This week we talk about the HoloLens, the Apple Vision Pro, and the Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses.

We also discuss augmented reality, virtual reality, and Orion.

Recommended Book: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

Transcript

Originally released as a development device in 2016—so aimed at folks who make software, primarily, not at the general public—the HoloLens, made by Microsoft, was a fairly innovative device that looked like virtual reality headgear, but which allowed folks to interact with graphical elements overlayed on a transparent surface so that they seemed to be positioned within the real world; so-called augmented reality.

This functionality relied upon some of the tech Microsoft had developed for its earlier Kinect accessory, which allowed Xbox owners to play games using their bodies instead of more conventional controllers—it used a camera to figure out where people, and their arms, legs, and so on, were in space, and that helped this new team figure out how to map a person’s living room, for instance, in order to place graphical elements throughout that room when viewed through the HoloLens’ lenses; so stuff could appear behind your couch, pop out of a wall, or seem to be perched atop a table.

The HoloLens was not the only option in this space, as several other companies, including other tech titans, but also startups like Magic Leap, were making similar devices, but it was arguably the most successful in the sense that it both developed this augmented reality technology fairly rapidly, and in the sense that it was able to negotiate collaborations and business relationships with entities like NASA, the US Military, and Autodesk—in some cases ensuring their hardware and software would play well with the hardware and software most commonly used in offices around the world, and in some cases showcasing the device’s capabilities for potential scientific, defense, and next-step exploratory purposes.

Like many new devices, Microsoft positioned the HoloLens, early on, as a potential hub for entertainment, launching it with a bunch of games and movie-like experiences that took advantage of its ability to adapt those entertainments to the spaces in which the end-user would consumer them: having enemies pop out of a wall in the user’s kitchen, for instance, or projecting a movie screen on their ceiling.

It was also pitched as a training tool, though, giving would-be astronauts the ability to practice working with tools in space, or helping doctors-in-training go through digital surgeries with realistic-looking patients before they ever got their hands dirty in real life. And the company leaned into that market with the second edition of the headset, which was announced and made available for pre-order in early-2019, optimizing it even further for enterprise purposes with a slew of upgrades, and pricing it accordingly, at $3,500.

Among those upgrades was better overall hardware with higher-end specs, but it also did away with controllers and instead reoriented entirely toward eye- and hand-tracking options, combined with voice controls, allowing the user to speak their commands and use hand-gestures to interact with the digital things projected over the real-world spaces they inhabited.

The original model also had basic hand-tracking functionality, but the new model expanded those capabilities substantially, while also expanding upon the first edition’s fairly meager 30 degrees of augmented view: a relatively small portion of the user’s line of sight could be filled with graphics, in other words, and the new version upgraded that to 52 degrees; so still not wall to wall interact-with-able graphics, but a significant upgrade.

Unfortunately for fans of the HoloLens, Microsoft recently confirmed that they have ended production of their second generation device, and that while they will continue to issue security updates and support for their existing customers, like the US Department of Defense, they haven’t announced a replacement for it—which could mean they’re getting out of this space entirely.

Which is interesting in the sense that this is a space, the world of augmented reality, which some newer entrants are rebranding as mixed reality, that seems to be blowing up right now: two of Microsoft’s main competitors are throwing a lot of money and credibility into their own offerings, and pitching this type of hardware as the next-step in personal devices.

Some analysts have posited, though, that Microsoft maybe just got into this now-burgeoning arena just a little too early, investing in some truly compelling innovations, but doing so at a moment in which the cost was too high to justify the eventual output, and now they might be ceding the space to their competition rather than doubling-down on something they don’t think will pay off for them, or they may be approaching it from another angle entirely, going back to the drawing board and focusing on new innovations that will bypass the HoloLens brand entirely.

What I’d like to talk about today are the offerings we’re seeing from those other brands, and what seems to be happening, and may happen in the near-future, in this augmented-reality, mixed-reality segment of the tech world.

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I did an episode on spacial computing and the Apple Vision Pro back when the device was made available for purchase in the US, in February of 2024.

This device was considered to be a pretty big deal because of who was making it, Apple, which has a fairly solid record of making new devices with unfamiliar interfaces popular and even common, and because the approach they were taking: basically throwing a lot of money at this thing, and charging accordingly, around $3,500, which is the same price the second HoloLens was being sold for, as I noted in the intro.

But because of that high price point, they were able to load this thing up with all sorts of bells and whistles, some of which were fundamental to its functionality—like super-high-density lenses that helped prevent nausea and other sorts of discord in their users—and some that were maybe just interesting experiments, like projecting a live video of the user’s eyes, which are concealed by the headset, on the front of the headset, which to me is a somewhat spooky and silly effect, but which is nonetheless technically impressive, and is something that seems aimed at making these things less anti-social, because you can wear the Vision Pro and still see people, and this projection of their eyes allows them to see you and your facial expression at the same time.

I’ve actually had the chance to use this device since that episode went live, and while there are a lot of weird little limitations and hindrances to this device going mainstream at the moment, the technology works surprisingly well right out of the box, with the eye- and hand-tracking elements working shockingly, almost magically well for relatively early-edition tech; Apple is pretty good at making novel user-interfaces intuitive, and that component of this device, at least, seemed like a slam dunk to me—for casual use-cases, at least.

That said, the company has been criticized for that high price point and their seeming fixation on things like putting the users’ eyes on the outside of the headset, rather than, for instance, investing in more content and figuring out how to make the thing more comfortable for long periods of time—a common complaint with basically every virtual reality or mixed-reality headset ever developed, because of the sheer amount of hardware that has to be crammed into a finite, head-and-face-mounted space, that space also needing to be properly balanced, and it can’t get too hot, for perhaps obvious reasons.

Those criticisms related to price are the result not of comparison to HoloLens, as again, the pricing is basically the same between these two devices, but instead the result of what Meta has done with their mixed-reality offerings, which are based on products and technology they acquired when they bought Oculus Labs; they’ve leaned into providing virtual reality devices for the low- and mid-market consumer, and their newest model, the Meta Quest 3S is a stand-alone device that costs between about $300 and $400, and it has mixed-reality functionality, similar to the Vision Pro and HoloLens.

While Meta’s Quest line doesn’t have anywhere near the specs and polish of the Vision Pro, then, and while it didn’t arrive as early as the HoloLens, only hitting shelves quite recently, it does provide enough functionality and serves enough peoples’ purposes, and at a far lower price point, that it, along with its other Quest-line kin, has managed to gobble up a lot of market share, especially in the consumer mixed-reality arena, because far more people are willing to take a bet on a newer technology with questionable utility that costs $300 compared to one that costs them more than ten-times as much.

Interestingly, though, while Meta’s Reality Labs sub-brand seems to be doing decently well with their Quest line of headsets, a product that they made in collaboration with glasses and sunglasses company EssilorLuxottica, which owns a huge chunk of the total glasses and sunglasses global market, via their many sub-brands, may end up being the more popular and widely used device, at least for the foreseeable future.

The Ray-Ban Meta Smartglasses looks almost exactly like traditional, Ray-Ban sunglasses, but with slightly bulkier arms and with camera lenses built into the frames near where the arms connect to them.

If you’re not looking carefully, then, these things can be easily mistaken for just normal old Ray-Bans, but they are smartglasses in that they contain those two cameras on the front, alongside open-air s