They could still be useful as a dumb display without voice or gesture. Imagine being in an airplane and wanting to use your laptop. You'll be hunched over with terrible posture. With a pair of AR glasses that support displayport alt mode, you could plug in your glasses and sit with proper posture, your screen displayed in front of you as a virtual 40" display, while you touch type on your laptop sitting on the food tray. Perhaps you're in bed and want to watch a movie. You could pop on the glasses, plug in your phone, and enjoy while while fully reclined, achieving the most comfortable least effort movie viewing experience. Maybe you're traveling and staying in hotels where you want to get some work done. Programming on tiny laptop screens sucks if you're opening more than 2 files at a time, but what if you could just pop on your glasses, plug them into your laptop, and program on a virtual 40" display?

My understanding is the current tech is not sharp enough for serious productivity, is too heavy for extended wear, and has a short life due to overdriving tiny OLEDs, so I'm not ready to purchase one yet. But some day those problems will be solved and I'm absolutely going to jump on that.

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sunrunner 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

The thought of an airport full of people all seated with perfect posture, all looking ahead but not really seeing, tapping away at their oh-so important work, feels both worse than the current status quo but also somehow no different. Maybe it’s the posture thing.

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stavros 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You can already do this, and I did it last week on my flight with my Xreal Air.

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craftkiller 4 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah, that's the brand I've been watching most closely. How would you rate the sharpness of the display for text editing / coding? Like if you opened some large code files on your glasses and desktop monitor, and adjusted both their font sizes to have the same legibility + feel, do you fit more text on the glasses or your desktop monitor and by how much?

This is the one aspect that is hard to find info about online. Everyone talks about the weight and what size the virtual display is, but if I am going to seriously use it for productivity then I need at least 3 files open side by side, fully legible, with 100-character-wide lines at the bare minimum to be considered.

Either way, I'm not going to purchase until they solve the longevity problem, but I am curious if the sharpness is at the point where I can stop worrying about it.

	▲	stavros 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's literally a 70" HD display around 4m from your face. All HD displays fit exactly the same amount of text in their 1920x1080 pixels, the only thing that changes is the field of vision the display takes up. I use them to do work, the issue I have is, having owned three pairs (for reasons), the lenses can be hit-or-miss. The pair I own now is more on the miss side, and some part of the lens is blurry. You don't notice it when watching films, but it's noticeable for text. The other two pairs were OK, this one I got less lucky with. This one also seems to tire out my eyes if I wear the glasses for more than an hour, and I don't know why (it might be the blurriness). It's not the focal distance, they did a good job there, it's about 5m as far as I can tell. Anyway, overall I like the glasses. They're worth the 200 € I paid used, but I probably wouldn't pay 400 € for them, I only use them on flights. They'd be great if I watched lots of movies or played games on a Steam Deck, though.