Two very different ideas of strapping a display to your face arrive in the same spring, and together they sketch out the whole map of where this goes. The Rift DK1 is landing on developer desks: low-resolution, blurry, tethered to a PC, and still somehow magic in the demos that are emerging from it. Google is handing Glass to its Explorers at the same time, a tiny screen floating at the corner of your eye that does not replace reality but pokes little notes into it.
VR goes deep, AR goes light
The Rift wants to take you somewhere else entirely. Glass wants to keep you here but add things. Neither is quite ready: the DK1 is blurry and restricted by the cable, and Glass is socially strange in a way nobody has quite found the word for yet. People are already side-eyeing anyone wearing one in public. But they are both real hardware you can put on your face, which puts them well ahead of almost everything else in this conversation.
The trend for the year ahead
The face is the new frontier, and the industry is already splitting into two camps: full immersion and lightweight annotation. Expect developers to start picking sides, and expect the first serious VR-native software to emerge from the Rift dev kit community over the next twelve months.
The Rift is the one that gives me chills. Glass is fascinating but feels like a solution looking for a problem. Immersion first, annotation later: that is my bet. The killer use case for AR needs more time in the oven than the killer use case for VR, and the DK1 is already proving the latter.
Part of Two Decades of XR, my running diary of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality.