Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

news.ycombinator.com

331–340 of 362 posts

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#331

ARkit finally pushing AR to the masses. From a developer perspective, having an SDK that simplifies "environment detection/reasoning" is huge. Previously required pretty deep hardware requirements and now is turning into an AI/ML/software problem. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/building_a_b...

Does it have Ocr built in?

not that I've seen, though with some logical combination of object dimensions, env variables (depth of field, etc), and a decent image recognition/ML then you could probably get decent OCR. Note that this is for visual recognition, feel text is decently solved (exhibitA, Google Translate).

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#332

ARkit finally pushing AR to the masses. From a developer perspective, having an SDK that simplifies "environment detection/reasoning" is huge. Previously required pretty deep hardware requirements and now is turning into an AI/ML/software problem. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/building_a_b...

A usable AR SDK has been available from Qualcomm/Vuforia for years on more devices than ARKit supports. The only thing that came out of it was marketing gimmicks.

yep - have been using Vuforia since it came out. Fantastic for scanning in models and the usability is great. That said, I keep coming back to the fact that the install base of iOS11 is what intrigues me the most. By no means is ARkit the magic bullet, but its enough and it can tempt developers the same.

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#333
post #265
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like a very large, performant-enough display for solely for editing in vi. Even that is still just a dream, as far as I can tell.

Have you taken a look at the Dasung Paperlike yet? http://www.dasung.com/english/

Is this more advanced than just an Indiegogo pre-order?

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm working on it. I believe the future of UI will be like Tinder or Akinator, where your browse through results and apply constraints to the search space by answering simple yes/no questions.

Nice! can you share some details on your work? do you have a write up somewhere? also is this academic research? or a commercial enterprise?

I'm trying to reduce suffering (the delta between the real and the ideal). For that, we need to communicate better.

Today, we generally communicate through natural language ("Hi, can I get a taxi at XYZ?") or software (Uber's "REQUEST UBERX" button).

I'm taking the best of natural language (ubiquity, flexibility, generality) and software (unambiguity, conciseness, guidance, automation) to create a better communication paradigm.

First, I'm getting rid of action verbs. Everything is the description of a state. Instead of "I want to go to the park", think "I am at the park" or better "me.location = park".

Second, I'm reversing the flow. Instead of manually requesting things, you get things suggested to you. Most of communication is done by accepting or rejecting suggestions, like with Akinator or Tinder.

Third, I'm making the real world interactive by allowing physical things to act triggers for suggestions. With the press of a button, you can capture you current location, a QR code, an RFID tag, a picture of a book, some Chinese text, the song currently playing, etc. The captured entity will be processed, meaning will be extracted, yes/no questions will be asked, and you'll be offered ways to interact with it.

Basically, I want to be able to point at something, get information about it, and act upon it.

This is neither academic research or commercial enterprise. I'm currently doing this on my own, but anyone is free to join.

Next week, I will publish a blog post explaining the relationship between GTD (Getting Things Done methodology) and the future of UI. This should cover some of the ideas I have mentioned here.

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to bring people physically closer together, just lean into NIMBYism and keep housing supply small. As current trends continue and require more people to live in city centers, we'll see more and more instances of people forced to have roommates when they'd rather not, multiple families forced to share a single apartment when they'd rather have their own, etc. But somehow I think you will actually create co…

I disagree. Living in a dense city does not necessitate living in some sort of tenement and being at each other's throats. Living costs are high in cities because people who bought property early like it that way. They want their properties to appreciate, so they prevent others from increasing supply. Governments seem happy to object out of some mistaken sense of social justice or historical preservation. Still, peop…

In some sense upzoning is still living further apart, just on the vertical rather than horizontal plane.

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#336
post #315

Large-scale low-cost metal 3D printing. We're _very_ close and it could be a game changer for a number of industries since the price for one unit is very close to the mass-production per-unit cost. It could allow custom-fit application or modification of a design on a per-customer level for things that would in the past require significant outlay. If I need a new part for something that's no longer supported, no prob…

Look at desktop metal, they're killing it.

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice! can you share some details on your work? do you have a write up somewhere? also is this academic research? or a commercial enterprise?

I'm trying to reduce suffering (the delta between the real and the ideal). For that, we need to communicate better. Today, we generally communicate through natural language ("Hi, can I get a taxi at XYZ?") or software (Uber's "REQUEST UBERX" button). I'm taking the best of natural language (ubiquity, flexibility, generality) and software (unambiguity, conciseness, guidance, automation) to create a better communicatio…

do you have a way that I can contact you for more information? I am working on something similar that might interest you.

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#339
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has so much economic potential that it hurts not being in the space already (working on that though) As someone not familiar with the area, could you elaborate on some examples of what you think the economic potential is? To an outsider like me, being able to overlay virtual objects on a scene seems like a nice curiosity, not particularly an engine for commerce. Edit: specifically, I was curious about areas wher…

I think you're missing a more important use case, namely, being able to layer contextual information over objects in your field of vision. Use cases in industry abound. On a trip to the doctor's office, your physician can overlay your medical file and get pertinent information about you. If you are a politician holding a fundraising dinner, AR + facial recognition will supply you with the biographical information, so…

That was an insightful comment, thank you. Like a few others in the thread, I was skeptical of AR's practical potential - the demos/apps I've seen so far felt like "a solution in search of a problem" - but your examples and concise summary helped me to imagine the range of possibilities.

The ability to "layer contextual information over objects in your field of vision".. I see, that is the crux of it, to further integrate the "real world", the sensory experience of a person, with the global web of information and computing. Great examples you gave of industries that could utilize this, in healthcare, political/social/interpersonal sphere, athletic or intellectual/educational/artistic uses.

It conjures a vision of near future where people enhanced with AR - or maybe "augmented senses" - would have distinct advantages over people without access to such layers of contextual information.

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#340

New, exciting tech making its way in to boring, old industries. And I mean boring , old industries. There's an unbelievable amount of backwards business process that's still out there. Unless you've experienced it first hand, I really don't think you can fully appreciate how manual the "business world" still is. For the past year I've been working with an intermodal trucking company building an app for owner-operator…

Can I ask what company you work for? Sounds like it's interesting work that's actually augmenting people's workflow to be both faster and easier. Seems like it's satisfying work.
Post reply on HN