Weekly Metaverse #138: A glimpse of the future at CES
The show isn't quite as grand as it once was, but there were still a few things to get excited about.
Pre-pandemic, CES was really leaning into crazy, futuristic stuff. Every brand had to one-up all of their competitors to get press coverage, so there was a kind of arms race of prototypes and concepts that looked super cool but was unlikely to actually be sold in the foreseeable future.
Now, with the show coming back post-pandemic to significantly smaller crowds and a generally less upbeat atmosphere in the country, the products this year are a whole lot more practical, near-term and realistic. Case in point: Honda’s big announcement was an electric car - not exactly the groundbreaking stuff of the future.
But while much of the whimsy is gone, that doesn’t mean the show’s a bust. In fact, in some ways it feels more exciting to me this year than anytime in the last decade. Flash back to 2015, and in stark contrast to Honda’s realistic plans to roll out an electric car, there were plenty of exciting self-driving car announcements which we now know were, to be charitable, somewhat premature. This year, even though we’ve downgraded from cutting-edge to realistic, that means that the stuff we’re seeing is a whole lot more likely to actually exist at some point soon.
So with that in mind, a few highlights!
Barry Collins at Forbes has Seen The Future Of AR Glasses At CES 2023 - And It’s Amazing. He got to preview Lumus’ (an Israeli tech company) AR glasses prototype. Lumus isn’t going to sell their own AR glasses; rather, they’re rumored to be supplying the optical engine for AR glasses from a top-tier tech company.
The big thing that stands out here is the form factor - they look like… glasses!
Collins further says the display is extremely bright, which will be important for outside, daytime use, and that they’ll have a battery life of four to six hours. All in all, this is really getting out of the realm of chunky, weird-looking prototypes and into the realm of real consumer products. Lumus say they expect the technology to arrive on the market in 2024, so unlike that Benz self-driving car, this just might be a real part of our lives before the decade is over.
Lumus wasn’t the only game in town, though - Matt Bolton at Techradar had a chance to try on an actual pair of glasses that is scheduled to launch to developers and consumers this year. TCL’s RayNeo X2, much like Lumus’ demo pair of glasses, looks like actual glasses, albeit certainly on the chunky side.
Bolton describes these as exactly what you’d expect from AR glasses: “you can see through them perfectly well, but information floats in front of your eyes, too. And that information is clear and sharp, and can be shown across a broad range of your vision, from top to bottom, left to right.”
He got a demo of live translation of someone speaking to him in Chinese, and it worked smoothly. While these are technically a prototype, TCL says developers will get them in Q1 of this year and consumers not too much later, so we may be closer to an AR-enabled world than I would’ve hoped for even a year or two ago.
We also got an update from Holoride, who we’ve talked about before here - they create in-car VR/AR experiences that integrate the real-world movement of the car with what you’re seeing. This is both fun from an immersion perspective and also useful in reducing nausea. When I was a kid, I’d try to play my Sega Game Gear in the car, get sick after a few minutes, wait a little bit until I felt marginally better and then repeat. If my kids get to play VR games in the back with no nausea, color me green with envy.
Last but very much not least… OVR Technology continues to push forward with Smell-o-vision (not their name for it, but clearly the correct terminology). Here’s Sarah Hill, CEO of Healium, a meditation/health-focused VR company, giving it a try:
I don’t know how useful this will be, but I do look forward to trying it someday. A meditation app does feel like one of the better cases for it - I could go for smelling lavender and sage while I sit in my tranquil VR meditation space.
A non-CES Apple update
Ladies and gents, we’ve got ourselves an Apple leak! You never know if Apple’s PR folks did this on purpose to keep them in the headlines ahead of CES, but either way it’s always great to get some detail on the most anticipated product of 2023.
Apple’s going to go with a waist-mounted battery. This feels like a pretty reasonable choice to me - it’ll keep the headset light without sacrificing battery life, and a wire running down to your waist shouldn’t be especially disruptive to the experience of using it.
They’ll have a small dial (like the Digital Crown on the Apple Watch) on the side of it that you’ll use to switch between AR and VR. I think this is very telling of what they expect in terms of how this device is used - if it were primarily VR with some AR capabilities (or vice versa), you could relegate passthrough functionality to an on-screen menu option. The fact that they’re making it an easily-accessible hardware switch tells me that they really do see it as both an AR and a VR device.
The field of view will be 120 degrees - larger than the Meta Quest Pro’s 106 degrees.
It’ll be able to run existing iOS apps in a simulated, 2D screen. This should help address my big concern at launch, which is a potential paucity of apps available. If you can read on the Kindle app or watch Netflix, that opens up a legitimately useful use case outside of the AR/VR functionality (though it’ll be a bit pricey for those relatively pedestrian use cases).
In worse news, Ming-Chi Kuo, who’s made a name for himself as a prescient analyst of all things Apple through analysis of their supply chains, says that they’re now unlikely to ship their headset until the second half of 2023. This may delay what was believed to be a January unveiling until the spring or possibly WWDC.
But in good news for me, I pulled the trigger on getting a Tilt Five and got off the waitlist fairly quickly, so it should be here in a few weeks! That should keep me occupied until Apple launches their headset. Also my wife is due with our first child in March, and I hear that may occupy some time as well.