alt Hacker NewsCounterpoint: I am looking forward to the opportunity to get fully open source, open hardware AR glasses. I anticipate that it will happen as first Meta and Google and big Chinese firms spend the R&D to create the hardware to make it possible, then Chinese knock-offs and discount brands appear, and then someone will start selling a pair through CrowdSupply which are truly open source.
At that point I will be able to have the fun of AR (gaming with paper toys or other papercrafts, displaying characters on a table for my tabletop RPG group, getting directions in a foreign city, identifying plants and insects just by looking at them, seeing where my cats are located through walls via their airtag collars) without any ads, without any data harvesting nor privacy concerns, and even being able to write my own custom apps or firmware mods. It will still be a toy rather than a necessary part of life like a smartphone has become but a fun toy nonetheless.
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Counterpoint, people will install content overlays and all of the same problems will exist with open source because "content isn't free".
The software is there already, apparently https://github.com/Mentra-Community/MentraOS
Countercounterpoint: by participating in this ecosystem which is ad-subsidized, you legitimize it via network effects, contributing to a shittier world for all, even if you yourself block the ads. I don't want the be the target of someone else's AR glasses, and I shouldn't have to give up being in public to accomplish that.
> without any ads
Why stop there? Stream the camera to a CNN and black out all the ads in real time you'd other wise be forced to see walking down the street or in the subway.
Why wait?
Meta Ray-Ban - already hacked by p0pcycle
Rokid Glasses - rooted firmware https://github.com/jaskier-os/client-glasses
Google Glass Explorer Edition - officially supported root access
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The big hurdle for widely available AR/VR is microdisplay availability. They require displays that are massively denser than regular glass-based LCDs and OLEDs but the ones made like silicon chips. Further, they require specialized drivers for generating correct voltages and waveforms, and they have to be coupled to exotic optics, either the "pancake" concentric reflexive lenses or stacks of Fresnel lenses for VR, or with off-axis optical surfaces or even sliced stacks of PVD coated surfaces or worse yet literal nanoscale or holographic metasurfaces for AR/smart glasses. Those can't be turned on a lathe, barely potentially 3D printable with transparent resin.
That makes smart glasses as a business to only make sense as a massive project with tons of stakeholders involving technical consultants and actual manufacturing companies that can still make those things. That can't be for cheap knockoffs, and that's the problem that needs to be solved for cheap smartglasses.