Please, for the love of God, prepare for what you are about to see. Facebook just received a patent for, uh, elegant Augmented Reality (RA) hats – and it’s a real smile.
First, some credit for the poor old Facebook and its terrible RA hats. Today’s mixed reality hats are bulky, cumbersome and not great. These new designs, Gizmodo the notes, at the very least, attempt to incorporate the screen into existing clothing items and, by moving the hardware away from the wearer’s face, could theoretically make RA hats more comfortable.
But take a brief look through the patent, published Tuesday and first discovered by the law firm Founders Legal, and you’ll see that even the little man from the mock-ups seems like he doesn’t want to be there. I mean, just look at it. He seems to be trying to escape his own hat.
People, you are looking at the face of the future with a gentle step back. Only the geniuses of Facebook’s brain could present a mixed reality screen that can be folded and out of sight when you don’t feel like using it, but that somehow hangs simultaneously from the edge of a baseball cap. i scales on the wearer’s nose.
If baseball caps aren’t your style, don’t worry! Facebook thought ahead and also launched designs that would work with a visor, a cowboy hat and even a fedora, which will eventually allow you to offer a tangible tip of the hat to your virtual waifu. No, Mom, you don’t have to look for that.
To be fair, no one can say for sure what the mixed reality headphones of the future will look like, nor can they predict which designs will take off compared to which will laugh at existence. But it seems reasonable to assume that subtlety will win and that an RA screen embedded in a pair of glasses would probably be more popular than, well, whatever those monstrosities are.
Of course, creating a functional mixed reality device that looks like normal glasses is a much more complicated engineering challenge than using all the extra space a hat offers. But if it worked, at least you wouldn’t have to walk in public doing whatever this woman is.
READ MORE: Google Glass was ugly, but Facebook’s AR baseball hat could be worse [Gizmodo]
More information on augmented reality: Augmented reality changes the cosmetics industry forever
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