It's really, really hard to overstate how disappointing the current batch of AR offerings are--at least the ones I've tried to develop on.

The best, probably because it is so limited in what it's trying to accomplish, is the Moverio BT-200. Basically, you get two translucent postage stamps that give you the appearance of a 21" monitor at like 4 ft. Little else, and a garbage camera, but that's actually just fine for the use case of "I need a hud". The resolution is fine (see: simple screen at a distance), the things actually fit properly (and even come with a convenient notch for people with glasses!), and overall they're a good experience.

Developing for them, though, is a pain in the ass. The documentation online is hidden for nonregistered users, and isn't that great to begin with. They use a locked-in Android 4.0.3 installation, and thus have all the weird shit of Android dev to deal with. The best library for them is Vuforia, but even that is a library cluttered up with random shit that just isn't interesting if you want a simple testbed (oh, and it really, really wants to pipe all your data into The Cloud for analysis and feature recognition).

The Meta glasses are quite disappointing, at least partly because they come so close and fail to deliver. The first moment when you fire up their depth camera debugger and watch cyan points dance over your hand in front of your face, it's really amazing--until you realize that your face hurts, the dots are low res, the hotkey dialog is clipped badly with no way to scroll, that you are looking through a small porthole onto the dots, and that generally everything about them is a hint at what a better implementation would be. The head-tracking is amazing, but even that can't save the other problems.

They are really uncomfortable because they lack an over-the-top headband: this forces you to really clamp them down to keep them on your face, and that just results in them squashing the everliving christ out of your nose.

The choice to do Windows-only support through Unity is basically a huge fuckup. Even the DK1 shipped with a native SDK for the adventurous, and forcing a developer to learn two new design paradigms (Unity's weird way of looking at the world, and the whole AR shtick of the Meta) is rather unkind. The website itself doesn't even have any public docs, because of reasons, and so you can't even try to develop for them without an SDK in hand.

The Linux users? The people who are probably most able to realize the AR workspace concept by way of Wayland or (god help us) X11? Yeah, left out in the fucking cold. Thanks Meta!

The hardware itself isn't even without blame. The little control box gets really upset if you plug things in incorrectly, but they didn't bother to make the plugs shaped in such a way as to prevent that.

The view itself is not bad, but suffers from a bad coordinate system. To elaborate: the BT-200s just put a transparent screen in front of your face as a virtual monitor. This is very stupid, very simple, and basically perfect for a HUD. The Metas, though, are really committed to a 3D space around the user, and at boot time pick an orientation and stick with that. So, if you look around, things slide out of view because they're in scenegraph misaligned with reality. You can, in a bad moment, convince the Meta that the default orientation of their goggles is like 45 degrees looking up and to the side, and then have to keep recentering it.

That last problem could be mitigated but for their decision to for you to use Unity and the whole 3D clowncar. So, for making a simple HUD, the Meta is at once overkill and underpowered.

~

This tech will get better, but right now everyone is too stuck in cashgrab mode to remember to actually make development possible. And thus, they're all probably going to wither and die while Microsoft laughs all the way to the bank.

Because Redmond, you know, actually cares about developers.

Developers developers developers developers.