The Holodeck glasses are here from Snap, but aren't affordable for most people. $2,195.
I just bought a $1,500 pair of ZeroG glasses
zerogeyewear.com/ to help me see reality better. The best my optometrist offers. With Zeiss lenses.
Yeah, I could have bought a pair of Warby Parkers, but I wanted the absolute lightest, best lenses, I could afford.
My eyes suck.
But these set a baseline I'll use to judge AI glasses that are coming out of the woodwork against.
My lenses:
1. Let me see near and far. Most of the digital eyewear don't do that.
2. Turn dark in sunlight. Most of the digital eyewear don't do that.
3. Are featherweight. Every fraction of a gram makes them less comfortable.
4. Are fashionable. Not true of many of the digital eyewear that's come out.
5. Are completely waterproof (I don't need to take them off in a rain storm).
6. Lenses have very scratch resistant coatings. My last pair, after four years, still have no scratches.
7. Are very durable. Titanium frames are the best at resisting abuse that I've found.
Compared to my new glasses I can't see wearing Snap's glasses all day long. So I'd wear them to try some augmented reality experiences.
The problem is that most of the augmented reality experiences aren't yet to the place where I want to keep them on for more than an hour.
Which is why these will still be very niche focused. Developers should consider. The rest will probably wait, just like they did with Apple Vision Pro (which does have many amazing experiences, but are too heavy and too expensive for me to recommend to my family and friends).
That said, sometime in the next five years some company will put it all together with a device that gets me to take off my ZeroG's for hours.
Will keep evaluating them, have several different AI glasses here to compare, with more on the way.
One kind of person I'd recommend getting digital eyewear? Business travelers.
The glasses from
@getVITURE or
@XREAL_Global give you a huge color screen to watch a movie, or work in privately, while taking a long flight. They don't pretend to be glasses you can wear all day, and require a wire to a laptop or a phone to power them, though. But at CES the crowds around their booths show that there's a market demand for their kinds of glasses.
There the utility does pass the ZeroG's I have. I also find I frequently put them on when working because of the huge color screens inside.
But the Holodeck device of my dreams still hasn't arrived. Will keep evaluating as Google and Meta bring new devices later this year.