im a pretty big fan of AR/VR for productivity, reading books, watching films. the resolution and lenses need to be pretty good for the first 2. but it’s promising. laying in bed and looking up at a book or movie is really something else. standing up once in a while is great also. i think there is a future here.
Or – hear me out – what if he used his already owned laptop with the VR goggles, instead of advertising the proprietary-connector Khadas mind?
I own a pair of these. Depending on the game, they add a lot of value to my Steamdeck. But for everyday computing, they are actually very impractical.
I really would like to try those glasses. They sound cool. But at $500 they are too expensive for an impulse and there is no place around where one can try those offline
you can do a similar thing with the quest 3 for less money I think
I can fit my PC in a backpack. It’s got a mini-ITX motherboard, SFX power supply, 240mm AIO water cooler, and an RX 9070 XT in a Lian Li A4-H2O case.
I went to the trouble of building it small mainly because of the possibility that I decide to flee the US. Thanks, Trump. 😡
I think you have my pc build, except a 9070 XT for a 6800 XT. But the case is huge, I don’t see how it fits in anyone’s backpack.
I was looking at mini-ITX cases for exactly this purpose a while back — wanted sturdy and small for portable use, something that could go in a backpack or suitcase or the like.
I remember seeing the Velka and one other whose name escapes me right now.
https://velkase.com/products/velka-3
184 x 99 x 219 mm
7.2 x 3.9 x 8.6 in
Optimus makes insane builds, check out his mini itx build with a fucking rtx 5090. It’s also smaller than OPs pc build
Maybe you’re thinking of some other case? Mine is a little under 13"x10"x6", about the size of a (large) shoebox:
Granted, not a whole lot else would fit in a backpack along with it, but I’m quite confident it would fit. A stack of three or four textbooks would be bigger.
My whole desk setup now easily fits into a backpack and I can take it anywhere
My laptop easily fits in a backpack. Hell I can fit TWO laptops in my backpack.
Laptop is hardly a whole desk setup though. AR is potentially going to be much better than using clunky laptops.
it is literally a whole desk set up in fact I have one on top of my whole desk
I carry two laptops in my work bag regularly, a 15" and 14"
And a whole bunch of other shit.
He has reached douchevana
He needs an actual typewriter instead of a keyboard to go where do douche has gone before.
Much to my surprise, it didn’t take long at all to get used to working while wearing AR glasses.
Could you see yourself spending a full day working with smart glasses instead of using a monitor?
For me at least, that “HMD all day” is the limiting factor. I don’t want to wear an HMD all day. My experience has been that they’re sensitive to being slightly misaligned and going blurry. Traditional displays are nice and crisp.
I think that to be something that I’d want to use, the thing would need to do something like mechanically move the display to keep it at a very precise, calibrated position relative to my eyeball, so that I don’t need to futz with not having my movements slightly misalign the HMD.
In 2025, we don’t have an HMD that can do that.
EDIT: Also, this doesn’t matter much if you’re watching a movie or something. Not visible then. But it’s a visible issue if you’re working with text or the like, if you want to full-on replace your display.
The quest 3 stays sharp when alignment changes, its surprisingly nice to work in outside of the brick on my face. I would hope the xreal glasses can match quest 3 clarity
I imagine it would be really annoying to set up after taking it out of a backpack. I think it would be much more practical to just use a laptop with the xreal glasses
It’s longer than a laptop, but honestly, I have my laptop set up to hibernate if I have it closed for more than ten minutes or so, and it takes several seconds to get that dehibernated, even off NVMe, and some of that is happening in parallel. My last laptop was a lot slower, took something north of ten seconds to get dehibernated. He’s gotta drop a keyboard on his desk, unzip his HMD case, and plug each in (if he’s not using a wireless keyboard or the wireless accessory for that HMD, neither of which I would personally use). Some of that at least can be parallelized. And that HMD has integrated headphones, IIRC — I carry headphones with me for my laptop, so he doesn’t need to do that bit.
EDIT: Oh, and his trackball/trackpad/mouse or whatever. I carry a trackball with my laptop, but don’t usually use it.
It’s a novel idea. But despite the article’s claims this is not a practical alternative to a laptop in planes, coffee shops, etc. Nor is a minipc inherently more serviceable than a laptop as others have pointed out.
For traveling, if it’s a longer trip, it almost makes sense to me as you’d have it set up for a while. Though I’d do a mini ITX system. The ones with external power supplies and no drive bays or expansion slots are pretty small. But even then, I don’t feel like this would be significantly better than a laptop. And that’s a lot to buy for a niche use case.
Edit: spelling and grammar
At this point, something like a steam deck would go better with the glasses, at least it has its own battery
That’s actually pretty cool idea. Wasn’t there some effort by Valve to support VR anyway on the Deck?
Idk about VR, the hardware is kinda weak, but just projecting the screen should be easy
I’ve looked at this before and I agree that mini-ITX is probably the most realistic. You want to look hard for a small mini-ITX case. Though even that isn’t that small. I think that you could maybe save some space — the mini-ITX power supply pushes the case size out in one dimension, so there’s probably some unused internal volume – if you could stick components, like the HMD, into part of what would normally be airspace interior to the case.
You wouldn’t use a typical SFX power supply for something where size matters; you’d likely use a Flex PSU, which are often long and thin. If you got a lower-power CPU with integrated graphics, you could manage a case that’s not much bigger than the motherboard or much thicker than the IO shroud.
Lemmy doesn’t have a lot of SFF or Ultra SFF content yet, but getting the most out of limited space is definitely a thing people are into, and they can get quite creative.
The final product is often portable but still rarely as tiny as a mini PC or NUC-like. Depending on your needs, someone might be better off making a Steam Brick.
Imagine being in a cafeteria with his setup, looking straight up to nowhere, people will think of you as crazy!
I originally had that when people started using Bluetooth earpieces with cell phones, and you’d see them talking to the air.
All this trouble just to be able to use a nosy keyboard and covertly watch porn in public.
I’ve thought about doing this too, with a very similar setup.
Larger FOV for your screen than anything else portable. Potentially more power efficient too, as you don’t blast light everywhere to get a tiny bit into an eye. More comfortable to use in some other orientations — I use a split ergo keyboard with my laptop when lying back in a recliner or on a couch, lets my hands not be jammed in front of me and obstructing my views of the screen, but an HMD is even more flexible.
Laptops have limited hardware customizability, so it’s really the only route other than carrying a portable display if you want more control over the PC.
The privacy is nice – and I don’t think that that reasonably can be reduced to looking at porn, which I assume most people aren’t going to want to do in public anyway, for obvious reasons. I can throw a password list up onscreen, don’t need to deal with those inane “hide your password as you type it” things that try to mitigate privacy issues with people using computers in public places.
Problem is that at least today, wearing HMDs is not as comfortable and sharp as looking at a display. Easy to get something slightly blurry if it’s not perfectly aligned. My HMD tends to fog up, though the Xreal thing in the article has more airflow and it’s probably less of an issue. Also, VR goggles and headphones tend to compete for the same spot around the ears — circumaural headphones need to seal there, so you may need to accept whatever sound, if any, the HMD can provide. You have less awareness of your surroundings, which matters in some situations.
A lot of work has gone into making laptops particularly low power, and if you build your own system, some of that is on you, to pay attention to component power consumption.
Also, I couldn’t find a way to get some kind of external battery to be treated by Linux as a
power_supplyclass device, which lets Linux do things like automatically hibernate when power gets critical and use nice in-UI reporting of low battery. Also, on the power source side, USB PD power banks, which it would seem would be a good solution, technically have the ability to report a battery level but AFAICT do not.I would definitely do this instead of a laptop if they managed to get HMDs to the point where I’d be willing to dump my displays and go all HMDs. We aren’t there yet, though.
Or, and hear me out, I could just carry a single device with a charging cable that weighs less than 5lbs that does all of that without all of the cables and BS associated with trying to be a tech edgelord for clicks. Hell, if that device is a Framework is will probably be way more repairable than that mini PC and probably super fragile AR glasses as well.
I’m pretty sure that the Xreal glasses have a carrying case, based on when I was looking at them. I carry a pair of headphones with my laptop, and they come with one. Does require some volume in a backpack or bag, though.
This article reads like satire… it’s sentence after sentence of “and I did it using one of the [best office chairs]” which is a link to some review by themselves. Every bit mentioned had an affiliate link and there wasn’t an actual review of what the experience (software, setup, visual fidelity) is like??
Welcome to Future plc publications. Almost entirely clickbait advertorial garbage anymore. It’s sad, really.
Makes me wonder what the onboarding/indoctrination process is.
Is anyone there actually happy, or proud of their writing? Are they actually all just marketing people cosplaying as writers, so they are proud?
The only thing that really attracts me about these glasses is that you could hold your head up instead of looking down all the time at a laptop or a portable monitor. But most of the time I need more than one display, while the glasses only offer a single, expensive, fairly low resolution screen. I also wonder what it does to your eyes to use this for long periods of time.
I tried a previous incarnation of these and was not impressed. The screen was too dark in bright rooms and the resolution and image sharpness was lacking. Also the response time was rather slow, which made them basically unusable for playing games or watching (which was primarily what I bought them for). Additionally, the virtual screen was not fixed in space but moved around when you moved your head, which gave me vertigo after prolonged use. I ended up returning them after a week.
It appears as if these are at least the second, if not third generation (mine were simply called Air), and the spatial processing chip might help alleviate some of these issues, but I’m disappointed to see that the vertical resolution has not been increased. But at 32:9, it seems that these have twice the horizontal resolution, which would equal two 16:9 screens next to each other.
I wonder if these might be worth giving another try, but I’m loathe to risk it as my Amazon account has been flagged for returning too many purchases before.
Additionally, the virtual screen was not fixed in space but moved around when you moved your head, which gave me vertigo after prolonged use.
The current version of these glasses have this optional device that they sell that provides this called a Beam – I assume that it’s got enough 3D hardware and such to do the projection.
The problem, as I mention in another comment, is that if you do any kind of 3D projection of a virtual monitor, you have to “spend” resolution from the physical monitor on it to get the virtual monitor enough lower-resolution that it still looks good, and I don’t want to give up the resolution.
Like, there are physically 1080p, 1920x1080 OLED displays in front of each eye on these.
My laptop monitor, right now, is 2560x1600. So even from the start, I spend resolution just to get down to the resolution of the displays in the physical HMD.
Then I’m projecting a virtual monitor on that. You could argue what’s a reasonable virtual-to-physical ratio is, but it’s gotta be less than 1.
The display might be big in terms of visual arc, use a lot of my optical receptors. But end of the day, I want to shovel a lot of data into those optical receptors.
Right, I have a 1600p laptop screen as well and the resolution downgrade was noticeable. What you say about the projection makes sense, unfortunately I haven’t seen any specs for the micro OLED displays they use, they only claim that the virtual screen has 1080p, which might be achievable if the displays DO in fact have a higher vertical resolution. It DOES appear that they’ve increased the size of the displays from 0.55" to 0.68" but there’s no information on the native resolution that I can find.
If I saw these glasses in a store somewhere I’d probably try them out but they’d have to be VASTLY better than the ones I tried to convince me to buy them.
I think that some of the issue here is that the theoretical use case that these are designed around is not what the author is trying to use them for.
The author is looking for a monitor replacement.
These are augmented reality goggles. Like, the hardware is optimized to look at the world around yourself and then display useful information annotated over it, for which resolution is not critical. If we had data sources and software for that, that might be useful too, but right now, we don’t really have that software library and data sources.
I think that Snow Crash did a good job of highlighting some of the neat potential of and yet also issues with AR:
Putting a rubber-band on brightness:
A black car, alive with nasty lights, whines past her the other way, closing in on the hapless Hiro Protagonist. Her RadiKS Knight Vision goggles darken strategically to cut the noxious glaring of same, her pupils feel safe to remain wide open, scanning the road for signs of movement.
Highlighting hazards in low-light conditions using sensor fusion can be useful (current high-end US military NVGs do some of this):
He turns off his view of the Metaverse entirely, making the goggles totally transparent. Then he switches his system into full gargoyle mode: enhanced visible light with false-color infrared, plus millimeter-wave radar. His view of the world goes into grainy black and white, much brighter than it was before. Here and there, certain objects glow fuzzily in pink or red. This comes from the infrared, and it means that these things are warm or hot; people are pink, engines and fires are red.
The millimeter-wave radar stuff is superimposed much more cleanly and crisply in neon green. Anything made of metal shows up. Hiro is now navigating down a grainy, charcoal-gray avenue of water lined with grainy, light gray pontoon bridges tied up to crisp neon-green barges and ships that glow reddishly from place to place, wherever they are generating heat, It’s not pretty. In fact, it’s so ugly that it probably explains why gargoyles are, in general, so socially retarded. But it’s a lot more useful than the charcoal-on-ebony view he had before.
And it saves his life. As he’s buzzing down a curving, narrow canal, a narrow green parabola appears hanging across the water in front of him, suddenly rising out of the water and snapping into a perfectly straight line at neck level. It’s a piece of piano wire. Hiro ducks under it, waves to the young Chinese men who set the booby trap, and keeps going.
The radar picks out three fuzzy pink individuals holding Chinese AK47s standing by the side of the channel. Hiro cuts into a side channel and avoids them.
Overlaying blueprint data can permit “seeing through walls”:
YOU ARE HERE," he says. His view of the Enterprise’s hull – a gently curved expanse of gray steel – turns into a three-dimensional wire frame drawing, showing him all the guts of the ship on the other side. Down here along the waterline, the Enterprise has a belt of thick antitorpedo armor. It’s not too promising. Farther up, the armor is thinner, and there’s good stuff on the other side of it, actual rooms instead of fuel tanks or ammunition holds.
Hiro chooses a room marked WARDROOM and opens fire. The hull of the Enterprise is surprisingly tough. Reason doesn’t just blow a crater straight through; it takes a few moments for the burst to penetrate. And then all it does is make a hole about six inches across.
A lot of the obvious stuff that one might display in AR goggles doesn’t compete well with just showing reality in terms of usefuless:
He stumbles forward helplessly as something terrible happens to his back. It feels like being massaged with a hundred ballpeen hammers. At the same time, a yellow sputtering light overrides the loglo. A screaming red display flashes up on the goggles informing him that the millimeter-wave radar has noticed a stream of bullets headed in his direction and would you like to know where they came from, sir?
Hiro has just been shot in the back with a burst of machine-gun fire. All of the bullets have slapped into his vest and dropped to the floor, but in doing so they have cracked about half of the ribs on that side of his body and bruised a few internal organs. He turns around, which hurts. The Enforcer has given up on bullets and whipped out another weapon. It says so right on Hiro’s goggles: PACIFIC ENFORCEMENT HARDWARE, INC. MODEL SX-29 RESTRAINT PROJECTION DEVICE (LOOGIE GUN).
He turns off all of the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it’s happening to him. Very post-modern. Time to get immersed in Reality, like all the people around him.
The author is looking for a monitor replacement.
Yes, and he’s not wrong, as that appears to be the primary use case for these glasses. For full AR, you still need the Beam Pro, which costs half of the price of the glasses alone.
I do love Snow Crash (it was one of my favorite novels growing up), but I think Google Glass was probably much closer to that vision than these are. Personally, all I want is a big fucking screen fixed in space before me that doesn’t make me dizzy when I look at it for more than 5 minutes, or wear out my neck muscles too much because the headset is too heavy.
Really. That’s a bummer. if there is an advantage to the glasses it should be that you can have as many displays going as you’d want.
