Agreed, that’s the other big reason I didn’t mention: most people don’t want a screen on their face. They don’t want their face covered, they want to see out the window or just what’s around them.

I have never seen someone wear a VR headset in public that wasn’t part of a mall VR novelty attraction.

107 grams is still pretty heavy. Regular glasses are 35 grams or less. My sunglasses are below 20 grams.

107 grams is still too heavy. That’s four times as heavy as my glasses.

the steam frame is apparently 440 grams.

Vive Flow is 189 grams btw

Beyond 2 has almost none of the sensor suite, no eye tracking, no meaningful compute, no pass-through video, no inside-out tracking, no gesture control, and requires two to three entirely separate units set up around the room to do any outside in tracking, yet it still weighs 4-5x what glasses weigh.

Just the displays and lenses will outweigh glasses considerably and there's nothing to strip back when you're down to display and lenses. Throw in a chassis and head strap and you're pretty far from glasses in weight and ergonomics.

Yes. This is how various headsets are made. The HTC focus Vision is one example, and there’s an addon (not sure if third party) for the quest 3 that puts a battery back there.

So yes, this is done and it can help.

This has been done as a mod for the Valve Index, it works pretty well. Really is mainly a balance issue.

The issue with that is you would constantly need to keep your head on the same plane, as soon as you move it around, it becomes unbalanced and now it's even harder to move around because it's heavier. Walking with something balanced on your head is a completely different use case than looking around, up and down etc.

Considering the short battery life, I’d prefer they ditch the battery and just tether the headset completely. Maybe have a small internal battery just to facilitate a 5 minute change of input.

> Yes, make the battery 2x bigger and include the compute in that.

You can't move the compute away in a headset. I have worked for an XR OEM, and when you are designing a headset, you want the compute to be as close as possible from the cameras and displays, to achieve the lowest possible latency and avoid motion sickness for the users.

Even moving the compute to the back of the headset was not considered viable by our HW team. And we haven't spoken about the bandwidth required for all those cameras and UHD displays.

A better way to reduce the weight of the AVP would have been to remove the (useless IMO) front holographic screen, and to replace most of the glass and metal by plastic. And maybe move the battery pack to the back, to get a more balanced headset.

is that 4-7 hours with the Quest 3 mostly for working or entertainment?

This is gambling on a 50 year timeline.

You mean 40-50 years? It would make more money if you invested in a tech stock. Apple itself has gone up 3,000x since its ipo. $1K would be $3M today.