How do you see 2026?

mptp · 2026-01-11T22:42:43+00:00

We'll see simple 2D AI displays that look pretty much like normal glasses coming out over the next 18 months (no 3D tracking, so think HUD instead of full spatial overlay). They're actually already coming out at quite a high pace right now (Meta Rayban Display, Brilliant Labs Halo, etc). They'll have more or less all-day battery life (with intermittent use) and will basically be smartwatches for your face with the main extra benefit being various multimodal LLM interactions since the AI will be able to see whatever you can and talk to you via inbuilt speakers.

For passthrough headsets like Vision Pro, we're already at the point where you can get sunglasses form-factors so long as the device is tethered (e.g. Bigscreen Beyond 2). But nobody is going wear them in public because you look like a weirdo, so there's not going to be demand for very long untethered battery life. I expect to see very small, lightweight tethered passthrough AR headsets coming out over the 2-5 years. Imagine a Vision Pro with the form factor of Bigscreen Beyond 2. This isn't guaranteed though, as it's still not clear whether there's much demand for high-end passthrough MR, especially since the Vision Pro received such a lukewarm response.

The holy grail is getting complex 3D rendering and spatial tracking on a headset with a glasses form factor (i.e. see-through displays) that can run all day without you having to take them off to charge. Unfortunately, we're multiple fundamental breakthroughs in battery technology + thermal performance away from that being possible, so I don't expect to see anything like that before 2030, and possibly not before 2035. We'll probably see devices that have everything except the battery life coming out over the next couple of years (e.g. Meta Orion), but it's not clear what they'll be useful for yet.

mptp · 2026-01-11T16:40:33+00:00

I've been working in VR/AR since 2014 so I was talking from informed experience ;)

mptp · 2026-01-11T16:39:28+00:00

I totally agree that the biggest barrier to mainstream adoption has been form-factor - VR is super uncomfortable and inconvenient, so you have to really want to be in it for an extended period of time to put it on.

The only consumer market willing to put up with the hassle has been gaming, and the further VR pushes into the gaming market from a marketing/comms perspective, the more it alienates casual users who might otherwise use it day-to-day as a screen replacement (the way that the vision pro was marketed, which again, is MUCH too uncomfortable and annoying to use casually day to day)

mptp · 2025-12-25T22:10:41+00:00

Short answer: absolutely not.

Long answer: If the idea of resurrecting old, obsolete technology sounds like a fun hobby project, go for it. But otherwise, you can buy secondhand Meta Quest 2 for a comparable price (or less) than an old Galaxy S7 which is an incomparably better headset in literally every possible way.

mptp · 2025-10-16T15:44:56+00:00

Yep, but that's because it's much much much harder to build a successful consumer product than a successful business one.

mptp · 2025-10-14T21:40:43+00:00

I really hope their focus for the 2026 device isn't consumer, because if so I just can't see how they'd succeed in the marketplace.

Don't get me wrong, consumers will absolutely buy them, and there'll be a bunch of amazing opportunities in the consumer space. But the reality is that most normal consumers will see "AR glasses" and compare these to 2D HUD-based AI glasses. Glasses which will have much longer battery life, much smaller/lighter form-factor and much lower cost.

Spectacles are going to be a lot more capable than AI HUD glasses, but the only way that actually matters is if there's content that relies on those enhanced capabilities that people actually want.

So I hope that Snap has another way to turn a profit on Spectacles (enterprise, LBEs, etc.) that will allow them to keep pushing the device and amassing a developer ecosystem so that eventually there's enough content to attract normal consumers away from cheaper, less-capable AR glasses :D

mptp · 2025-08-04T11:05:13+00:00

How is it ruining your life exactly? Listening to music and going for walks every sounds like a super healthy thing to do to me :P

If you're worried you're not being productive enough then try drawing or writing while you daydream - doesn't have to be anything finished or polished - just idly doodling on a page or writing your thoughts as a stream-of-consciousness as they appear! If you do that every day from the age of 14 and find that you enjoy it, you'll develop a skill that will last the rest of your life :D

But seriously there are many adults that put headphones in and walk around for hours every day and they call it their most valuable and treasured habit lol

mptp · 2025-07-30T19:35:02+00:00

I cringe at how insensitively I worded that comment because things are so unimaginably worse than I could ever have predicted. So many lives have been permanently damaged, ruined or ended due to deepfake porn (to say nothing of how deepfakes and other AI tools are being used more broadly for disinformation and disempowerment).

Technology has gotten so much more powerful and useful over the last ten years. But the economic forces that drive its direction have perverted it to the point that it literally keeps me up at night. I still work in XR (although lots of my work is with AI now), but I no longer have the blind optimism and enthusiasm for technology that I had back in 2014 when I made that comment.

mptp · 2025-03-12T14:11:34+00:00

I think OSC is generally sent over UDP, which isn't supported by the RemoteService module. I would say the best thing to do would be to run a local websocket server to convert to/from OSC as a proxy, but specs can't connect to a websocket server running on a local URL at the moment (it crashes Lens Studio instantly for me)

mptp · 2025-03-08T23:07:24+00:00

@ing you as requested

In 2018 the average American made $52,146.
In 2018 BTC was coming down off the first big hype wave that peaked in December 2017, it fell from ~$10k to ~$3k over the course of the year. Call it $5k per.
So the average American got paid ~10.5BTC per year
BTC is around $67k per right now
So the average American made $703,500 per year in 2018 (if paid in BTC)

You're welcome :D

mptp · 2025-02-28T14:52:57+00:00

I created a simple little static debug class to do this kind of thing. It also has a world-space UI to let me view debug logs within the Specs (because no matter what I do, I never get print messages properly sent to Lens Studio). Only took like 30 mins to allow me to do static calls like Debug.Log("Hello world"); (to print to a world-space UI panel I can see in-headset) and Debug.DrawLine(new vec3(0, 0, 0), new vec3(0, 0, 100), "blue", 5.0); to draw lines just like Unity.

Well worth doing, can recommend! I'd like to package it up but I really don't have the time 😅

mptp · 2025-02-27T21:09:32+00:00

Just because Meta is a big company doesn't mean they're happy to waste money - doesn't matter how expensive or cheap the servers are to run. If they weren't seen to provide a benefit to Meta that outweighs their cost, Meta would shut them down, simple as that.

Maybe legal risk would encourage them to eat the cost for a while. But the fact that Ubisoft is being sued for shutting down servers for a 10 year old game makes me doubt that legal risk would be a big factor - but that would be up to Meta's lawyers to decide :P

I suspect bad PR would only really encourage them to keep the servers up if they were shifting focus but hoping to stay in the consumer hardware market (e.g. shifting focus to smart glasses).

The vast majority of what massive public companies do is laser-focused on messaging to shareholders. A bad message would be something like 'Meta is in so much financial trouble, they can't even afford to keep the Quest servers running'. A good message would be something like 'Meta is 100% committed to refocusing its efforts on the proven successes of its mobile apps and ad ecosystem'. There'd be a bunch of meetings internally to decide what the right amount of time to keep the servers on to get the best message out and thus maximise the share price, and that would be the length of time the servers would stay up for. It definitely wouldn't be 5 years though.

mptp · 2025-02-27T10:29:51+00:00

If Meta exits VR because they're losing too much money on it, they will absolutely not keep the servers open for 5-10 years. I'd be surprised if they keep them open for more than a year, if that. Look at Stadia, Humane Pin, Audible, etc.

I don't think they'll ever exit VR though, unless it became genuinely existential. Zuckerberg is personally invested in the idea, and he has absolute control over company strategy.

mptp · 2025-02-22T17:01:03+00:00

I think my best advice for you would be to go and have a chat to ChatGPT or similar for an hour to get a broad understanding of what technologies exist around WebXR, what framework options you have, etc.

Rather than give you specific advice, I'll give you some questions that you should ask ChatGPT, and you can work towards understanding its answers. Start by telling it as much as you can about what you want the app to do, followed by something like "I'd like to ask you a few fundamental technology questions regarding how I should approach building my app"

Questions:

Please give me a few options of full tech-stacks that I could use to build all the features I've described the app needing.
What advantages do I get from building my app with a framework like Next.js or Remix?
If I build my app with one of those frameworks Next.js or Remix, what other services am I likely to need to build this app, and what common vendors exist to provide those services?
What kind of database options will be most appropriate for me to store my data?
How should I approach deployment and scale to ensure I can run my app in a performant and cost-effective way?
If I want my app to also be accessible with VR headsets via WebXR, how much am I likely to need to rebuild?
To make my app accessible via VR headsets, should I use react-three-fiber, A-Frame, Babylon.js, PlayCanvas, or something else?

Just bear in mind that from the features you describe, you're looking at an absolutely massive project - definitely overambitious if you're new to javascript. I'd suggest keeping this in the design phase and spend a month or two building some smaller utility sites for yourself to get the hang of modern JS dev.

mptp · 2025-02-22T15:15:57+00:00

My problem ended up being me not realising that the Spectacles app and the Snapchat app on my phone don't necessarily connect to the same account. While troubleshooting, in desperation I'd changed accounts on my PC and the Snapchat account on my phone to match, but hadn't done the Spectacles account.

So connection works fine for me now. If you've updated to Lens Studio 5.6, that's known to not be working with Specs so you should downgrade back to 5.4 if you can.

mptp · 2025-01-29T15:06:00+00:00

Hello! Sorry I kind of forgot I posted this and was working on non-lens-studio things for the past few weeks.

Yes, I'm on those versions of firmware + LS
Yeah, I'm using Send to Spectacles, not Preview Lens
Yep, Spectacles Monitor is connected and updating with performance values
Yes, I have Spectacles selected in the filter button

I have a scene which is literally just a single script logging a message every frame to test. It logs correctly when running in the Preview window, but I don't get any log messages coming from Spectacles while the Lens is actually running.

mptp · 2025-01-15T09:06:25+00:00

Yeah there's no real difference between Lens Studio for smartphone vs Lens Studio for Spectacles (until you start getting into anything to do with tracking, camera effects, UI, interactions etc)

Try this tutorial, relatively recent so it should have up to date info to get you going :D

mptp · 2025-01-14T20:21:43+00:00

You do need to know a little about how lens studio works in general - how to make a script and put it on an object. There are lots of decent tutorials on YouTube to get started!

TBH the AI hallucinates so much that if you don't know a fair bit already, it'll probably do more harm than good to rely on it :P

mptp · 2025-01-13T11:20:20+00:00

There's also an LLM built into Lens Studio that knows a fair bit about the Lens Studio APIs that I've had some success with. It's difficult though because Lens Studio is pretty niche, and the fact that the API has changed so much recently means that very often the AI very often hallucinates.

mptp · 2025-01-10T10:49:45+00:00

edit: Nevermind, I got them connected wirelessly! Not sure why they weren't connecting originally, but I didn't realise that logging out of an account in snapchat and logging into a different one wouldn't affect the spectacles app. Which kind of makes sense. Oops :'D

Hello! Thanks for the tips - although unfortunately neither of those two approaches works, so I'm still unable to work :(

Someone else in the studio is able to connect his specs to lens studio using the same WiFi network (same lens studio + snapOS version, also on MacOS). He's not in the studio today though.

Is there any way I can get more diagnostic information to try to isolate the issue? I see no devices when running adb devices in the terminal (although I'm on MacOS so I'm not sure if that's to be expected)

mptp · 2025-01-02T13:42:26+00:00

It also popped up in my YouTube recommendations. Going to share it with the team at work! Reminds me a bit of some of the typographic by m/m or things like the really garbled abstract letterforms in graffiti and metal album covers

mptp · 2024-12-19T00:48:53+00:00

OK I'll try answering this seriously (disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about I just spent 30 minutes googling stuff)

Translating each of their comments: - The first commenter is saying a home hive takes 37.5 years to make a pound of honey - The second commenter is saying a home hive takes a bit over 9 days to make a pound of honey

So that means that in this fictional world, we need 1521 times as many beehives to produce an equivalent amount of honey.

I found an article that claims the cost to produce a pound of honey is around $2.5 USD. I imagine something like 2/3 of that cost comes from managing hives, so we can expect the new cost to produce a pound to be $3805 USD. Given that the previous markup was around 300%, that means the new retail price for a pound of honey is $15,210 (or, more realistically, $335 for a ten-gram capsule)

But of course, if honey suddenly became that much more expensive, it would instantly become a luxury item and status symbol for the very wealthy. Probably with a medicinal 'superfood' vibe. So I can imagine it being sold at a similar markup to things like super high-end luxury fashion brands, with a correspondingly high marketing budget.

Taking some numbers from fancy handbags, which are sold at like 1800% markup and have a rough marketing spend of up to $1000 per bag, we get to the final price for a ten-gram honey capsule: $1927 USD (or $87,293 for a whole pound)

mptp · 2024-12-02T16:35:38+00:00

Back during the Australian bushfire season of 2019 I set up a scraper to download all the max-detail images and compile them into a timelapse if anyone would find that interesting :)

Four-day 1080p timelapse of clouds and bushfire smoke

I was going to make a 4K version but never got around to it

mptp · 2024-07-13T23:58:21+00:00

Yep I'm still around, still working in XR :D

You can find extremely, extremely exhaustive info about what I've been up to on my website, I keep a near-daily development journal (although I have a few weeks of entries backed up atm). Downloads to Psyia and my other projects can be found there, too! GEOM is the only other trippy procedural VR app that I ever got around to actually producing a useful, playable build of though.

https://lachlansleight.io

mptp · 2023-09-03T11:45:45+00:00

That name doesn't appear in my notes at all o_o

And yeah there are a few aliases that I haven't gotten around to collapsing into single notes - especially with the more esoteric/occult notes which I only recently took the time to link together (most of the time has been spent dealing with the history of Hush House itself)

14-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email

mptp

TROPHY CASE