Optical AR is a dead end. Passthrough AR with VR goggles and 8K cameras on the outside will be the way that wins.
I suspect this is why Apple is having such a hard time with their headsets. Above all else, Apple doesn’t release products that are dorky.
A company that secures a steady contract delivering AR equipment to the military will then have the runway to polish the packaging until it's palatable for consumers.
I wonder whether there still will be stores selling things you want to spend time to choose between options by the time that tech exists.
I so vehemently disagree with this because it's the same category of thinking that keeps XR in the dark ages.
The capital "P" Problem in XR is content. Behind every major innovation in content consumption technology has been content to consume. As of yet, there is no such content for XR, and the one thing Magic Leap did (and this was a few years back) was to invest in people to create content for their platform and dev tools to make it.
You can have the ugliest piece of garbage tech tethered to a desktop PC, and people will pay to use it if they get to experience some piece of content created by a team of artists that can't otherwise tell the stories or convey emotion as effectively in any other medium.
Throughout the history of consumer media you find that a successful medium is determined by what art is created upon it, not by its technical aptitude. There is always something better, but what makes it useful is what artists can do with the limitations of the medium today.
That's why we see this pivot to the nebulous "enterprise" (without real success). It's because they haven't found artists that can create real content yet, at least nothing people want to experience. The most successful so far was LBE (location based entertainment) which was seeing good growth pre-covid.
I follow VR more closely than AR. It has a ton of examples as to how people will not pay to use ugly garbage tethered to a desktop PC. This is why Facebook's pivot to standalone headsets has been so successful. PC tethered VR apps look better, are more interactive, and are vastly larger and more in depth. No one plays them, because a slick single device is more important than every other factor. When I used to demo PC VR apps to people, they'd be blown away. They'd ask how to get one, I'd explain the PC and the base stations, and their faces would fall. No one ever bought one. When I do the same demo with the much worse apps on the Quest, people buy Quests.
Magic Leap's investment in content is another example. What good did that investment do? None, because the Leap itself was too big and clunky for people to buy.
Now airpods are in vogue.
Social perceptions easily change, especially when there are billions of dollars invested in making them change.
I do think the AirPods metaphor is good but for the exact opposite reason: AirPods were the first "true wireless" stereo earbuds on the market with both a working microphone and reasonably good pairing and activation capability (at least with iPhones).
Previous Bluetooth headsets were either mono, for phone calls only, which quickly and probably correctly got associated with obnoxious salespeople yelling about deals in airports, or connected stereo affairs, which were generally strange looking and unwieldy. And the 2 or 3 "true wireless" offerings on the market ahead of Apple were hampered by hobbyist quality and poor Bluetooth behavior. AirPods offered a meaningful and substantially improved utility over their predecessors - not just a glossy style or some kind of marketing driven social change.
In this same way, true augmented AR offers genuine advantages over passthrough AR, in terms of comfort, safety, and utility. If the technology can be made to work augmented AR is likely to win over any kind of passthrough AR for reasons of utility, not just fashion.
Before airpods wireless earbuds looked like this: https://www.lg.com/us/bluetooth-headsets-headphones/lg-HBS-7...
In all cases, I think it was more the “look how I’m more interested in my own world than in people around me” than the actual looks of the device.
Possibly, the fact that early portable tech typically is fairly impractical (for example in battery life or in base ergonomics) added to that.
I bet they could make them look very slick, since the hardware requirements would so much less arduous. There was a set of 'augmented' bicycle glasses here on HN some months ago and they honestly looked pretty compelling.
But it be ridiculous to thing that people are going to be going out in public with a VR headset with cameras (known as Passthrough AR). On top of a number of human factor issues, it would dangerously block a person's view of the real world.
None of the big companies are interested in what that would be though.
They want the equivalent of the next smartphone revolution so it needs to be like a pair of glasses.