Palmer Luckey

I'm a huge fan of what Apple is doing there.

I'm also a big fan of the fact that they are doing mixed reality or augmented reality or whatever you want to call it using full reprojection, meaning they're using sensors to take in a view of the real world, merging that with a digital model of what you want to put in it

and then projecting all new photons into the eye from displays.

This is contrasted with, let's say, the HoloLens approach of having an optically transparent system where you have real photons from real things mixed with new real photons, but representing virtual aspects of the space blended together.

The problem is that all the systems that are good at adding photons to the view of the real world also totally screw up your view of the real world.

And they're very, very limited in what they can do.

They can only add light.

They can't subtract it.

So you can't match dynamic range.

You can't match brightness.

You can't draw black.

You can't erase things.

You can just add glowy things in the environment.

And that's not what people actually want.

Apple started trying to do

optical transparency.

And the Vision Pro was supposed to be basically a development kit for the tool set for developers to use that system.

It's now become the product they're actually going to ship.

There are people in Apple who think they're someday going to get back to optical transparency.

There's another camp that thinks that the long-term win is full reprojection.