Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…I believe in AR glasses as part of the future because I do think looking down at your phone all the time is not great for us as social creatures. So if you can maintain social connections and get information, that's where I think we're headed. Orion, the AR glasses we worked on, I worked on most recently are a bit ahead of their time because they're using waveguides and MicroLED that are not quite ready for mass production. The yields just aren't there. The cost is still high. I think that's absolutely a path that AR glasses are likely to take. And as we figure out the input to those glasses, how do you communicate with them when you're on the move, when you're in public? How do you communicate quietly, silently with them? I think once we start to figure out some of those challenges that having a display that's mostly off that you can turn on when you want it to be on seems like part of the future. So that's part of it. The other part is there's this lineage of technology going through VR and then AR and now in, I'm using the term robotics, physical AI, but you really have to step back and look at autonomous vehicles, drones, obviously robots, autonomy period, manufacturing. All of these technologies are going to need the same piece parts, the same pieces that we built in the AR/VR spectrum. It's interesting with VR. There's this idea with when you build product, there's always this question when something doesn't work. Is it just you executed it badly or the idea was just a bad idea and it's always hard to know. It feels like with the AR, it's just like so much effort was put into making it work just for a decade, many decades, and just has not worked. So it's nice that we know, okay, there's nothing we can really do right now to make this work. I completely agree with you. The issue is just like, "I don't want to sit on my couch disconnected from the world." And even if I could see people through it's just like, "Eh, I'm just going to ... I don't need this. It's not that big of a deal." In AR, you're going to just start getting more and more larger and larger displays. But the great thing about Orion is you've got a 70 degree field of view binocular. So with the prototype, you got to sense what this is really going to be like in the future. It's very hard to describe how it feels to use a pair of glasses like this, but when you do, you suddenly are like, "Oh, I feel immersed. The field of view is wide enough. I feel immersed." And it becomes pretty clear that I think this is part of where the future's headed.…

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