Battery is weight. Putting that weight off the head and into a back pocket is imho a very acceptable solution to the weight problem.
The screen is also a huge part of the weight issue, because it is literally a smartphone strapped to your head, plus some extra bits so your eyes can focus. It's heavy, and it's located on the front of your head. There's big foam bits touching your face all over. I could definitely not wear this for as long as I'm usually working at my desktop.
Yes, putting the battery somewhere else is a good solution, one I've used with my Quest a bunch of times. But if I need to be plugged into a wall to do long stints with a smartphone strapped to my face, what's the advantage of that over a normal screen?
Then again, I'm a boring old man who just wants more space for text editors and terminal windows. Maybe you kids have found something fun to do with VR.
And for the record, VR is already “a thing”. Has been for years now. It’s mainstream, it’s on multiple platforms, and even has standalone offerings.
VR is a "thing," yes. It is a thing gathering dust on my shelf. It's fun like Wii Sports is fun, but without the audience. It's a neat experience but the only truly useful thing I've found to do with it is to walk around the streets of a city I'm going to visit so I can orient myself. But that's hardly something I'd spend $3,500 to do.
Hopefully Apple will find a "killer app" for VR. If I could use this thing to quickly and easily sketch out a remodeling project, I'd love it. But I haven't found anything on my Quest that can do that, but Apple knows a thing or two about killer apps. Or they did, anyway.
“Chunky pair of glasses” already exists as a VR device, but they are highly personalized and prohibitively expensive.
All the ones I've seen look like really ridiculously oversized ski goggles. Please link to something like this and I may change my mind.
As for “it’s basically a smartphone strapped to your face” I’m not sure how you’d break away from that?
Have a super miniature, high-intensity display somewhere near the front of the glasses and use mirrors to reflect it into the user's eye. It would involve incredibly complex eye tracking algorithms to prevent nausea, and that's going to cost in computing power and energy.
Or use lasers projected onto the lenses at some kind of polarization, which might do a better job of overlaying on bright backgrounds, but suffer the same eye tracking limitation.
Don't get me wrong, I really want VR. But I want to be in VR for hours at a time, not minutes. And that's about as long as I can stand to have a cell phone strapped to my face.
