The optical pathway is pretty much locked in. LEEP was invented in the 80s, and that's still the optical system used today. Compare the size to NASA's VR system from the early 90s. https://images.nasa.gov/details/ARC-1992-AC89-0437-6

It's been 30 years of massive improvements to all of the rest of computers, and VR has only shrunk a couple inches. There's not much else we can do to make it smaller.

I am looking at that picture and to me it definitely looks like way more than a couple of inches.

lol, indeed, that is the full monty

it's not much different in size than a vision pro or quest 3, it's just kinda un-wieldly.

the photo of it sitting in a display case gives a decent sense of scale, I think.

http://briteliteimmersive.com/blog/remembering-nasas-view-vr

Look at the bigscreen vr headset!

Maybe it doesn't feel like you are staring at your nose as much in NASA's 92 head set?

Yes and no.

There’s an insane amount of tech in the Vision Pro. Eyesight probably occupies a big chunk. Then there are more sensors than they need. Also the CPU and 100% processing is happening literally strapped to your face.

This is like having two 5k displays powered by a mobile device*.

* 2 x 5k = 28 million pixels, compared to Vision Pro’s 23 million pixels.

This is like comparing an oscilloscope to the iPhone 15 because they both have a screen.

Didn't Microsoft's hololens first launch around 10 years ago? It was AR rather than VR, but it was absolutely pitched as an early product meant for very specific use cases to act as a proof of concept before consumer versions.

I personally used a HoloLens for a few minutes and it had severe problems with field of view and brightness of the display. AR works for enterprise or the military to train people or present information at least the US military for the HoloLens [1]. Google finally axed the Glass Enterprise project in 2023 which was much longer than the original version.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/13/23871859/us-army-microsof... [2] https://support.google.com/glass-enterprise/customer/answer/...

Google Glass was pretty slick honestly, ahead of its time.

I had a friend that worked on the team for a couple years when it first started. The use case of a headsup display for directions while driving was a great experience.

I had a friend get Google Glass. I tried in on for a few minutes and was pretty disappointed. It was a tiny Android window stuck in the upper right of my FOV. Looking at the hardware, I guess it makes sense, but it’s not what the marketing seemed to be selling, and I expected a more custom UI that would get out of the way, rather than what looked like a tiny phone screen.

It wasn’t mine, so maybe there was more to it that I didn’t get from my brief interaction, but it didn’t leave me wanting more.

Yeah the UX definitely wasn't immersive. I liked the idea of a heads up display and have never really wanted a full display experience, Glass would have fit really well for me.

These days I don't even want that, but that's almost certainly of a combination of getting older and over reacting to how pervasive tech and displays have become.

I like your username.

I loved my Google Glass.

See, for example:

https://youtu.be/gAkfPhlvSn8?si=fSObULo52MAvcBoR

it's impressive that this was shot 10 years ago but now meta Raybands do that

I’m still amazed Quest 2 was affordable as it was vs the entertainment I got out of it. Heavily with the novelty of being my first VR device.

Imo headsets will be long obsolete before they are viable and will be replaced with something else entirely.

>Ten years ago was pre oculus rift.

The Rift DK1 is almost exactly 11 years old, released 3/29/13.

Oops, you're right.

The list on wikipedia [1] doesn't include it, I guess because it was a "development kit", and I just naively assumed the "Oculus Rift" was the DK1 not the CV1.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_virtual_reality_headse...

Edit: Went ahead and edited the wikipedia page so the next person won't make the same mistake.

> Ten years ago was pre oculus rift. We weren't saying anything about VR headsets.

Rift DK1 was released in ~2013, and lots of gamers bought it throughout 2014. We got the first "consumer release" for the original Rift in 2016. I think its more than fair to say 10 years - we were absolutely talking a lot about Rift DK1 in 2014.

> Five years ago was pre valve index

Valve's first consumer VR headset was the HTC vive, released in 2016:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Vive

"The first-generation Vive was announced in 2015, as part of a collaboration with video game studio and distributor Valve Corporation, and implementing its VR software and hardware platform SteamVR; the first-generation consumer model was released in April 2016."

I don't get your second bullet. The Vive is not the Index.

It demonstrates Valve have been at this longer than the ~5 years of the Index, and closer to a decade again (the point OP disputes and uses Index as evidence of).

not OP but it does seem like you're nitpicking details instead of engaging with what seems to be the intent of the response: AR/VR has come an incredible distance since DK1, the last 10 years have seen it go from a barely-discussed completely unavailable/fringe dev-kit-only technology to being an clearly viable spectrum of mass-market products.

edited: grammar. still feel like I've failed to produce readable english, but I'm giving up

This is wrong. VR =/= AR

I’ve been in AR since 2010

The AVP is leaps and bounds ahead of where we were collectively technically back then

But I don’t see us appreciably closer to the goal of ubiquitous persistent headworn see through visual computing

It’s a social expectations and data problem it’s not a “technical” problem

It’s probably gonna be decades before we see any regularized mainstream adoption, because the form factor is such a different thing that we’re not even close to make it a simple transition for the least savvy consumer

There's been talk about VR and some kind of headset since the late 90s, even if it was cardboard, or some computer science professor wearing large goggles and backpack around campus. Google Glass came out in 2013.

Heck, nintendo even tried marketing a stereoscopic gameboy headset as virtual reality in '95.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Boy