I’d like to think that with a decade of time spanning between the Google Glass devkit and Apple Vision, had they chosen to continue development, that they could have improved on their initial design with technological advancements in hardware that would absolutely allow them to do a higher quality output in both eyes and incorporate eye tracking.
The main reason why Google abandoned the project (in the public sector, anyway) was the metric fuckton of negative press it was getting, mostly due to neo-luddites obsessing over the fact that it had an outward facing camera as if they weren’t constantly under scrutiny and surveillance by cell phone cameras and CCTV anyway. The media coverage of the product was way outsized compared to the actual number of users. Another reason is people weren’t convinced that this early heads-up device was worth the cost since as you mentioned it was expensive even back then, and most of the comments I saw about it at the time believed that the bespoke glasses they came with were dorky looking, not to mention lenses were not available in prescription strength, so yet another limitation that could have been overcome with a bit of engineering effort.
I don’t disagree that Vision Pro is better, but it looks like a huge step back in terms of style and practicality. Who wants to walk around town with a VR headset strapped to their head? It really does look like the NPCs in Cyberpunk 2077.
I’d like to think that with a decade of time spanning between the Google Glass devkit and Apple Vision, had they chosen to continue development, that they could have improved on their initial design with technological advancements in hardware that would absolutely allow them to do a higher quality output in both eyes and incorporate eye tracking.
The main reason why Google abandoned the project (in the public sector, anyway) was the metric fuckton of negative press it was getting, mostly due to neo-luddites obsessing over the fact that it had an outward facing camera as if they weren’t constantly under scrutiny and surveillance by cell phone cameras and CCTV anyway. The media coverage of the product was way outsized compared to the actual number of users. Another reason is people weren’t convinced that this early heads-up device was worth the cost since as you mentioned it was expensive even back then, and most of the comments I saw about it at the time believed that the bespoke glasses they came with were dorky looking, not to mention lenses were not available in prescription strength, so yet another limitation that could have been overcome with a bit of engineering effort.
I don’t disagree that Vision Pro is better, but it looks like a huge step back in terms of style and practicality. Who wants to walk around town with a VR headset strapped to their head? It really does look like the NPCs in Cyberpunk 2077.