Weekly poll results: AR more promising than VR, but neither is guaranteed success

Last week’s poll brings unexpected results – Augmented Reality glasses are the type of XR that holds the most promise. That being said, there just isn’t much confidence that XR tech is ready for mass adoption or even useful.

The technology has been improving at a rapid pace, riding on the coattails of smartphones – high quality displays with high refresh rates and the efficient chipsets that power some of the experiences could only have been developed in the cutthroat smartphone business.

No one has perfected the formula yet. Several comments mentioned the Ready Player One movie, which portrayed the OASIS – a virtual reality platform used by millions. That is what Mark Zuckerberg is trying to build with the Metaverse, but it’s a long way away. And while headsets like Project Cambria have full color passthrough, which will enable AR experiences, VR is still seems to be the primary use-case for Meta’s projects.

Commenters also mentioned various VR games that they have enjoyed. However, VR headsets haven’t found their Halo title yet – that game was responsible for most of the Xbox sales in the early days. There are popular games, just not must-have games that will have you buying a VR headset just for them.

Mentioning AR glasses may bring memories of Google Glass’s very public failure, but AR headsets have been adopted as workplace tools in some industries. That’s how computers got their start too – people were using computers at the office for years before buying one for the home. Of course, it took a while for early computers to come down in price and be user-friendly enough to have a place in the home.

That is where AR seems to be at the moment – useful enough to do a job, not good enough to spend all day on. Especially with concerns about comfort and eye fatigue. But with multiple tech giants hard at work we have seen components get lighter and optics improve. It may be just a matter of time before regular reality has some solid competition.