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Comment by kredd | Hacker News Reader

You still have some sort of spatial awareness while using a phone, which makes it more acceptable to use in public. Like, if I’m dining solo, and a waiter comes by, I will still acknowledge their existence and be able to respond to them, have an eye contact and be able to use your body language. That’s kind of lost in AR/VR case.

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Just to make a point, some of the aforementioned people are absolutely unaware of their surroundings, won't acknowledge the waiter's existence, nor have an eye contact with them, while they are on their phone.

Immersive experience, that is.

(note that I understand your point, just want to be sarcastic and bitter when I think about phone / AR-VR and other social media addicted people, who are eventually going to be the target audience of any of these new time wasters)

The headsets that exist today are very, very isolating. The whole idea behind them is to bring you somewhere else! To get AR right though, we need to be talking about something more like a projection like Google Glass. To bring the interface to you instead of bringing you to the interface means that pass-through must work when it’s powered off.

The Reality headset apparently addresses this with an external display that shows the user’s eyes.

It seems hard to imagine how this could possibly be enough to satisfy the waiter scenario you’ve described. But my understanding is that it attempts to handle some version of this social need.

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