I am looking for light AR glasses / AR headsets for Sketchup Pro on MS Surface Book 3 with Windows 10 Home and for Sketchup Viewer on iPad Pro with the latest iPadOS.
For example Hololens 2, but it’s too expensive for me.
Which AR glasses / AR headset are suitable? I want to show my customers my own sketchup drawings of home gardens in 3D.
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Do you want to show the model in 3D (in Virtual Reality) or overlay it over the real World (Augmeted Reality)? If second - have you tried the AR viewer mode in SketchUp Viewer for Android/iOS?
If you want to show with VR - I don’t think that the devices that you mention are powerful enough to drive the VR headset.
I want augmented reality, for example my plan of a house garden over the real world in the background.
The AR viewer from Sketchup on the iPad is good when I show the planned garden on a desk, but not 1: 1 in the garden to be built live on site. I think a headset with AR glasses is the better option.
There are also AR glasses, for example Epson Moverio. Do you know these ?
It is not easy as a gardener to get an overview of all the technical possibilities …
With what you are looking at, I don’t think you have many options other than Hololens 2. (or Trimble XR10) But that is circa £3.5k, which is very far from cheap. And quite niche.
I’ve used both Hololens 1 and Hololens 2, will not recommend original first version (slower and small field of view). From what I can see in terms of Epson Moverio - it is way below Hololens 1. E.g. I don’t see anything to track 6DoF to position hologram correctly. I used similar glasses (with one display) for warehouse picking operations - it can add image, but just floating in one space, without awareness of surounding space (one of things that makes Hololens so cool. And expensive)
I am using the Oculus Quest 2 with the VR viewer. Note that the VR viewer is a separate program that runs on the PC. The main expense in getting VR up and running is that you need a powerful graphics card, and right now the cheapest ones that support VR (I have the AMD Radeon 580 with 8gb VRAM) are around USD $600 due to shortages caused by the demand for cryptocurrency mining. You also need the $80 fiber optic cable to run tethered to the PC (there is supposed to be wireless AirLink support but I’ve never gotten it to work) and possibly a USB-C adapter card for the Oculus Link cable (don’t expect it to work with a dongle-type USB-3 adapter). The Oculus Quest 2 itself is $400. Still cheaper than the Hololens or other alternatives.
The Sketchup VR viewer is a bit of a pain as you have to save every project as Sketchup 2018 format and the VR interface is not that smooth but it works.
AR (using the mobile viewers for Android or iOS) is a good option - I use both - and I found the cheapest tablet viewer is getting a refurbished 9.7 inch iPad 5th gen on Amazon.
There is yet another option for viewing on VR headset which does NOT require tethering to the PC, and that is to use Unreal Engine with the udatasmith (free) export plugin. Unreal Engine produces amazing and flexible interactive walkthroughs. It’s a bit hard to learn (I would say it’s a bit like learning Blender) but pretty amazing, and it’s free unless you’re developing games (then you pay royalties on the games you sell). I have only used Unreal Engine to build apps for the PC which I view in tethered mode, but you should ALSO be able to build an Android app for viewing your model, and put it on a viewer like the Oculus which runs Android. But I haven’t done that myself.
AR = using a screen with a camera which overlays your model on the real world using camera positioning
VR = using some type of stereo anagraphic headset with controllers to simulate moving around inside an imaginary world
It really does sound like you want AR - the Oculus does have cameras but uses them for positioning and for occasional grainy pass-through vision. I don’t know if there are VR headsets that do a good job of AR and won’t have you falling into a ditch, but I would think that AR with a decent tablet should suit your purposes quite well.