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760 points mikenew | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.204s | source
1. mncharity ◴[] No.44017289[source]
> FOV is actually too big [...] Seeing the top and bottom edges of the screen means moving your eyeballs

Or head tracking.[1] Aphysical rotation exaggeration avoids trading eye for neck stress.

> I do feel a little weird wearing these in public, but not that weird.

Non-weird can be an expensive constraint, fruitful to relax if going beyond a minimalism setup. A baseball hat can barnacle quite a bit before people find it remarkable... at least around Boston. For instance, for head tracking, an Intel RealSense, or a hat fisheye camera and tennis ball on the table, or an optical marker on a hat chopstick, can be simpler, easier, lower power, and less expensive, than invoking "and it has to look non-weird". With current tech, that's almost as challenging as "and it has to be a product".

> as these AR glasses continue to improve and Linux continues to be flexible and awesome.

I suggest Nreal (now Xreal) made a bad call here. They developed internally on Ubuntu, but chose to shut out linux. (Caveat: I've not followed in a few years, maybe that's changed.) Unicorn dreams and race to mass market - maybe the right call if everyone started watching media on phones with glasses. But it could have been an inexpensive risk mitigation, and a worthwhile investment once market fit was clearly a long haul. Is there some doc which lays out alternatives for a company who thinks they have a crown-jewel binary blob, to allow the community to wrap it for linux consumption, with minimal "we just throw a blob over the wall - we don't support linuxes" cost? It's been a lot of years that something like TFA has been possible, during which a lot of developers could have been exploring for viable market niches. Instead of... not.

[1] https://x.com/mncharity/status/1225091755667853318#m