> I mean, why try to do anything? [...] compromise [...] severe lack of funding
I agree with the challenge, but suggest parts of the compromise are not being squarely faced.
Have you seen a Jackie Chan action film, where mixed into the ending credits, is a blooper reel of stunt fails and injuries? It serves to correct the reality distortion of the film itself, to reduce viewer injuries from emulation misjudgement. If Hollywood held itself to a similar standard, there would be less paralysis from "we had to move them, before the car exploded", and less drowning with "but... it was so quiet".
A microbiologist writing a young children's picture book, included an errata page. Describing the liberties taken, and at least some of the errors made. And if just maybe, one might uncharitably suggest that maybe it was motivated a bit more by concern for being seen by ones colleges as having made an mistake, and perhaps a bit less for the conceptual integrity of readers, still it served to remind of the latter, and perhaps helped.
Yes, resources are always limited, and engineering and content creation are fundamentally about tradeoffs.
But you know how expense escalates, as one moves from thought to sketch to storyboard to crufty draft to professionally polished prettiness? That means one can always afford to add something crufty, if motivated to do so.
I'd have no problem if people said, "yeah, we could have reduced that misconception, but given our resource limitations, it would have been an unprofessionally hackish job mixed into our otherwise nice work, and we prioritized polish over the misconceptions, which maybe sucks, but it has to be viable as a product".
But I've never heard that. I've never heard "we prioritized polish over student outcomes". But I have heard lots of comments about software limitations, and pedagogical constraints, and so on. But the implicit constraining context, that "pretty" is prioritized as more important than "works", that's usually not looked at straight on.
And sure, part of that is the dysfunctional way that content is created, which in turn results from the way it's funded. I talked with a PBS science creator, who commented, sure, we'd love to try iterative creation and testing, rather than creating a thing, tossing it over the wall into the world, and never being sure how all our efforts and tradeoffs actually worked out... and just as soon as we find someone willing to fund that, we'll try it.
So my suggestion is that if we were more heads up about our choices, and their costs, we might be making different and better choices.
> headsets
I'm looking forward to the 1080p Nreal Light AR glasses early next year. I've found resolution limitations more of a bottleneck than market, but then for me it's merely a hobby for now. Thanks for the 10k link.