This post is in response to opinions people have expressed to me about https://www.roadtovr.com/sightful-spacetop-announcement-investment-funding/.

  • The main thing people should know! Sightful is only shipping 1000 units total for now. They’re doing lots of weird things here, mainly because this is a pilot. It’s not a mass market offering. If you’re asking “was this product made for me” the answer is “probably not.” There are definitely 1000 people in the world who would want this.

  • One very valid point people have:
    • For a lot of enthusiasts, gamers and hardware engineer types, something like Bigscreen Beyond is going to be way better than this. (But it will take work to make portable.)

  • Two points about people going “$61M in funding, smh.”

    • One: that’s a normal amount of money! That’s enough for 70 employees for 6 years, which is probably right. If they’re shipping their own OS, they’ll need a lot of engineers and support people. Also they’re getting chips and software from Qualcomm, which is ahhh, not cheap

    • Two: Fuck off with your “well I’m smarter than them and I could make a better product than them.” It’s not about being smart or wise, it’s about being bold. If you think you can do better than these guys, get some investment and show the world that.

  • Some points about “omg how can it possibly cost $2000”:

  • The BOM comes out to around $1500-1800, and there’s a lot of software costs:

    • Nreal Light costs $600 on its own. See “could they have gotten a better HMD here”

    • This is using a Snapdragon 865! No chromebooks that I can find have shipped with this. 865 is serious shit, I think it’s 8-core and at least 6gb ram.

    • Here’s an 865 devkit that costs $1.2k: https://eragon.einfochips.com/products/development-kits/qualcomm-snapdragon-865-eragon-eic-q865-210-hardware-development-kit-hdk.html

    • I would expect the snapdragon 865, keyboard, mousepad and chassis to be VERY expensive. 865 is hard to get for cheap in low MOQs (they are only using 1000 here!)

    • The chassis looks injection molded, those molds weren’t cheap to make.

    • Also this may be paying for actual software development.

  • Making an expensive headset isn’t stupid, actually.

    • Facebook wasted billions and billions making Quest 2 cheap, and its retention is ass. Super duper risky! Making things cheap is expensive, and you have to get volume.

    • With expensive hardware, all your users are dedicated. They invested a lot of money in this, and clearly they had good reasons to want it. Means they’ll be very good at giving feedback, and your next iteration will be that much better.

    • This is obviously a pilot! They’re only selling 1000 of these! They’re looking to see if there are people who love this idea, and what they want more specifically. This isn’t a mass market launch!

  • Is the laptop form factor good? YES!

    • This isn’t for gamers! This is probably going to be mostly for people who spend their days in front of huge spreadsheets, (what’s the word for UIs full of stock tickers?) and code editors. Hand and controller tracking isn’t very good yet - spatial input isn’t very good yet. These guys are just going “well HMD displays are pretty high res, what if we don’t need monitors anymore?” It’s a good question! The answer is probably “no!”

    • So yes it’s kind of boring. Boring is good! If it gets out of my way, I can actually use it!

    • And yes, it’ll probably be entirely flat web apps, but that’s fine! eg. Google Suite is going to be really performant and nice on this device

  • Could they have gotten a better HMD here? NO!

    • Nreal Air is very good. It’s light, it doesn’t look that stupid to wear in public. Most VR HMDs don’t have the pixel density, but Light actually does because it has a pretty low FOV

  • Is arm64 and roll-your-own OS stupid here? Probably not!

    • Snapdragon 865 is a very good chip designed for very specific purposes. 865 and Nreal Light were practically made for each other. It’s hard to find a decent x86_64 processor that fits in a netbook that can drive displays as fast as Nreal Light requires.

  • Is there a market? Maybe! if it’s just 1000 people, almost certainly! Some user stories off the top of my head:

    • My 48 year old dad,, these days he writes PHP in a web IDE, calls his employees over <insert call app here> and probably reads lots of documents and spreadsheets, all on a laptop. If this just worked and let him have more screen space and better posture, he’d probably like it!

    • Some guy I know is a day trader. I’m actually confused about how he makes money, but he clearly does. He has two enormous 48-inch monitors in his office that have some huge stock trading software suite taking up the full area. He’s been talking about traveling to Europe for a while but doesn’t want to because it’ll be way harder for him to trade from a laptop. This device might help!