First, let me set your mind at ease by telling you that you're completely, 100% off-base. Just in general. Very off-base. :)

> I wish I had many more options for pads.

Yup, we've heard this a lot, and it's definitely something we're looking to address. It is possible to lay down additional retroreflective material to get a larger viewable area. Folks in our discord can likely give you some tips if you're interested.

> I don't understand why you ever released this product. It wreaks of "yet another naive startup got ripped off by a some factory in China".

I didn't mean to imply at all that we got ripped off by a factory. Getting manufacturing right is on us. We had an issue that we didn't catch, and some people got shipped glasses that defocused. We've done our best to do right by them and repair or replace those glasses.

We released the product because we believe that despite some imperfections, doing AR like we do it is way more compelling than any other way possible today for certain use cases. We want to enable people to do cool things and enjoy this product, while we learn from how they use it so we can improve on it. I think we've improved it a lot already, and will continue to do so going forward (that was the point I was going for in my first reply).

Currently, doing XR hardware is all about trade-offs. Designing just the display system involves significant trade-offs between price, weight, brightness, field of view, vergence-accommodation conflict (eye strain / comfort), image resolution, eye box size (accommodating different face shapes & look-directions), depth of field (what range of distances are virtual objects in-focus across), latency, and power consumption just to name a few. Our trade-offs are pretty unique in the industry, and we've struggled a bit with how best to communicate about them to different audiences.

Basically, we give up the ability to draw virtual objects anywhere, relying on the retroreflector, and in exchange we get to make a pair of glasses that are light weight, bright, in focus for up-close objects, have a wide field of view up-close, don't cause eye-strain, have a large eye box, are translucent with minimal dimming of the real-world, all for a non-astronomical price. For clarity, the "up-close" qualifier for the "in focus" is a feature - most headsets are focused at infinite distance and close objects will be improperly focused. The "up-close" qualifier for the "field of view" is a limitation of the gameboard, assuming additional retroreflector isn't added.

On top of that, afaik, we're the only company looking to enable local multiplayer experiences for AR. There's something pretty special about interacting face-to-face with other people that are seeing the same things-that-aren't-there as you. It helps with the suspension of disbelieve in sort of a unique way. I know you said that we should give up on this so we don't catch everyone's computers on fire, but 4 pairs of our glasses have fewer pixels than a 4K display, and because we do the 180 Hz image stabilization on the headset, the PC only needs to hit 60 fps for smooth animations. We tend not to be entirely pixel-limited in the rendering, but as we optimize more that's the limit we'll approach.

Anyhoo, hopefully that wasn't too infomercial-ish, but that's some semblance of what excited me about this when I first met Jeri all those years ago, and it's what still excites me (and I think everyone at Tilt Five) about it today. And that, ultimately, is why we made the product.

Maybe that's the sort of answer you were looking for? Feel free to tell me I'm completely off-base ;)