5 ms·
I saw the keynote, and while everything about the glasses was more or less as expected, seeing Zuck easily navigate the interface and type 30 words per minute w
by paxys 1y ago
I saw the keynote, and while everything about the glasses was more or less as expected, seeing Zuck easily navigate the interface and type 30 words per minute while barely moving his fingers was a true WTF moment. If they can actually make the neural interface work that well then Meta has won this round.
- yakz 1y agoDoesn’t that make the wrist accessory the important part? The chunky glasses look like they’re still too early, not enough tech.
- paxys 1y agoThat's why they are sold as a pair. The glasses are simply a screen strapped to your face. How to control it was always the real problem to be solved (and no, voice was never the answer).
- jeron 1y agoI was one of the earliest developers to test Vision Pro after it was announced at Apple Park. My thoughts after using it for a whole day was that the hand gestures really did feel like magic, at the tradeoff of having a huge headset on your head. Costs aside, the Vision Pro is too bulky for use outside of your home. I had the idea of wearables to solve this, as many years ago I had the Myo gesture control armband. They were very early with this product too, and from what I had read, most of that team got acquired/absorbed into Magic Leap
- zmmmmm 1y agoi was disappointed they didn't say you could connect it to other devices too. I would buy it just as a bluetooth keyboard!
- hn_acc1 1y agoWould you have to give Meta a non-exclusive license to every work generated using it as well? HARD PASS.
- jayd16 1y agoIt's still certainly early adopter tech. We have the technology for stereo vision and augmented reality. It's just a matter of getting the display and battery and compute bill of materials in order now that they have the screen and a feasible input path.
- NitpickLawyer 1y ago> still too early, not enough tech. At one point I was tracking a company researching beaming images straight on your eye. I think they were MS related, but not sure. After a while they stopped updating, so I guess that went nowhere? It seemed really promising.
- oever 1y agoMeta sells your eyes and ears, not your fingers.
- encoderer 1y agoI can’t find this demo. Am I blind??
- paxys 1y agohttps://www.facebook.com/Meta/videos/1927325824791552/ https://www.facebook.com/Meta/videos/1927325824791552/ Skip to around 53:00
- bemmu 1y agoExactly, felt like the wristband was the big thing. I don't want the glasses, but I'm somewhat curious if it'd be useful as an extra input device when using a computer.
- sigmar 1y agothey've been bragging about how good that neural wristband is for years. It's strange they haven't ventured to make a smartwatch with it. Maybe because Zuck has been so focused on AR/VR
- swordsmith 1y agoOne device at a time!
- evanjrowley 1y agoThe vision here is much more ambitious than a smart watch, and it probably helps them to introduce it as something that doesn't compete with the Apple Watch / Google Pixel Watch / Samsung Galaxy Watch. The neural wristband is meant to go on the right wrist, so potentially it could complement a more traditional smart watch, or pair with some future Meta smart watch.
- MangoToupe 1y agoI'd buy it if I could use it as a dumb bluetooth keyboard. As it stands he's ambitious for a vision that has no use in my life—I'm generally trying to escape digital interaction, not constantly immerse myself in it.
- fl7305 1y agoIt'd be interesting to try it as a regular keyboard too. Probably a bit too imprecise even for skilled users, but who knows. And if you really get into them, maybe it's worth spending the time to learn chords instead, like for a court stenographer?
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- cflewis 1y agoHow does the finger thing work? What's he doing? I saw him tippy-tappy but it didn't seem like he's moving through some invisible keyboard.
- jwrallie 1y agoIt was hard to see, but it looked like handwriting to me.
- phire 1y agoFor marketing reasons, it needs to be something that people can pick up with absolutely minimal practice. I doubt it has enough accuracy for a virtual keyboards (since keyboards require precise absolute input and it measures relative), besides, most people aren't experienced with single-hand typing. A bespoke gesture based shorthand would be optimal, but then users would need to spend months learning this new shorthand. But (almost) everyone already has experience with handwriting, which is a single hand relative input method. It's the easiest option for people to quickly pick up and enjoy. Though, it's far from perfect, you can see he is struggling to trick his muscle memory into writing without a pen, and he needs to do it on a solid surface (I'm not sure if that's a technology limitation, or a muscle memory limitation).
- swordsmith 1y agoVirtual keyboard is completely doable, but too slow.
- dagmx 1y agoIt’s tracking the EMG signals that trigger your finger tendons. Doing that it knows how your fingers are moving. It can therefore translate it to a handwritten stroke and then do classical handwriting to text conversion.
- jay_kyburz 1y agoBut I only type with my index fingers! You've got to type with your shoulders if you want to avoid RSI!
- zmmmmm 1y agoyep. whatever else you say, Meta's willingness to throw some tech out there is thrilling from a geek / tech perspective.
- stavros 1y agoWhile I agree this is extremely impressive, when I'm out walking, I'm not going to be looking for a convenient flat surface I can rest my hand on so I can type a message. It seems useless in practice.
- etrautmann 1y agoThat's not a limitation - it works in the air, on your leg, other hand, etc.
- stavros 1y agoDoes it? Zuckerberg looks like he had to rest his hand on that desk to write, wouldn't he have written in the air if this weren't a limitation?
- _zoltan_ 1y agothere are only a few companies where very strong vision, long time horizon and pouring money into said projects come together. NVIDIA, obviously and Meta are definitely on this list.
- xandrius 1y agoYep "vision" because they are trying to sell you glasses. /s But Meta's business is clearly getting more and more sweet data from its users. How anyone can not see past this being a surveillance tool for a vast amount of data is unbelievable to me.
- _zoltan_ 1y agothe vision is not the glasses. the vision is a connected world. maybe this is not something that you understand, especially if you're in the US, as there it's common to move farther than the distance between Madrid to Budapest, as an example, but for a lot of people I know, like me, who live more than a 1000km from their childhood friends and 3/4 of the family, any innovation that helps us meet more often and do more things together is welcome. forget the glasses. it's a step in a direction. there will be many more steps. if you have not already, I urge you to watch Mark's interview at the Acquired event, he talks about his vision there. do they need money to make all of this happen? of course. you can be part of this as well just by buying META stock. in the EU I do not need to log in with my facebook account anyway.
- xandrius 1y agoFrom the EU, I really do not care for mr. Zuck. Fool me once, fool me twice, so to speak.
- hn_acc1 1y agoMore frequently connected to your friends, so more ads can be sold to you and them, and more data collected to sell to other advertisers / surveillance forces? Doesn't sound all the great to me.. If it was open source with zero tracking, I might consider it. As it is, HARD PASS.
- NamlchakKhandro 1y agoIf it was going to blow up then why hasn't those laser beam projected keyboards blown up, or why have mechanical keyboards become so damn popular and not "keyboards on screens?" This isn't going anywhere.
- jackbrookes 1y ago> why have mechanical keyboards become so damn popular and not "keyboards on screens?" I mean... have you ever used a phone?
- dandellion 1y agoMy phone has so far replaced zero of my keyboards.
- paxys 1y agoThe vast majority of the planet uses a touchscreen phone or tablet as their primary (and sometimes only) computing device. The tech audience on HN is very far removed from how the rest of the world uses technology.
- dandellion 1y agoYou're kinda missing the point here. Yes, mobile phones use touchscreens, and billions of people have smartphones, that is correct. Yes the audience of HN is far removed, not gonna argue that. Because that's not what we're talking about. Grandparent very correctly points out that mobile phones haven't replaced traditional keyboards, in fact there's probably more keyboards being sold now than at any point in history before, that's because phone touchscreen haven't replaced keyboards, they're just a new interface for a new device. 15 years later other devices are still using other interfaces, and the actual places where it has been replaced are not that many. Only point of sale machines and cars come to mind having replaced keyboards (and I'm being very generous, honestly I wouldn't even call that keyboards) with touchscreens, and some car brands are even starting to walk it back.
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- archon810 1y agoTurn that neural band into a WHOOP band and then we'll talk. Such an opportunity for those who already use fitness trackers.
- saberience 1y agoOne, Zuck probably practiced for days for this moment and just managed 30 words per minute (which is slow, 1 word per two seconds is really bad). Two, just try doing this now, moving your hand around like its writing with a pen and see how it feels (without holding a pen). It's super uncomfortable and feels really weird and also looks really weird. People are really sensitive to looking weird and feeling weird and especially being singled out for being weird or looking weird. Also, there is a huge subset of society now who will not buy anything made by Meta. I think this product is doomed to failure honestly. Happy to eat my words when I see the subway filled with people wearing this dystopian specs.
- fennecbutt 1y agoNah, it'll only be cool once Apple does it, I mean once they invent it.