Through the Looking Glass

Augmented Reality (AR) is one of these technologies we keep returning to. The sheer science-fictionness of wearing a computer on our faces, augmenting what we see around us with information gleaned from a combination of sight and sound and voice and motion commands, is on par with the data tablet and the universal translator in classic Star Trek. Hell, in the decades hence, we’ve invented some of the gadgetry!

Meanwhile, Virtual Reality (VR) has been semi-successful in commercialization, with the Meta Quest going through multiple generations and the Apple Vision Pro launching earlier this year—albeit with so much advanced hardware that it priced itself out of mainstream adoption. The two categories of devices, though, are often lumped together because of their similarity in technological sophistication, as well as the components required to build these headsets: arrays of cameras, microphones, speakers, high-resolution displays, plus the processors and batteries to run it all.

The main difference between AR and VR stems from their use cases.

VR fully encloses and immerses its users in a virtual, 3D environment. So far, that has meant games that can take advantage of the added dimension of depth or lots of windows floating in 3D space for added productivity. The disconnect between what your eyes see and what your inner ear and body don’t correspondingly sense can easily create nausea, which means VR experiences are either sit-down sessions or require enough open space around the user to allow for 1:1 movement inside virtual environments. These parameters result in heavier and more powerful headsets, to be used in confined spaces1.

AR is much more useful when you’re out and about. Since the primary benefit is layering information and connectivity on top of the existing world, most of the hardware here has converged around reading glasses or sunglasses, with LCD projectors or pass-through screens layered on the lenses. Getting all this computing hardware to fit in such a restrictive form factor, however, necessitates tradeoffs: some go the route of speccing out their glasses similar to phones and look clumsy; others model themselves after contemporary eyewear styles but have to offload functionality or rely on a nearby phone for heavy computing tasks. Meta’s recently announced Orion AR glasses are a promising development, in that they’ve crammed a lot of both hardware and software—including the difficult trick of scanning the surrounding environment and then tracking discrete objects in it—inside reasonably sized and weighted glasses. More importantly, they have the budget and know-how, via their Meta Quest headset line as well as their partnership with Luxottica, to further miniaturize and fashionably iterate on the hardware.

Moreover, the gadgetry advances of AR hardware and the overall social acceptance of always-available cameras attached to smart glasses seem far removed from the Google Glass débâcle a decade ago. Granted, we’re very far from achieving the level of ubiquity with phones that would truly test this acceptance, but Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses and Snap’s Spectacles have been sold for a while now, with muted backlash on their photographic capabilities. Some of this newfound acceptance is certainly attributed to phone saturation for 15+ years, but it also helps that the hardware is more discrete, and the novelty of wearing a computing device has given way to judgment based on actual utility and convenience.

The bull case for both VR and AR is that they replace our computers and smartphones, respectively. For the former, headsets have made some headway in replicating desktop use cases: the Meta Quest app store has built out a light but real game library, while the Vision Pro supported projecting MacOS at launch and that functionality remains the best productivity tool on the platform. PCs and Mac hardware have become so powerful that entry-level machines are sufficient for most users, so it seems likely that VR headsets will steadily march toward that computing baseline.

AR is a bit further behind in its evolutionary curve, Its utility comes from augmenting reality and always being available, yet mostly unobtrusive; that combination necessitates more sensors and more processing, in even smaller form factors, while introducing new input techniques like Vision Pro’s stare-and-pinch or Orion’s neural wristband. It’s certainly a harder product category to create, but the potential payoff here—well, it’d be akin to how smartphones fared against personal computers in the 2010s.


  1. To give a smidgen of credit, when the Vision Pro launched, people made an effort to wear it around town—a meme that lasted for maybe a day.

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