty minimal.
Definitely get a demo of a Quest 3 if you can, or better. Though keep in mind the 3s isn't better, despite being newer, it is "s" in the same sense that smart phones tend to use it, it's a newer generation, but a cheaper lower end headset. A really good value. But it doesn't have pancake lenses, the most important part of the Quest 3, and clearly most expensive part, lol.
Wireless headsets can just be used anywhere, especially when you are in AR mode or playing something mixed reality. But they are still at their best when using your computer through them. Although, you don't have to. Their standalone games are basically xbox 360/PS3 level graphics, not amazing, but not really a problem. Most of what graphics have advanced by since then is just less "faking" stuff to look almost exactly right anyway and more rendering it in insanely computationally demanding ways to make it look 10% more right.
With Virtual Desktop, my computer is now in every room of my house, including the ones where I get to lay back in a recliner. And my computer is also at all my friends and family's houses. And with cell-phone tethering, it can be on a bus, or a hotel room where I don't want to use their wi-fi. Sometimes the cell connection is bad enough that I have to lower the resolution or framerate, but often times 4k 120hz is still viable on cell. Just has a bit more latency, so some game types are contraindicated. A 4k 120hz stream only needs about 25mbit to be clear enough to be worth using over a lower resolution or framerate. And cell latency can be as low as 5ms nowadays. 4g could only go as low as 200ms, 5g can theoretically go as low as 1ms, but obviously in practice that is almost impossible.
I did have fun with the novelty of moving multiple screens around like Minority Report but it really is just a novelty at this point
I want a GTA style HUD at all times 🤪
Current wanted level by the police would be quite handy
Health bar, bank account balance, number of steps in the day, calories burned, my next calendar event
Arguably just gps instructions and step tracking superimposed on reality would be a great use of AR
What should they be pursuing now? They have state of the art chips, tablets, phones, laptops and even all in one desktops, the only thing they don't have are TV's, at this point why not try to conquer the next frontier. even if it takes a decade?
A Quest 3 isn't "insane." It does AR just fine for a few hundred bucks. There ARE real world applications and more coming all the time. The education and medical fields in particular can benefit greatly from such tech.
It's been over a decade since the oculus rift came out and there hasn't been much improvement.
It's a mobile phone you don't need to hold.
It's a mobile phone that never goes in your pocket.
It's a mobile phone that is always on and has access to everything you see and hear.
Sounds like a fucking nightmare, but a wet dream to Big Tech.
That's pill. They just have to sugar coat it enough for everyone to swallow it (like we did with phones).
It’s a bummer than those sound like bad things simply because corporate abuse is always a forgone conclusion. If your data was truly private and always entirely under your control and ONLY your control, those would be really attractive features.
Some implementations also have the problem of constantly pointing cameras at non-consenting passers-by.
Totally. I'd also love to train a LLM on my own personal data and preferences, but there is no way I'm trusting a corporation that information.