Interesting NWN comment from Second Life/High Fidelity founder Philip Rosedale, responding to Magic Leap's just announced, no frillys avatar chat app:
It seems possible that VR headsets like the Quest or Focus, with pass-through video capabilities and wide field of view at a consumer price point ($400) will provide a better experience than can be delivered with AR. You can't see a person's eyes when they are wearing the HoloLens or Magic Leap, so why not just wear a VR headset?
If I'm reading this right, Phillip is arguing that you can use the Quest and Focus' video capabilities to create augmented reality-type experiences within VR. (Whereas you wouldn't be able to do virtual reality-type experiences from within most augmented reality HMDs.) Which is a very valid point. I'm also intrigued by his acknowledgement that lack of eye contact is a problem for both AR and VR:
It was an issue also raised by game designer Warren Spector in last weekend's Sinespace Q&A, echoing his thoughts in an interview a few years ago. Others have raised possible solutions to this, such as displaying a VR user's eyes on a screen on the outside of an HMD. But that workaround seems so convoluted, it may be there's really no viable way around that barrier to adoption.
I already do AR with the Focus https://skarredghost.com/2018/06/25/how-to-create-an-augmented-reality-app-for-the-vive-focus-in-unity/ (at the link you can also find an opensource plugin for that that I made for Unity) and also MR https://skarredghost.com/2018/09/14/the-world-is-your-dancefloor-with-beat-reality/ and I can guarantee you that is pretty awesome. And it has the potential of showing a modified view of the world... so not only virtual objects added to the world
Posted by: TonyVT Skarredghost | Tuesday, November 20, 2018 at 04:50 AM