Facebook Glasses 2021 Unlikely To Be AR Porn Ready
Facebook appear ready to enter the ‘smart glasses’ market this year (2021) with an eye on taking the Big Tech lead in the sphere of augmented reality, just as they clearly have with virtual reality through the Oculus Quest headsets. However, it seems that the first iteration of the glasses will be smart only, without any significant capability to provide 3D AR holograms such as the virtual strippers of Naughty America or BadoinkAR. That is at least to an article at Bloomberg, who are usually quite reliable when it comes to insider tech predictions.
Facebook Inc.’s planned smart glasses will arrive “sooner than later” in 2021, but won’t feature the kind of digital overlay technology that is associated with augmented reality, according to hardware chief Andrew Bosworth.
The glasses, which are being built in partnership with Ray-Ban and parent Luxottica Group SpA, will connect to a device — though users won’t be able to overlay digital objects onto their real-world view, a foundational element of AR.
“These are certainly connected glasses, they are certainly providing a lot of functionality, [but] we’re being quite coy about which functionality precisely we are providing,” Bosworth said. “We’re excited about it but we don’t want to over-hype it. We’re not even calling it augmented reality, we’re just calling it ‘smart glasses,’” he added.
Similarly, according to the same website, Apple – who have long made clear their ambitions as regards augmented reality – are not likely to release their own AR glasses for some time. A much rumoured ‘headset’ that is predicted to be revealed this year, and that was expected by many to at least feature some AR capabilities, is now more likely to be more of a high-end virtual reality headset that will be a kind of ‘precursor’ to Apple’s eventual AR headsets and glasses.
I spoke to an adult industry insider recently who is very knowledgeable about all things XR (extended reality – AR, VR, and mixed reality). He believes that we are likely another 5 years away until we have affordable mass market AR glasses or headsets that can deliver the kind of augmented reality porn that we are all looking forward to – smooth, ultra-HD motion videos of 100% authentic ‘3D hologram’ girls, that last for at least several minutes and feature highly accurate placement etc. Limiting factors include battery life, bandwidth, processing power, video compression etc. My insider friend believes that Microsoft might be the first to solve the problem and release a mass-market version of the HoloLens in the next 2 or 3 years.
In the meantime, the little AR porn we currently have will slowly improve, even if most of us will have to enjoy it through are smartphones (or a mobile phone AR headset). And as I described recently, it’s already pretty exciting, even if some of the excitement is due to the early novelty of AR porn.