Xreal style glasses use forms of "birdbath" optics with screens up top reflected through prisms. This likely use the regular concentric pancake optics used in many other VR headsets.

But yeah, the angles are to obscure thickness. It's not going to be as thin as it appear from a distance.

but there are other LEO Internet services, like Iridium and Globalstar that just don't compare, like 100x slower at 5x monthly price for 1000x less data.

"because LEO" don't explain why Starlink is like million times cheaper and faster than competitors while singlehandedly being reponsible for like 75% of man-made objects in space currently and past.

If you are stuck on a ship in a typhoon, iridium is precisely the system you want to be using.

these seem to be just operator hq locations, not necessarily the station street addresses. but yeah, the locations would be public information.

All of the social media have this issue: the fraud detection algorithm become oversensitized and starts flagging every new accounts. But it's not the policy, so the company won't admit to mandating ID submission.

Not that I am comfortable uploading ID or that I even consider Quest, but that is how it starts.

Facebook is the only social media I've ever had this kind of problem with. Every few years I find some group or community that only exists on Facebook that I want to join (in the most recent case it was a local DnD meetups group; in a previous case, it was a gardening group that was my only reputable lead on seeds for an uncommon variety of heirloom tomato I was searching for). It always ends in my new account getting banned within a few days for suspected fraud with no real reason or opportunity for appeal. No other social media has that problem as far as I can tell, it seems like it's primarily a Facebook problem, and clearly I'm not some unique case considering how common a story it seems.

Perhaps it has something to do with if you had an old account you deleted a decade ago; maybe Meta assumes that any person who ever deleted their account will never ever want to make a new one, so anybody using the same email or name or face or ID or device as anything that has touched a deleted account is by definition fraudulent.

Maybe like destruction of Russian military command structure sparing just the silo based nuclear force?

no country had made road or water profitable either

I think this is a big stopgap until an actual transparent AR glasses and an admission that Meta and the entire AR industry have no instant next quarter solution for shortcomings of Meta Ray-Ban Display.

The geometric waveguide technology used in the Display glasses is quite complicated and costly, the birdbath optic that Xreal uses is stupid, so to speak, and various holographic solutions used by Even Realities and likes is not so spectacular in light loss(IIUC the fancy term is "quantum efficiency"), as well as multi color feasibility(needs 3 layers with separate image sources).

Prior to now we didn't know if Meta will be doing a Display 2 or Quest 4, or if they plan to do something else. This is that something else.

Rumor is they are going to do a Quest 4 (late next year).

I agree that these seem like a stopgap short of the thing everyone wants - Vision Pro specs (ahaha) in a pair of regular glasses.

Personally, as a glasses-wearer, I'm not quite convinced it's the right target though - even my 20 gram glasses are uncomfortable to wear all day and I take them off whenever they're not needed. I'd rather have a ski-goggle device (similarly light, but with the weight more evenly distributed, and still with optical see-through) with fewer performance compromises. Of course that wouldn't let the manufacturer dominate "the next form of personal computing" or whatever.

Yeah, I've switched to ultra-light rimless glasses and I really do not want to go back. I no longer have sore nose-pad dents at the end of the day.

(I have a fairly strong prescription, so the literal glass in my glasses does weigh a fair bit more than for most people. Yay modern optional media! It's so much nicer than it used to be)

They had to get something out to undercut Snap finally formally entering the market with a consumer product. That's my read. Their entire strategy for years has been doing whatever they can to box-out potential XR space competitors.

Is this Five Whys from First Principles?

It sure seems to be. For the uninitiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys