There are several new or new-feeling devices that have come out or will come out in the past year, but two obvious ones are nowhere to be found.
1. Why doesn't the phone/dockable computer exist?
2. Why is there so much emphasis on vr/ar headsets when simple text overlay would be much simpler and more useful?
I have some ideas on this but I really would like to hear other people's thoughts. About the phone/computer, I actually saw a phone (or maybe it was a tablet) that could dual boot into Android or Linux maybe 5 years ago. It would be great to be able to just plug your phone into a dock with a monitor/keyboard/mouse and never have to carry around a laptop. For 90%+ people, that would be powerful enough. The iphone 16 that just came out appears to be slightly more powerful than the m1 macs, which are only 4 years old and still decently powerful machines. Now I get that Apple would never do this because it would cut into their own sales, but why wouldn't Samsung or other similar companies?
About #2, completely detatching oneself from one's surroundings by wrapping screen-google around your head is an obviously fringe idea. On top of that it's a considerable hardware challenge so even something like Meta's upcoming chunky-but-more-or-less-normal-looking glasses will almost certainly be exorbitant. Why doesn't anybody start with a super simple pair of glasses that have text-only overlay. Also, no on-device ai or even significant compute, just connect via bluetooth to a phone. I get that Meta will never tie themselves to phones because they have a grudge against Apple, but again, why not Samsung or even Teenage Engineering? It seems crazy to say, but Google basically got the form factor right ~20 years ago with google glass. Now so much later shouldn't this be a lot easier to make a reality?
It wouldn't bother me so much, but after seeing so many distopian headsets and two or three ai pins in a short span, it really makes you wonder why simpler, more useful things don't come out.
The glasses, there are several options already that are not VR that are simply display overlay. Here is a quick Google search result https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/xreal-air-vs-viture-xr-d...
I have no idea how good they are or the quality of them but they do exist outside of a full VR headset. One of the problems is is they have to reach a price point that people, even hobbyists, are willing to spend on them so they cannot be super high resolution displays because that drives the price up a lot. If you want them here they are.