Read this with some skepticism, but the specs seem relatively good (no word on battery life of course).
So maybe AR and glasses are about to come out of the doldrums of the hype cycle back into the consciousness of society. The rumours suggest Apple is set to announce something this year as well.
Like you, I am in two minds on VR and AR. I tried Google Glasses when it was still a thing and was mind blown. Except I could think of a problem it solved, and seemingly no one else did, as Google Glasses are now not a consumer thing. The Meta Vision (the virtual office but full of legless beings) and the Microsoft (you can don these bulky glasses to read virtual paper notes) don’t work for me. Yes, I know both are in perpetual further development, blah, blah, blah.
Then you see something like this and think, wow! AR magic does really exist.
One of the stands at HiNZ this year had AR that one could try. It was less disoriented than VR but still hard to use. We also need to consider is it a technology looking for health problems to solve or an enabler of healthcare.
Buried in the article and easy to miss: "Lumus’s CEO Ari Grobman told me that he expected battery life to last for between four to six hours. "
That’s actually quite a jump as the Google version had only 40 minutes. I still wonder why you would not have a small battery pack on your belt or similar. It’s not as though the headset is small or discrete.
I think we’ll see VR/AR go mainstream in the next few years. Replacing monitors, laptop screens, phone screens, etc as the main way we view digital information. The technologies needed are all almost there - very high resolution glasses so you don’t see pixels; almost perfect voice recognition, etc. Battery problem could be solved with a quick charging case like AirPods and more efficient processors/screens. VR is really great for medical simulation training. You feel like you are really there.