The hard part of AR is the shared experience part. It's close to creating a cross-platform MMO game.
A TV is like a piece of furniture, or a decoration like a painting. As compelling as it is, you can choose to ignore it, make eye contact with and talk to someone else in the room wether the TV is on or not. It's casual.
I imagine too what an outrageously high pixel count a VR set would have to have to render a virtual TV with the same resolution as a real one.
And even aside from the above, I really can't see myself putting something on my face and dropping out of my environ for anything more than about 5 or 10 minutes. It's just weird.
Yup. It might take decades to get there, but I think we'll get there.
> And even aside from the above, I really can't see myself putting something on my face and dropping out of my environ for anything more than about 5 or 10 minutes. It's just weird.
I'm envisioning the equivalent of a pair of spectacles. People wear spectacles all day every day without _too_ much issue.
While I enjoyed watching movies in VR, it's just more comfortable to lay down on the couch and watch a movie without a headset on.
What you describe sounds like a single person experience which is fine but watching a show or a movie can also be a social experience and very often is exactly this. Seeing other people’s reactions and sharing space is a huge part of it. You can’t do that in VR.
Personally I think they'll be replacements for mobile phones. This will only happen if the devices start to become indistinguishable from a normal pair of glasses and allow for prescriptions as well.
Audio will either be through bone conduction or small speakers like how Bose's Audio Glasses [1] do it now (I have a pair of these actually, got them for free at a developer hackathon they hosted once a few years ago, never use them mainly because I don't wear contacts and need prescriptions)
Ideally it could even pick up subvocalization to be able to compose messages in quiet situations without rudely having to speak out loud, if you're the type that cares about that (I certainly do)
We might still need some small handheld device paired with it, maybe it has a simple keyboard on it or maybe just a number pad that also serves as 4-directional buttons for traversing menus and things in your view"