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> My thing is, no matter what it is, it's a solution without a problem.

Gorilla Tag has hit 760,000 daily players and $26 million in free-to-play buy-a-hat revenue in December [1], and that's with the many, many issues that come with playing a physically active game while wearing a current-gen VR headset. Anything Apple comes out with now will be too expensive for that market, but there's definitely a market there, and I think it's more limited by the physical weight and display quality of the headsets than by anything else.

[1]: https://mpost.io/vr-game-gorilla-tag-reached-26-million-in-s...

Woah, first time I've heard of Gorilla Tag... hilarious that they did away with the "pants issue" by just deleting everything below the waist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8IDJq0tvsw

The half-body is less about that, and more about how your locomotion method is entirely by walking on (or climbing with) your hands. Part of the meteoric growth of the userbase is that this seems to also nigh-eliminate nausea issues with smooth movement for most people, so somebody new to VR can jump into an active game without having a negative reaction.

> My thing is, no matter what it is, it's a solution without a problem.

I don't know what this Apple headset is, but a theoretical headset can solve the problem of phones. In 15 years cellphones will be replaced by a wearable closer to a Ran-Ban Story than a Oculus Rift. The market can support a cellphone replacement wearable at a cost equal to and possibly more expensive than flagship cellphones ($1400+).

The Problem of Cellphones:

1. Has to be carried around. Glasses are much more natural, with a longer history in our culture.

2. Draws the gaze/attention away. Maybe we've gotten use to this, but its actually a huge problem.

3. High friction of notifications. Was that buzz in my pocket important? I have to spend ten seconds finding out.

First you have to figure out how to break laws of physics it seems: battery, cpu, gpu, ram all need to go somewhere

Same issue when the first smartphones were developed: how do you fit a camera, phone, PC, GPS, etc. into a single device. It's just a matter of time until it gets figured out

It wasn't as big of an issue. And there's a limit on how small you can go, especially with batteries.

It's not "just a matter of time".

> It wasn't as big of an issue

Clearly you weren't around when cellphones came out. They were seen as borderline miraculous devices, even if they were huge. The first phone weighted 4 and a half pounds! Even at that size, people didn't believe it was possible. Remember, that pre-dates personal computers. No laptops existed.

It was a big deal and required newer technology and even advances in mathematics (for the cellphone signal processing).

We can make them tiny now. So tiny, in fact, that you can have tiny spy devices which are nonetheless able to talk to cell towers.

Sure, we can only make battery so small until they can't store much in terms of useful energy. But that also depends on how much power the devices require. An Apple Watch was an impossibility until not too long ago. Not just because of battery size, but also because of power draw (specially from screens). Have you seen how small an Apple Watch battery is? And that powers quite a bit of compute (an Apple Watch equals to about 2 Cray supercomputers from 1985, around 3 GigaFLOPS).

It is a matter of time.

> Clearly you weren't around when cellphones came out.

Dude. I'm 42

> And that powers quite a bit of compute

On a tiny screen, mostly idle, with most complex things driven by phone.

You want a continuous compute with a large projected screen on your face.

Except people found don’t like wearing glasses all the time. Source: I wear contacts

> But this isn't an iPod, so I just don't get how it can possibly be made essential or even sexy.

I mean, people said that about the iPod. Slashdot, famously: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

Or Watch.

"Younger people don't wear watches any longer."

That said, genuinely useful AR in a headset seems challenging as a consumer device.

There are some obvious genuinely useful AR applications:

For those with prosopagnosia, the names of people floating above their head, replete with notes on your first/last interaction with them, how you know them, the company they work for, their net worth/their company's market cap, current pupil size vs normal, breath rate, etc. Be however invasive you want/don't want to.

Subtitles underneath the person who said it, for the hard of hearing.

Live translation (output as in-ear audio or subtitled) for foreign languages.

And the not so great:

An X-ray glasses app using deep fake technology to show everyone around you as naked.

Replacement of visually undesirable elements with a happy planters (so you don't step on them). Trash and poop and homeless people are no longer things you have to see. (Debuted at the end of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(Black_Mirror) )

Assuming this will is all powered by, basically an iPhone 15, these things are within our grasp. For better or worse. The real concern is battery life. An iWatch has such pathetic battery life that I can't believe Apple stands by it as a product. But it gives a floor on how long Apple AR glasses will last on battery power before Apple is willing to release it as a product.

I find Apple Watch Ultra much more useful as a day to day device than my previous 3G? device.

I agree that AR could be very useful (if socially disturbing) in principle. I'm just not sure when it can get there.

> An iWatch has such pathetic battery life that I can't believe Apple stands by it as a product.

This seems to depend heavily on the series and your specific usage.

I've had my Series 7 for about a year now, and I charge it for ~20m every morning when I sit down at my desk. It's usually at ~55% battery at that point. I can stretch it to two days between charges but I don't like to.

I got my daughter an SE at the same time (it was "free"), and it barely gets a day of charge. If she enables the "always-on screen" setting it only lasts like 12h. It can be a daily watch or a sleep tracker, but not both.

From what I'm hearing the Ultra lasts longer than the Series 7 or 8.

I think that AR will be much more impactful than VR, but I also think it's further away.

> solution without a problem

If it had been out three years ago, we’d have 10M blissful zoom schoolers by now.