[…] What the current glasses lack though is any kind of display, and that’s what Meta’s next glasses, codenamed Hypernova, are set to bring. […] To be clear: this won’t be AR, it will be a small fixed contextual display.
In a new report today, The Information’s Wayne Ma and Kalley Huang say Hypernova won’t be a partnership with EssilorLuxottica, the eyewear company that owns Ray-Ban, because the company “balked at the design”.
To project an image into your eye and deliver the HUD, the report says, Hypernova will have “a thick frame that current and former Meta employees say is likely to turn off consumers”.
That projection system also brings the weight up to around 70 grams, the report says, compared to the roughly 50 grams for the Ray-Ban Meta glasses and 30 grams of traditional glasses.
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Why Meta would waste money of a brand-name for an highly technical and mostly early adopter product is beyond me anyways. It serves no purpose and will not be able to “over-ride” the bad reputation the Meta brand has in the eye of the technically inclined customers. If people buy it, it is because of the technical merits making it attractive despite the band name attached to it.
I can imagine that there’s multiple reasons for teaming up: glasses style, ray band brand, production & local stores.
It appears to be quite successful and people like it quite a bit. For listening to stuff, taking hands free photos & videos, and AI stuff. I don’t know what exactly the use case of “look and tell me what you see” is, but for that this is by far the best form factor.
I guess the main appeal is that it looks low key and does a few small things well.
For their existing “smart” glasses that might be true, as they are basically an lifestyle accessory with limited functionality beyond being sunglasses.
I genuinely hate what VR has become. They’re signing this tech’s death warranty and they should know that. After over a decade we’ve just about plateaued in terms of developing objectively better headsets, and fucked any chance of having a PCVR/peripheral headset that actually looks good, has good tracking, and works universally with whatever the fuck you want too hook up to it without being $1500 or more.
Not to mention locomotion hasn’t made any real progress and we’ve actually scrapped a lot of promising looking haptics tech that could have been a standard feature of VR controllers. We’ve also lost any hope of 3rd party controller support.
We’re cooked, and I don’t see this going anywhere good. Keep what you have for novelty’s sake and future ‘collector’s’ value, but don’t bother looking forward to a future of VR or AR beyond gimmicky shit like google glasses and whatever the fuck Cuckerberg is doing.
