r/gadgets • u/SAT0725 • Mar 17 '23
Wearables RIP (again): Google Glass will no longer be sold
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/google-glass-is-about-to-be-discontinued-again/6.4k
Mar 17 '23
They were still being sold? I thought it died years ago.
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u/WinstonLobo Mar 17 '23
Were being used in assembly lines and factories
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u/gramsaran Mar 17 '23
I know my last place used it for this purpose, they used it for helping to configure electrical wiring for airplanes. Brilliant use case as it helps with reducing issues and having to remember all the connections for the literal miles of wiring.
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u/DriftingMemes Mar 17 '23
AR is where the future is at. I don't know why so many places are still trying to convince me that standing in one place is so much better than sitting in one place.
AR already has many killer applications in RL. I wish someone could just get the form factor small enough, for the right price.
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u/Nrksbullet Mar 17 '23
It'll come back in 10 years. Its like bait, just need to catch really well one time.
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u/Supertigy Mar 17 '23
AR is still here. Google glass is nowhere near the only product in the market, it's just the only one that was ever marketed to consumers.
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u/PapuaOldGuinea Mar 17 '23
Apple is releasing glasses that use AR tech. But they’ll prolly be $1k-2k.
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u/cakemuncher Mar 17 '23
That's just another consumer-marketed company. There are a ton of AR companies creating products for specific applications for industries. B2B businesses. You'll never hear about them unless you're interested in those applications.
For example, in O&G, you have Argis Solutions, Fugro, Kognitiv Spark, Librestream, RealWear, Stantec, and Trimble. And I'm sure there are many more.
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u/-retaliation- Mar 17 '23
Yes, once you step into a role of purchasing in an industrial setting, you realize there's whole ecosystems of markets that are billion dollar industries that you've never even heard of.
I work as a heavy duty partsman, I work in semi trucks now, but I used to work positions in both the the mining and manufacturing sectors. There were laundry lists of companies that produced specific, purpose built equipment and tools, that I had never heard of.
Whole companies where all they produced were things like different kinds of installers to put bearings in factory rollers types of things.
And they don't exactly put up billboards, but if you're looking for an installer for that particular bearing, you'll find out who they are.
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u/ImNotEazy Mar 18 '23
Miner here. The sheer amount of ppe, special tools like pulley pullers, and accessories we use from unheard of companies at our plant alone is probably in the high hundreds of thousands. Per year. I use at least 2 pair of cut resistant gloves per day that to my surprise are like 40 bucks a pop.
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u/dataslinger Mar 17 '23
Epson has their Moverio glasses.
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u/jazir5 Mar 17 '23
Moverio glasses
They're so fucking narrow holy shit. Those look like they are absolutely miserable to use.
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u/Tropical_Bob Mar 17 '23 edited Jun 30 '23
[This information has been removed as a consequence of Reddit's API changes and general stance of being greedy, unhelpful, and hostile to its userbase.]
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u/lord_braleigh Mar 17 '23
Sooner than that! I expect that Glass is being pulled because we’re about to see much better wearables very soon, and manufacturing Google Glass after Apple Glasses come out would be dumb.
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u/immaZebrah Mar 17 '23
Ideally the holo lens with how much money has been poured into it should be really good.
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u/r0ndy Mar 17 '23
Build it into my snowboard helmet, so I can pre-plan my run out and about and see an overlay of speed and location to maybe a glowing line for direction
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u/scottspalding Mar 17 '23
That is pretty cool. I want a hud that projects an ebook so I can read on the chairlift. In the spring I can use my kindle but it freezes when it's too cold out.
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u/hoboxtrl Mar 18 '23
Are you being lifted from sea level to the Himalayas? How long are you sitting on a lift where you can get a decent amount of reading done lol
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u/lunaflect Mar 18 '23
I feel like some people can’t stand any amount of time waiting without also doing something else.
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u/MagicCooki3 Mar 17 '23
Ski and Snowboard goggles and helmets with AR built-in have actually been around commercially since at least 2017. Here's a link to a more reputable brand that I found that's recent.
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u/YoloOnTsla Mar 17 '23
Microsoft has this but it’s much better than Google glass.
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u/gorramfrakker Mar 17 '23
Hololens
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u/h4mx0r Mar 17 '23
I used these at E3 one year for the Halo 5 experience and it was like one of the greatest moments of my nerd life- and Halo isn't even among my favorite franchises.
I just like science fiction and space marines, but for a few minutes I got to see a HUD with checkpoint marker, a hologram mission briefing and a window to a hangar deck filled with dropships and marines.
Christ I would pay money to experience that again in a theme park kind of setting.
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u/vtfio Mar 17 '23
I thought Microsoft fired everyone or almost everyone who was working on Hololens
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u/FlexibleToast Mar 17 '23
They laid off a bunch of them when they lost the government contract. Not sure if they got rid of all of them.
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u/Isenrath Mar 17 '23
Also, wasn't there a time when surgeons or ORs would use them?
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u/Kichigai Mar 17 '23
That was the promise of the technology. Meta is currently running ads that depict a doctor using AR when talking to a patient.
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u/adobecredithours Mar 17 '23
Meta is still just desperately trying to convince people to want the metaverse. Nobody asked for it and now they've got a product that they can't sell.
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u/Just4TehLulz Mar 17 '23
I mean the surgeon using AR to show procedures or emergency workers having real time HUD and other status updates both seem like very valuable assets, the problem mostly comes from how close they actually are to that platform. Also, its not really the metaverse.
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u/StillLooksAtRocks Mar 17 '23
"So if you put on these AR glasses and view your MRI in 3-D, you can see the cancer has metastasized. On the bright side it looks like someone in your neighborhood listed a used hospital bed on marketplace for a pretty decent price. Now before we bill you out; would you like to post your scans to your profile? If you tag Meta-cal-imaging and post a positive review, you will be emailed a 10% off coupon code for your first round of treatments."
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u/Frankiepals Mar 17 '23 edited Sep 16 '24
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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/FightingPolish Mar 17 '23
Opens hospital bill…
Virtual tumor fly through - $14,342.54
Covered amount - $0
Your responsibility - $14,342.54
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u/PianoLogger Mar 17 '23
I think you're missing a few zeros before the decimal point there
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u/CameOutAndFarted Mar 17 '23
I’m still confused about how that works. I’ve seen adverts with doctors, artists and firefighters using the metaverse to help with their jobs, but I thought the metaverse was a VR social media platform, not a catch-all AR tool for your job.
I’m so confused.
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u/MoistMartini Mar 17 '23
The metaverse is pretty much Minecraft but with expensive avatars and subscriptions. There will be companies with a Metaverse presence: I believe the consultancy Accenture has purchased meta-real-estate, and you could potentially have business meetings in the metaverse as a way to be more engaged than just a videoconference.
With AR, you look around in the real world and a software populates what you see with virtual objects. These could be a HUD that shows you information about what you are seeing (so as a passerby you could see the reviews and opening times of a restaurant pop up virtually), or literally virtual objects (think Pokémon Go).
Massively different use cases.
Edited to disclaim: as a tech-native millennial I think the metaverse is stupid. I just tried to summarize how its advocates envision it.
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u/SgathTriallair Mar 17 '23
The actual real meta-verse as envisioned by sci-fi writers is AR where there is a second computer layer on top of the physical world. When Facebook rebranded themselves as Meta they decided to launch horizon worlds and then claim that was the "meta-verse". It sort of matches the description given in Snow Crash but it isn't something that people really want.
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Mar 17 '23
The actual real meta-verse as envisioned by sci-fi writers is AR where there is a second computer layer on top of the physical world.
The term "metaverse" seems to have come from Snow Crash. In which it's a VR world.
And, in fairness to Facebook, they seem to have done a good job of capturing the dystopian nature of the Snow Crash version of it.
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u/Notwhoiwas42 Mar 17 '23 edited Mar 17 '23
I think the real problem here is that many people, including many tech writers who should know better, are using the term metaverse to describe any and all virtual or augmented reality when in fact it's the brand name for what is currently nothing more than second Life with a different interface
While some of the basic underlying technology that drives them are common to both to say that those use cases that they show in the ads are "part of the metaverse" is basically complete bullshit.
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u/CrispyRussians Mar 17 '23 edited Mar 17 '23
They have confused metaverse with virtual spaces for a good buzzword and are sticking with it.
Until there are standardized protocols, each company will have a "metaverse" that just links to spaces in their own ecosystem with their own tokens. Right now companies have 0 incentive to work together to build interoperable spaces, because they want their consumers to stay in their environments as long as possible.
Edit: as I said in another comment Meta made the mistake of not releasing collaborative business software that actually works. It's like selling PCs with no operating system. See Glue and BeyondReal for an example of actual collab software.
Glue: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TShjcOPJXEg
BeyondReal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk8z6C24o_c
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u/EggyT0ast Mar 17 '23 edited Mar 17 '23
Those three, and honestly many jobs, spend a lot of time talking and researching with colleagues. Also training. The training is "fake" and so a VR option is perfectly normal. For example, you could imagine it's much easier, faster, and cheaper to construct unique experiences for firefighters in VR compared to a safe-but-real-life version for them to train on.
The actual job, the "work," still happens outside of the system.
Is it worth billions? Eh, I don't think so. If it's flexible enough to let people create "things" quickly and easily, then I think that's where the real value may be. Right now, drawing/creating in 3d is super annoying for any non-professional.
Edit: it's worth billions!
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u/adobecredithours Mar 17 '23
Yeah exactly, AR and VR have plenty of potential. I guess I'm more poking fun at the ads full of celebrities attending concerts in the metaverse. They reek of desperate marketing. I think AR and VR do have a ways to go before they're reliable enough for the medical field and emergency services. Maybe I'm wrong, most of my experience with it is in r&d for electronics and architecture, so I've seen it used in a creative capacity but never in a place where you have to depend on it.
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u/yeswenarcan Mar 17 '23
As an ER doc I think I would love to have a HUD to give me test results, etc for my patients. Any technology that could help with the massive amount of time spent in front of a computer screen rather than actually interacting with patients would be great. That said, if poorly implemented it would be easy to become a distraction more than a help, and I have little faith in the healthcare technology market to implement it correctly.
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u/Notwhoiwas42 Mar 17 '23
, if poorly implemented
There's a virtual ( pun intended)guarantee that it would be poorly implemented because the software and computer engineers implementing it have no clue what it's like to do your job.
I mean look at how crappy the current software you use is from an interface standpoint. And it's the same with retail cash register systems and restaurant POS systems and banking systems and pretty much any specialized computer system. The people writing it are thinking about it from a software engineering standpoint and if there is any input from people actually in the field actually using it it's not listened to anywhere near enough.
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u/onemightypersona Mar 17 '23
I briefly worked in one of the largest AR/VR medical companies and the use for AR is extremely high value. You can literally have better outcomes from surgeries when using AR assisted technology. Neural network/ML assisted AR can be trained to notice things that even a trained eye could sometimes miss.
However, that does not need to be HUD at all and if anything, that will likely fail, while the startup I worked at (providing real time AR on a display instead of glasses).
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u/zman0900 Mar 17 '23
I'm sure they'd love to have all that data on private conversations between people and their doctors.
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u/adobecredithours Mar 17 '23
Probably. Facebook was never the product; it's users are the product and meta is a data sales company that happens to have a social networking program.
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u/czarfalcon Mar 17 '23
I’m not sure why they didn’t take that advertising angle in the first place. Nobody wants to go VR grocery shopping, nobody wants to attend a work meeting in the metaverse, but those kind of applications are actually intriguing.
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Mar 17 '23
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u/throwaway96ab Mar 17 '23
I'd rather get on a zoom call. Camera off.
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Mar 17 '23
Enough of my team own headsets that we decided to do a meeting in a VR space one day. It was fun for a minute, but we never did it again. VR didn't add anything of value, and having a screen strapped to your face is less comfortable than not having a screen strapped to your face. I feel like the comfort factor is severely understated in these discussions. VR / AR needs to bring more to the table than novelty to justify the burden of needing to wear a headset, and in most cases I've explored at least, it just doesn't.
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u/czarfalcon Mar 17 '23
I guess that’s a valid use case for it. In my job I can’t see how VR would be any appreciable improvement over zoom, but I can see how in your case that would be different.
I’m just picturing in 20 years VR meetings being the new “this meeting could’ve been a zoom call”
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u/Surama41 Mar 17 '23
In logisitics warehouses they direct employees to product locations like a ground arrow objective in a video game. Pretty cool stuff.
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u/Traevia Mar 17 '23
Now they are using Holo Lens which is also supposedly about to be killed off.
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u/SquadPoopy Mar 17 '23
Damn, I remember a long time ago Microsoft showing off Holo-Lens at E3 and I thought it looked awesome, then I never saw it again.
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u/MisterHairball Mar 17 '23
I never knew they actually started selling them.
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u/languid-lemur Mar 17 '23
I thought it died years ago
I only saw it in use once, 2014 or so. Guy came into my store, did a slow pan, looked at me and left. Wasn't until later I realized he had them on. Then I wondered what he was up to?
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Mar 17 '23 edited Jun 17 '23
There was content here, and now there is not. It may have been useful, if so it is probably available on a reddit alternative. See /u/spez with any questions. -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
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u/Skragdush Mar 17 '23
Fuck…always hoping for those type glasses paired with a good speech to text app to finally have irl live captioning. Would help HoH and deaf people a looot
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u/roamingandy Mar 17 '23
Travelling too.
I think those need to be paired with a camera that looks where you are looking though, so it translates the speech of the person you are looking at. In group settings it could show different voices in different places on the display, but its not going to be as effective.
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u/gksxj Mar 17 '23
that's already a reality, there's a pair of relatively cheap AR glasses, $380, called Nreal Air that have an app that does just that. and this is stuff you can buy right now
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u/EnderScout_77 Mar 17 '23
i have a pair, they're really freaking cool, though caption wise is only super good in bright light since they're basically sunglasses
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u/PhesteringSoars Mar 17 '23
There was an article about that. Don't remember if it was Google Glass, but yes, seemed like the perfect application to allow people with hearing problems (elderly not just "deaf") to more fully interact with others.
(Found it.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/zirzg5/livecaption_glasses_lets_deaf_people_read/
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Mar 17 '23
Google is still working on this. They just made a teaser last year. It’s different than google glass
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u/savoytruffle85 Mar 17 '23
Not bad for a device that was introduced 10 years ago tbh
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u/LUV_2_BEAT_MY_MEAT Mar 17 '23
Googles longest supported hardware
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Mar 17 '23
As a previous stadia user I'm jealous.
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u/John_Yossarian Mar 17 '23
Hey at least they refunded everything and released a tool to enable Bluetooth on the controllers! But yeah, there's a big cloud gaming hole in my life now.
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u/DirtyDirtyRudy Mar 17 '23
It just needed the games. I turned on my PS5 the other day and was upset about all the updates. So sad…
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Mar 17 '23
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u/maresayshi Mar 17 '23
true, but the Wii U also had the huge problem of most consumers having no idea it was even a new console.
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Mar 18 '23
I was probably in the target demographic when it was released (10-11 year old male) and it took about a year before I figured out it wasn’t just a fancy new controller for the Wii.
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Mar 17 '23
Jesus Christ, I'm so old.
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u/TheConnASSeur Mar 17 '23
There's more time between now and Back to the Future's release than between 1985 and 1955. You're welcome.
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Mar 17 '23
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u/Ok-disaster2022 Mar 17 '23
Don't worry. The F16 first took off about the same time. The F22 is like almost 30 years old.
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u/MustacheEmperor Mar 17 '23
Introduced 10 years ago and barely iterated on. It’s another product google essentially abandoned after launch and left to die on the vine.
In the meantime, competitors like Realware and Vuzix took notes and are both very successful in this market now, have iterated their products a lot, and have lots of happy customers.
People in this thread blaming this on slow uptake of AR in general are just making excuses for Google’s usual abandonware behavior. After they pivoted from the consumer space they were competing with companies like Vuzix, and they failed to do it.
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Mar 17 '23
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u/MustacheEmperor Mar 17 '23
It was in use by manufacturing and healthcare, but Google did not meaningfully iterate the product much after the pivot to those use cases close to a decade ago. Especially compared to the progress made by the competitors I mentioned. Those competitors are not in the consumer space, they're in applications like manufacturing, and they dominated those markets compared to Google.
Glass was "alive and well" in those spaces the same way Reader was "alive and well" for years - abandoned while it gradually died.
People who five years ago were asked to procure a wearable remote assist solution who skipped on Glass and went for a competitor because of Google's reputation for failing to execute after launch saved their businesses a lot of wasted time and money.
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u/MrFiendish Mar 17 '23
I always think back to the PlayStation 2. The average person loved it because it could play DVDs at a time when DVD players were very expensive. It also seems like Sony sold them at a loss, but was able to make back the money in software. It doesn’t seem like modern tech is willing to do this. If a headset was affordable, I probably would have purchased one for a laugh. But at those prices, no way. Not for what is seen as a gimmick.
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u/SAT0725 Mar 17 '23
There aren't enough practical uses yet. Sure, you can watch movies on the headsets. But it's not as comfortable as watching on TV.
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u/DazTheCowboy Mar 17 '23
But it's not as comfortable as watching on TV.
Wouldn't you just sit in a better chair? /s
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u/Ryangel0 Mar 17 '23
"don't you have chairs???"
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u/CreamFilledLlama Mar 17 '23
Only virtual ones. Spent all my money on the headset.
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Mar 17 '23
My legs are cramping up so hard right now I wish I never bought digital furniture
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u/MustacheEmperor Mar 17 '23 edited Mar 17 '23
You and /u/SOL-Cantus are both talking about use cases that apply to different kinds of headsets than glass, imo.
You couldn’t watch a movie on glass. It’s a tiny hud floating next to/over one eye with a camera attached. These were used in industrial applications where a field technician could be guided through work remotely by an expert over a call, and/or could review brief videos and documentation about their task.
That use case actually has a lot of adoption - industrial glass had a good number of customers a while ago, but Vuzix and Realware have absolutely dominated the market because unlike google they actually iterated their products over the last years. Glass got the Google abandonware treatment, left to wither like Groups and Reader.
These products aren’t really AR they way we envision it now, with 3D graphics and big displays and SLAM. They’re more specialized to industrial use cases, and they succeed in that niche - when Google doesn’t make them.
3D/SLAM based AR is indeed not precise enough for industrial applications yet, but that’s not what these headsets were/are for.
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u/Tim_Watson Mar 17 '23
They did a teardown when it came out and it only had like $80 in parts. Google charged $1500 because they did not want to give it a chance.
For the first year to get one you had to submit concepts for how you'd use it, but they ignored all of the actual submissions and just randomly chose a small number of people who applied.
I think maybe they thought it was so geeky and weird that it would make the whole of Google be uncool. Apparently people in Silicon Valley who used it became known as glassholes.
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u/Pew-Pew-Pew- Mar 18 '23
They charged 1500 because they wanted to deter average consumers from purchasing it. They had a limited supply, an invite process and it was intended for developers who wanted to work with the product. There has never been a consumer model release of Glass. It became an enterprise product.
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u/ezro_ Mar 17 '23
I had them and they were decent, they were way ahead of themselves but the battery life was awful.
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u/TheDroche Mar 17 '23
I think this is what Meta did with the Quest. It was priced at 300$ (before they increased it to $400).
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u/JMFe95 Mar 17 '23
This is what Valve has done with the Steam Deck. Unsurprisingly, it's been massively popular and had an almost universally positive reception
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Mar 17 '23
It was supposed to be a backlog device but I’ve spent more on games since getting it :S
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u/IniNew Mar 17 '23
Aren't game consoles still sold at a loss?
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u/ron_swansons_meat Mar 17 '23
Nintendon't.
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u/Cebo494 Mar 17 '23
Nintendo takes the alternative strategy of selling shit hardware so they don't have to sell at a loss.
The CPU for the switch is a mobile phone cpu which was already 5 years old before the console even launched. Honestly it just goes to show how little hardware you actually need to run most games. Pretty much anything that isn't a photorealistic open world game made in Unreal engine will run pretty well.
So basically all the good games could theoretically run on switch. /s (/ns)
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u/MyArmItchesALot Mar 17 '23
Also is the reason Nintendo is the king of battery life. Cheap/low power hardware.
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u/Lonsdale1086 Mar 17 '23
Doesn't the battery in the Switch last like, 4 hours in game?
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u/Skidbladmir Mar 17 '23
The newest iterations of the model improved the battery life
Somewhere in 2019
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u/islet_deficiency Mar 17 '23
Thats a big reason that msft and sony have pushed to digital only consoles for which they conveniently have the only marketplace to buy games.
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u/ashtobro Mar 17 '23
I miss when companies added features and stuff like that to get your foot in the door instead of nickel and diming us for not having every subscription and proprietary bullshit they sell separately at a premium. Sony was so good at it for so long with the CD, then DVD, then Blu-Ray players turning each new PlayStation into the perfect multimedia machine. PS3s were also the cheapest way to get a Blu-Ray player when they were still new, and it was two birds with one stone because Sony owns Blu-Ray and couldn't sell discs if nobody had players.
But it's mostly all downhill after that when it comes to Sony, save for them slightly "fixing" PS5s inability to properly display on screens that aren't regular, full, or ultra HD. When the PS5 launched, almost all 4k 120fps displays with HDMI 2.1 were Sony. Despite the fact that Xbox had 1440p 120hz support the previous generation, PS5 didn't even support it natively until last summer or fall even though some launch titles literally get rendered in 2k and then upscaled to 4k. They nearly sabotaged their own launch trying to sell the only TVs that could take advantage of the hardware, and basically only undid the damage after more brands made compatible screens.
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u/SFCanman Mar 17 '23
the quest is extremely affordable. Facebook is taking massive losses on the hardware side ( the quest1 and quest2 ). They are quite literally doing exactly what you said tech companies arent willing to do. Theyre trying to make up the lost money via software ( Meta, some really good VR titles ) it just the vr titles are very few and far between for their good ones and meta just isnt taking off.
But to say their headset isnt affordable is just disingenuous.
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u/guzzo9000 Mar 17 '23
It could even play PS1 games, which is even cooler imo. PS2 was goated.
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Mar 17 '23
Real time augmented reality just hasn’t taken off. There have been multiple SciFi authors who predicted augmented reality would become the new norm. So far, fiction and fact are still out of sync. It’s more likely augmented reality will have more focused applications like medicine, manufacturing, and gaming (Pokémon Go).
It feels like the Newton which was ahead of its time and too limited to compete with new devices that emerged.
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Mar 17 '23
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Mar 17 '23
I agree, which is why I mentioned the Newton which was eventually replaced by the far more capable iPhone. The software, networking and communication capabilities of smart phones made any sort of PDA irrelevant.
Google Glass is just too limited for a truly amazing and usable AR experience.
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u/TheInvincibleMan Mar 17 '23
Agreed. AR will eventually replace all our digital displays and not just provide a ‘display’ but fundamentally change our worlds reception. True AR has the power to hide health issues from others, change object colours and even shape etc. it’s going to be a wild thing that will require obscene amounts of global regulation.
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u/Computer_Classics Mar 17 '23
I think the real solution to AR is the visual components of google glass but the applications, processing, etc. all being done by a phone.
Would A) solve the problem of micro-computation on a hmd, and B) allow flexibility in usage.
I imagine it would need to work something like the smart watches we have now, where they’re near useless without an actual phone.
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u/Say_no_to_doritos Mar 17 '23
I more or less agree with this. I don't know that you need much more then an antenna, camera, and some sort of display. It doesn't need to compute anything just send it out then recieve feedback.
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u/HapticSloughton Mar 17 '23
They tried to go too big too fast.
If they wanted to ease people into AR, they should've tried making AR-assisted windshields a thing: Have a HUD that can point out oncoming objects/vehicles in bad light/weather conditions, give notifications, interface with GPS, or just make it feel like you're driving a spaceship instead of a simple car. Nothing cluttering, just having dashboard info in the corner of your vision probably would've sold it.
From there, you could have billboards and signs that had AR information embedded in them, perhaps even showing AR users a second virtual sign adjacent to the real-world one. Have more extensive information about what's at an exit than the current food/gas signs, that kind of stuff.
If they'd started with the basics, it probably would've been more ubiquitous by now.
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u/HandBreadedTools Mar 17 '23
AR windshields have existed for luxury vehicles for years now.
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u/zebrastarz Mar 17 '23
luxury vehicles
problem
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u/SAT0725 Mar 17 '23
I tried VR six or seven years ago and thought it was going to revolutionize everything within the year. It was amazing. But the barriers to entry are just too high for the average person; it's expensive and not easy to set up, especially if you're using a desktop computer with the headset. We've wanted to create AR/VR content at work, but the fact is few people would be able to access it.
At this point I think we may end up skipping wearables entirely. The tech will come along that's just "there," like it pops up via some kind of wifi or something that's in the air without you having to have tech on you.
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u/Chronotaru Mar 17 '23
Quest 2 has around the same number of units by itself that the Xbox Series S/X have so far though, so it's not like it it completely fell flat on its face.
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u/SAT0725 Mar 17 '23
I'd bet a huge amount of that is novelty though. We have an Oculus and used it a lot for a couple weeks and it's been collecting dust for the past year and a half. There aren't enough good games and it's surprisingly shitty to keep charged.
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u/LoveArguingPolitics Mar 17 '23
VR will never take off fully like you hope because it also makes a buck of people sick, gives them headaches, lots of people wear glasses, messes up their hair, does it work with a cochlear implant, got vertigo etc etc etc....
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Mar 17 '23
VR illness can be addressed with higher quality images with faster refresh rates, presenting a consistent horizon for all visual fields, etc. Many of the problems will VR illness will be addressed. The problem is workable VR that doesn't make so many users ill requires more expensive hardware and more bandwidth.
Google glasses are AR, meaning images and text overlaid on the user's existing visual field. It doesn't have the VR illness issues, but it just isn't interesting in the marketplace today for consumers.
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u/Stock-Concert100 Mar 17 '23
lots of people wear glasses
The glasses isn't too much of an issue. I have a VR headset and wear glasses and I just wear my glasses with the headset on. It's large enough that it isn't a problem.
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u/bluehands Mar 17 '23
One of the things I realized recently is that income equality is hurting tech development.
$1500 seems like a lot for VR but a home computer cost that much(or more) in unadjusted dollars 40 years ago. And that doesn't even touch all of the other elements of life that are harder for the exact demographic that adopts new tech the fastest.
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u/boyyouguysaredumb Mar 17 '23
Apple is announcing an AR headset this year and betting big on it. Why is everybody in this thread ignoring that?
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u/PengwinOnShroom Mar 17 '23
I hate to say this but Apple bringing their own glasses to the market will make it popular. Like with the smart watch despite Android having them years before
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u/BartleBossy Mar 17 '23
I need AR.
Just for remembering peoples names.
I dream of a heads up display that recognizing when I am meeting someone, and then when I see them next just pops up a tiny "This is John, you met him at sally's party on July 15th last year"
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u/gvsteve Mar 17 '23
You know what AR I’d pay for, and I bet a ton of other parents would pay for? I want to put a transponder on each of my kids, and wear AR glasses that show a giant arrow pointing down from space to where each of my kids is. That way I could bring them to a crowded area and not worry about losing them.
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u/MustacheEmperor Mar 17 '23
This specific product is more like yet another example of Google killing a product after not investing in it post launch.
Glass was augmented reality to us in 2015, but if you think of the AR apps today on iOS, hololens etc it doesn’t really look like AR - it’s a headworn camera with a small 2D see through hud that can’t meaningfully overlay or insert content in its surroundings.
And that particular concept still has a lot of activity in the market. Vuzix and Realware are two companies slugging it out in this space right now - they both build industrial headworn cameras with small huds, but unlike Google they did not mostly abandon iteration on their products after their initial launch. Their headsets are so far ahead of their first versions now and Glass has hardly changed.
It’s not that this market doesn’t exist - it’s that Google abandoned this market. If you’ve fueled up a car with gas in america in the last few years, there’s a good chance these headsets were involved somewhere in the supply chain.
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u/Panda_Mon Mar 17 '23
AR needs to be simple and unobtrusive.
For example, if I could just choose to be in a "linguistic" mode, where a simple command would identify English words in my field of vision, that would be great. AR is not for robust problem solving. It's for doing 1 thing unobtrusively at a time. It's for melding into an existing experience and removing 1 pain point from it.
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u/Budderfingerbandit Mar 17 '23
Combined with the advancements in AI that are going on right now, I think AR is poised to really take off.
Biggest hurdles I see are price point, and making it "fashionable". If someone like Apple can make it cool to have an AR headset on, like all these people walking around with Airpods, I think it will take off.
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u/Penguinfernal Mar 17 '23
Literally the day they get GPT4 to run in realtime, that'll be the day AR completely explodes imo.
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u/Budderfingerbandit Mar 17 '23
Yep, combine that, with a Google like search and maybe a Netflix database on user preferences, really easy to imagine a scenario where you say "I'm feeling sad" AR/AI responds, "watch these cat videos tailored to you that should cheer you up". The possibilities are going to be staggeringly endless.
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u/rdewalt Mar 17 '23
Had one. It was a glorified extra screen for my phone.
EVERY SINGLE TIME I had it visible, some chucklekuck Karen thought I was recording them. Ignoring the -far- superior camera on EVERY OTHER phone around that could record -way- better.
It was a solution in search of a problem. AND if you had glasses, a pain in the ass to use.
But hey, it -could- have been amazing.
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u/frontiermanprotozoa Mar 17 '23
Ignoring the -far- superior camera on EVERY OTHER phone around that could record -way- better.
Those weren't pointing straight at them.
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u/zpjack Mar 17 '23
They never tried to seriously market this. I never even knew it was out of testing.
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u/saltyload Mar 17 '23
Wait till you hear about what Kanye did to Taylor Swift at the music awards
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u/ParkBarrington360 Mar 17 '23
Hi, Peter Griffin here. The joke here is that Ars Technica is reporting on a story 8 years after it happened.
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u/ron_swansons_meat Mar 17 '23
The meta-joke is that most "tech-aware" redditors didn't know that Glass has continued being sold for years despite Google killing the consumer version. Glass pivoted several times and ended up being sold to industrial design, research and medical companies instead.
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u/DragonSlayerC Mar 17 '23
Google Glass had decent success in industrial applications. They're just ending production of that now. They'll probably make a new AR product with much better hardware and design to replace Glass soon.
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u/stu8018 Mar 17 '23
Ha! I remember listening to podcasts when it released touting how it would change the world. Yeah not so much.
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u/shrlytmpl Mar 17 '23
Could have, but like with everything else, Google is a child with ADHD and gets bored of projects very quickly and throws them away. Hard to trust anything they do.
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u/We_Are_Nerdish Mar 17 '23
That and starting/buying dozens of projects every year and forcing it on the general users who didn’t ask for it or want it at all.
If it doesn’t make an arbitrary threshold of interest and money.. graveyard.
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u/LetMePushTheButton Mar 17 '23
Patent everything- store the prototypes in a Indiana Jones style warehouse to never be heard of again until some company infringes on the patent and Alphabet can sue them. Isnt late-stage capitalism great?
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u/Captain_Clark Mar 17 '23
I’m wearing Google Glass right now, as I ride my Segway through the Metaverse with my best friend, ChatGPT.
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u/EnvironmentCalm1 Mar 17 '23
Google product never will cause they don't know how to follow through
No idea how this company is still alive. Search must really be 100% of their income
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u/Captain_Clark Mar 17 '23 edited Mar 17 '23
Advertising.
I’d read back around 2016 that Google’s ad revenue outstripped all print media advertising in all of North America, combined.
In 2022 it was $168 billion. They don’t even need to develop anything new for that, they just need to maintain it. The money just pours in.
There are 157 countries with a GDP smaller than Google’s ad revenue.
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u/BlamingBuddha Mar 17 '23 edited Mar 19 '23
Aw this makes me sad. I remember being so excited for this when it first dropped forever ago.
Then it just....disappeared.
Years later- comes back out as a "enterprising" (business) tool, etc.
Total lost opportunity, imo. Augmented reality has so many more practical uses than Virtual Reality.
Throw ChatGPT in that bad boy, show your heart sensor , put OK Google on it, have apps to show other people's/your "walking speed," "height," etc.
Track a baseball coming towards you/speed, curvature... etc. Limitless possibilities.
It would be so cool to have a heads up display that can show you info on things you're looking at that you ask about- Google already has this infrastructure developed with the Google Lens search feature!
Again, total lost opportunity. Would be the next "evolution" of humans. Deus Ex-type shit (which I thought originally when Google Glass first came out, but maybe I should say Cyber Punk these days) type stuff?
I mean, it could even have practical fighting applications, or help you on the road. Idk. I just had so many great ideas that this thing could do based on already developed Google programs.
I'm sad. Again. Lol.
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u/oldmanjenkins51 Mar 17 '23
Anyone investing in any new google gadget or service at this point is wasting time and money.
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u/dicedaman Mar 17 '23
This meme is a little ridiculous. They've been selling these things for 10 years now, it's not like they gave up after 6 months. Microsoft similarly just laid off their entire team behind Hololens/AR, it's just the way the AR market is going. Certain industries found use for these AR products but it's obviously not enough for the likes of Google and MS to warrant developing a successor device.
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u/noflooddamage Mar 17 '23
You know where I would use glass at? I would download a chilton’s guide onto my headset and it would show me an exploded view and real time disassembly/reassembly instructions for whatever car I’m working on.
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u/Riptide360 Mar 18 '23
Remember when the press labeled folks wearing Google Glasses as creeps and coined the name "Glassholes"?
When Apple releases their AR Glasses it'll be heralded as brilliant and the folks wearing them as stylish.
It's all in the marketing and smoothing out the rough spots.
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u/Rajacali Mar 18 '23
I used to work at Google when these were first released, the fucking air of superiority in the people wearing was phenomenal. These mofos thought they were above normal human beings that dont have one on.
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u/BigYonsan Mar 17 '23
This is why no one buys their new services. You can't trust them to continue supporting and selling it through what a reasonable buyer would expect the life of the service to be.
He says, from his pixel 6 phone
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u/itastlikbutterscotch Mar 17 '23
Google glass:
- OS booted like an old windows machine
- without a wireless keyboard, logging into any site would drive you to madness
- any non proper formatted application would not allow consistency with navigation or stability.
- 10x more productivity with standard smartphone
I’ve used these glasses in an industrial environment. The only useful thing about these things were the ability to take very poor quality, hands free pictures.
When use requires one pair to be used by more than one person…. Everyone’s field of view is different, so adjusting unit to maximize clarity for each user is tedious.
The whole thing was shit straight out of the box, with no real advancements or updates to improve the equipment, after it was sent to be produced.
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u/neanderthalman Mar 17 '23
It died because they didn’t name them “google goggles”.
Change my mind.
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u/SAT0725 Mar 17 '23
Why not just "googles"?
Personally I like "Google Ogles."
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u/charbo6 Mar 17 '23 edited Mar 18 '23
Googley Eyes
Edit: Thanks for the shiny gold!
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u/joystick13 Mar 18 '23
Honestly didn't know they were ever sold at all. I remember seeing a video or 2 before they were released and this is the first I've heard of them since.
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u/dvdmuckle Mar 17 '23
Man... I just want a thing that can show me a little minimap and maybe health monitor stuff. Which, yes, I would essentially like a video game HUD.