Ask HN: Best AR Device?
I bought a used Hololens 1 on Ebay for about what the Xreal Air costs.  (Except that I can wear my glasses w&#x2F; the HR1) The Xreal Air doesn&#x27;t seem to have a lot of intelligence onboard whereas the HL1 has a PC built inside.  The dork factor is worse for the HL1 I think.<p>The HL1 has a SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) system that builds a 3-d model of the environment you use it in.  You can place a 3-d object somewhere in your space,  go to another room,  then come back and the object is still there,  look at it from all sides,  etc.  There are also applications that can do things like visualize airplanes in the space around an airport or let you throw darts and draw the trajectories they take.<p>It looks like the XRA is just a display on its own,  if you have a really powerful Android phone it can run applications similar to the HL1,  or you can use it as a display for a game console or computer.  I think the XRA has more apps,  particularly if you discount all the apps for the HL1 that are clients for some enterprise 3-d modelling software.<p>The HL1 would like to be usable without a controller,  it recognizes the same pinch gesture that the Apple Vision does but the Apple Vision has a wide enough field of view that you can make that gesture with your hands at waist level whereas you have to hold your hands up to head level to make gestures for the HL1 and that is quickly tiring.  You can get a &quot;clicker&quot; which fixes that.<p>I see the HL1 as a &quot;minimum viable product&quot; for AR and similar devices might have better specs on paper (HL2) but aren&#x27;t really better in practice.  One real weakness of all the holographic waveguide or birdbath devices is that they aren&#x27;t bright enough to use outdoors in the day at all,  I think the SLAM would not work with the HL1 outdoors at night either.<p>Of course the display capabilities of the Apple Vision are entirely different,  the Apple Vision can subtract light,  not just add it,  and it should work outdoors.  On the other hand,  the software environment for applications should be basically the same for all those things and so far as I can tell all the major AR headsets (HL, XRA, AV, Magic Leap) support Unity for developing applications so I think porting applications from one to another should be possible.<p>Those who &quot;think different&quot; might get a jump on AV application development by starting with another headset instead of futzing with the AV emulator.