Technical Illusions's augmented reality glasses

I can't get excited about Google Glass. The public privacy concerns are too great. The platform is too closed, the software too crappy. The company making it has too patchy a history of support and too disgusting a commercial mandate.

I can't get excited about Oculus Rift. The issues I want to see more game designs tackle right now are ones it makes worse. It's a device that cuts out everyone around you, that makes 25% of people motion sick, that seems basically purpose-built to re-sell the same first-person action games and designs in an era where the usual rasterization improvements have hit diminishing returns. Its backers crow about immersion, but videogame immersion is bullshit. On a purely technical level I care more about color-accurate and high-DPI displays and it's a big step backwards for both these things.

But yesterday Sean Hollister at The Verge interviewed Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson and demoed some new AR glasses from Technical Illusions, a company being described as "spin-off," but sounds more like a cast-off, of Valve.

This is what I want. They don't take pictures. They don't tell me where to go. They don't encourage me to come back to Doom, Team Fortress, or other designs that worked perfectly well on traditional displays. Instead they show me something new; they let me interact in new kinds of spaces with other people; they let people who are not plugged in spectate.

It's actually all in the name, right? They augment my experience. They don't replace it, they don't virtualize it, and they certainly don't "smooth," "simplify," or "filter" it.