Half of the world spends half a trillion dollars a year on makeup and hair care products, and an hour a day applying them. If your tech product covers their faces, smears their makeup, and musses their hair, it's probably not going to achieve mainstream success. Just sayin.

Pancake lenses, 2160×2160 LCD panels, no local dimming. :(

What's Steam Frame's visual stack? What kind of fidelity can we expect?

Quest and Vision Pro are on the back burner, headed for the dust bin. In their hubris and greed, Zuck and Cook reached for the next PC form factor, and missed. Now is the pivot. Oh, and justifying the massive failures by claiming goggles were always meant to be stepping stones.

So Apple will add VR games to replace its failed "productivity" use case, and Meta will try to catch up with VisionOS. This will run out the clock long enough to reach simple stereoscopic glasses and the promise of a (very far off) future with more goggles-like features.

But good enough glasses have big challenges to overcome. Monocular is a non-starter. Stereoscopic may be too, depending on use cases. Inside out tracking, and wireless are musts, and all that'll require new battery shaping techniques and large efficiency improvements. Etc., etc.

Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro are undoubtedly cooked, but with so much time and money invested, and next big thing still years out, they will keep these devices alive with small sustaining teams long enough to pretend that glasses that do very little were the goal all along.

The future is simple phone and PC-dependent AR glasses with see-through lenses, not standalone 1.5 pound strap-on face PCs with pass-through displays. If you want to know more about this future, Oscar's put together an excellent comparison table for the optical components.

VR/MR could be amazing. Had Apple and Meta spent their $100B on great display peripherals, instead of chasing the next PC platform, we'd have something 1/5th the weight and 1/2 the price offering even better visual fidelity. Instead we got 1.5 pound strap-on facial PCs.