Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Vision for Mixed Reality: Now vs The Future!”.
All right, here’s a theory – I’ve been thinking about uh someday, maybe not next year or five or even 10 years, but maybe someday we’ll all live in a world where we all have these wearable computers on our faces. All the time and a lot of these tech companies really believe in that future, like I’ve never spoken to anyone on planet Earth who believes more than Mark Zuckerberg that humans are on their way to spending tons of their time in some sort of metaverse. But the tech is clearly not good enough yet today in 2023, for anyone to want to do that like this is what a VR headset looks like in 2023, and this is the best we’ve got, and even now the computers and pixels and batteries and everything on Your face are too much for people to want to spend all day in something like this, but we’re all kind of on board that maybe someday the tech will shrink down more and more and more and more until eventually, it’s no more than just a normal. Looking pair of glasses and then maybe at that point well I’ll be cool wearing it every day. So this Quest three, this newest and latest and great headset from meta.
My theory is, is on this side of the scale and on the other side of the sliding scale is smart, glasses and meta literally, is also announcing smart glasses at their event. So these things are literally called the Rayban meta. Smart glasses, aka the Rayband stories 2o right now they are super simple. They don’t do much because they can only fit a camera and small speakers and a battery, but there are some clever tricks that enable them to do as much as possible and maybe someday. The tech will get power enough and useful enough for people to want to use these every day, so VR headsets are racing to get smaller and smaller and smart glasses are racing to get better and better Tech and they’re both basically racing towards each other and companies.
Like meta, are spending tons and tons of money to develop these things to figure out which strategy will hit first. So, let’s see, let’s start with the headset. So this is the latest and greatest from meta, the quest 3, and this is the year they made their big pivot to it being a mixed reality, headset, which in hindsight, feels like a natural progression for these things.
If you want to get them more comfortable for people to wear everyday like glasses, so in previous VR headsets, it really felt like pass through was an afterthought like you put the headset on and you’re just immediately in your own world. Until you take the headset off and this new version is still built to be immersive, it still has all the light blocking and fills your field of view with screens and makes it as immersive as possible. But it now has a bunch more sensors arranged around the outside that make passed through dramatically better than before.
It’S now color stereo, very low latency and decently high resolution and there’s immediately a bunch of benefits to having pass through being this good. First of all, the setup was way more intuitive, like you can literally take it to a new spot for the first time and just put it on it boots up and automatically you look down and it just Maps out the floor of the room you’re in the Available floor space, the objects in the room, the spots where you can stand and to surprisingly great accuracy. So it’s using a pair of RGB cameras and the light R sensor in the middle. So you no longer have to painstakingly draw a play area every single time and stick with it. It just naturally feels like it plants the menu floating right in the middle of where you’re standing, and you can still see everything around you now.
You may be wondering okay. How good, though, like exactly is the quest 3? Is it the best? Is it? Is it better than the quest Pro? Yes, it’s better than Quest Pro, but it is not as good as Apple Vision Pro. I would kind of equate it to like if I gave you a clear pair of glasses that were not exactly your prescription, but basically this one’s good, because it’s stereo and color and nearly real time. So you see accurate colors, you look at your hands and you can find the controllers wherever they are in the room, just pick them up and put them down without needing someone to hand them to you. Just so many benefits like that. There’S also just a small amount of distortion with up close objects and things near the edges of your vision.
But it’s not quite high enough Fidelity to like pick up your phone and start using that screen so like. If you get a text, you’re still gon na have to take the headset off to be able to read it, and I know comparing it to a $ 3,500. Headset feels unnecessary and it kind of is, but also a lot of people have asked me about it. And I am one of a few people who can actually say they’ve tried both, so I will say that yes, Apple Vision, Pro is still the best pass through I’ve ever experienced.
I distinctly remember taking notes about my experience on my phone while still wearing the headset. It was kind of insane, but for a $ 500 headset yeah. This is absolutely as good as you’re going to see and combined with the high resolution of the actual menus and the accuracy of the controllers. It’S I think, it’s pretty awesome and then, of course, the other benefit to having way higher quality sensors around the outside of the headset. Is you don’t actually need the controllers now? You’Ve always had the choice to either use the controllers or use your hands uh, and these controllers have gotten better over the years. They’Re smaller they’re, pretty sweet.
They have better haptics than ever before, but the hand tracking has also gotten way better and really intuitive and responsive responsive, and I think this is key again to feeling like the future. So you do this pinch gesture here to pull up the menu and move around to select things. You can literally scroll around menus by touching the digital menu and flinging them through space with your finger, or you can grab a window and just move it around, putting it on a table or floating it in the air, and it just stays locked there, which is Pretty awesome so pretty much everything except typing is is natural. It works as you’d expect, like you’re typing, on a virtual keyboard floating in space, but this will definitely take more practice because there’s no haptic feedback see the other gestures I was talking about almost always have a haptic feedback of your own fingers hitting each other, which Is really interesting, uh this keyboard here you’re sort of just poking an invisible plane in the air where the keyboard should be so that that’s a little tougher. The main selling point of this headset, though, is still playing games. That’S still what it’s super good at and it plays all the same games that the Quest 2 could play, and there are even some games optimized for Quest 3, that it’s even better at it. Has this nextg Qualcomm Snapdragon xr2 chip. It has higher resolution per eye.
It has a wider, more immersive field of view and it’s, in my opinion, slightly more comfortable thanks to this new strap that improves weight distribution. So I’ve been playing a bunch. I I’ve really enjoyed this golf game that feels surprisingly realistic as someone that was expecting like wi golf levels of graphics and control, also pingpong, which this has this eie multiplayer mode online, where someone else’s Avatar just shows up in your space standing 10 ft away from You, but with no legs uh, but you know the classics like beat saber super hot and then even some new ones, like gorilla tag, is blowing up. All this stuff is the main reason why today you’d buy something like this to spend like half an hour in the thing. But again the tech is shrinking down more and more and more and will every single year until it gets close to something like these smart glasses. So let’s talk about the smart glasses, so these are the meta, smart, glasses and and there’s others like it.
But they’re going to start at the other end of the spectrum, where there’s only so much stuff that you can stuff stuff into a regular looking pair of glasses that nobody would even look twice at but over time as Tech gets better and more powerful and more Miniaturized these things will get more and more powerful and more and more able to do more stuff. So right now this is a 12 megapixel camera with a little LED light ring to indicate when it’s recording or taking a picture, a shutter button on top and then a literal computer inside with some storage, a touchpad on the side and then some microphones. And then these really tiny pinhole speakers that Fire audio downwards directly into your ears. It doesn’t sound like much, but when paired directly to your phone and The Meta view app, this thing is surprisingly capable as a little computer on your face.
So you can use the camera, of course, to just take firstperson pictures and videos. Just by hitting the shutter button. Videos are limited to 60 seconds or less and portrait orientation, but honestly, despite all that, they’re actually pretty solid, looking videos and there’s some promise here. I kind of feel like I might want to use these for autofocus for, like car driving footage. If I could get widescreen out of them, that would be awesome and then you can also start a recording or take a picture. Just by saying, hey meta, take a picture, and so you can see that it was pretty fast the the little light there uh.
I don’t know if you want to say that phrase out loud very often, so you might just stick to one of these but yeah. It has a voice assistant built in so you can send and receive messages through WhatsApp Messenger. You know meta stuff, but it’s just audio like there’s no screen anywhere in here built. So this this really works best with experiences that can be entirely handled with just audio.
So they’re connected all the time to your phone via Bluetooth, so you can listen to music, and these little speakers are directional enough, that at half volume there’s really not that much bleed and that high volume it kind of just sounds the same as someone like. Maybe listening next to you with open back headphones, that’s as loud as it gets, but you can also ask questions of the meta virtual assistant, little AI virtual assistant, built into the computers in this little pair of glasses, and you have to ask it: hey meta: what’s The weather tomorrow and then it reads the answers directly into your ears, and so now I know it’s going to rain for our last practice of the Year great. We can also ask it random questions about people. Uh asked it to write a poem, and it gave me a poem it’s Internet connected from your phone, so it can do a bunch of stuff uh for fun. I asked it to write a acceptance speech for me, as I walk onto stage wearing the sunglasses and by the time I got on stage, I can start saying an acceptance speech as it’s reading them into my ears, which I thought was that’s kind of a fun Hack, so this is all based on meta’s new llama 2 language model, so it’s pretty fluid and you don’t have to rely on saying certain specific phrases to get it to keep going through the conversation. Now you know it’s not the best AI assistant, I’ve ever heard, and it still has its limitations. It still can’t set alarms or access third third party services that aren’t meta, but the fact that I could be on a phone call right now and you wouldn’t even notice in public. That’S kind of the point: there’s uh two different styles by rayb Band.
For these. These are the headliner and the W farer. The downside is, is very clearly battery life.
I mean this is a small small battery to fit in here. So it’s cool that you have this wireless charging case, so the second you take them off. You can just put them in the case and charge them back up just like earbuds. Basically, so it’s more about how many times the case can charge them up honestly on one charge. If I listen to a bunch of music and take a bunch of pictures and videos, I can kill these things in under 2 hours, but they’re, quoting 36 total hours of battery life with the charging case.
By the way, the recording light is on one side, but then it’s the camera on the other side, so that keeps it nice and symmetrical like normal glasses should be, but that’s the idea. This is about as much Tech as you can fit in a normal. Looking pair of glasses in 2023, without it starting stting, to look weird with the current Tech we have, but it’s going to be more and more and more stuff and still looking like this every year. So the question is: which side would you bet gets Mass adoption? First, and this is a question tech companies have to answer before they start investing now, meta is invested in both, so maybe they win either way and they’re they’re involved.
But if you’re Snapchat they’ve already tried just the smart glasses and maybe they’ll keep doing that later, uh, if you’re Apple they’ve, clearly started with apple vision and they’re, going to try to miniaturize that and Shrink that year after year, but which side and what a time To be alive for all this cuz, the tech that we’re going to have on our faces in 10 20 years is going to look insane compared to what we have today. The same way that the tech we had 10 years ago looks archaic compared to what we have now. So all that being said, I’ll leave you with this one Quest three for 500 bucks is awesome and if you’re looking to get a VR headset or a mixed reality, headset at all, no problem recommending this one. It’S pretty sweet, sweet, two Apple’s Vision Pro is still on track to be released early 2024 and I think it’s going to be pretty awesome so make sure you get subscribed to see the review of that when it happens and three I’m pretty sure we are barreling Towards this computers on our faces future at some point it does feel like it’s picking up that much Steam and that much investment.
So, even if you don’t believe we’re are going to be wearing these on our faces for a super long time, it probably won’t be this it’ll be something smaller and slowly we’ll get more and more face computer time so, which side do you pick thanks for watching Catch you in the next one peace, .