111–120 of 137 posts
Optical AR is a dead end. Passthrough AR with VR goggles and 8K cameras on the outside will be the way that wins.
If you are talking for many "game playing" applications you may be correct. But it be ridiculous to thing that people are going to be going out in public with a VR headset with cameras (known as Passthrough AR). On top of a number of human factor issues, it would dangerously block a person's view of the real world.
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This seems like a tech-community-only opinion to me, the same thinking that is currently killing Magic Leap. If you want to build a mass-market AR headset, you should have one priority: make it look like glasses. People like eye contact. People don’t like looking like alien telemetry pods are eating their eyeballs. Once you have that, then you can worry about things like resolution, fov, and color reproduction. The o…
> If you want to build a mass-market AR headset, you should have one priority: make it look like glasses. I so vehemently disagree with this because it's the same category of thinking that keeps XR in the dark ages. The capital "P" Problem in XR is content. Behind every major innovation in content consumption technology has been content to consume. As of yet, there is no such content for XR, and the one thing Magic L…
I follow VR more closely than AR. It has a ton of examples as to how people will not pay to use ugly garbage tethered to a desktop PC. This is why Facebook's pivot to standalone headsets has been so successful. PC tethered VR apps look better, are more interactive, and are vastly larger and more in depth. No one plays them, because a slick single device is more important than every other factor. When I used to demo PC VR apps to people, they'd be blown away. They'd ask how to get one, I'd explain the PC and the base stations, and their faces would fall. No one ever bought one. When I do the same demo with the much worse apps on the Quest, people buy Quests.
Magic Leap's investment in content is another example. What good did that investment do? None, because the Leap itself was too big and clunky for people to buy.
Back in October, when Facebook made a lot of "metaverse" noise, I wrote a thread looking at the history of stereoscopic 3D from the 1850s to the present as a way of explaining why I think facehugger VR is going nowhere. Somebody turned up to complain that going back to the Civil War era wasn't sufficiently big picture for him: "You need a long view. All the serious players are still in the Mercury phase. The Gemini a…
The same Abovitz that did this abomination of a TEDx talk ... https://youtu.be/w8J5BWL8oJY
"This crazy art form corresponds to the crazy significance MAgic Leaps technology will have on mankind. IT IS THE NEXT BIG THING WE HAVE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR."
...
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Read your thread, but I don't think you have quite the right idea. There's certainly a long history of static 3D imaging with photography and then movies. But that's not all that related to the modern tech started by the Oculus Rift. Yeah, 3D doesn't make photography or movies fundamentally different for the most part, because with some rare exceptions we already can fill in the blanks. Consumer VR itself is a pretty…
Sorry, but I'm not persuaded. Does some tech take a while to develop? Sure. But some tech never develops. If you're only including happy-path examples, that's a biased sample. If you're trying to do analysis and not propaganda, you have to look at both routes and see what the differentiators are. If you want to suggest this time it's different, you have to explain why it's different. My point is pretty simple: Stereo…
Well, the thing I see immediately is that you're not really doing an accurate analysis. Stereoscopic 3D from a fixed point of view is indeed an old concept, and definitely not enough. But we've moved well beyond that already.
I think the actual value proposition is immersive stereoscopic 3D + good in-world body-based controls. That changes things in a way something like a 3D TV can't.
Eg, for games, you can't really get more immersive than acting out your character's movements yourself. Something like Superhot lets you do Matrix-like moves in VR that just nothing else does. You can find games with slow-mo like Max Payne, but they don't make non-VR games in which you can actively move your head out of the path of a bullet and have that work naturally.
Or something like Racket NX is a very real workout that works very naturally.
The downside of course is that the tech has considerable limits and constraints that will still take time figuring out. Normal computer games worked out their mechanics over decades, so if you go back far enough to something like Dune 2, it feels very clunky.
On a longer term, I'm hoping for the day I can replace my monitors with a VR helmet and just display anything I need anywhere in an arbitrary position and amount. One can't ever have enough terminal windows.
Optical AR is a dead end. Passthrough AR with VR goggles and 8K cameras on the outside will be the way that wins.
I bet they could make them look very slick, since the hardware requirements would so much less arduous. There was a set of 'augmented' bicycle glasses here on HN some months ago and they honestly looked pretty compelling.
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I don't think there is a market for AR on a consumer's face except like a side display like Google Glass. I think the market for AR is in industrial operations, military, etc. where people won't care what they look like.
I want product reviews as I look at items on shelves in stores, without holding my phone in front of my face the whole time.
I wonder whether there still will be stores selling things you want to spend time to choose between options by the time that tech exists.
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No one wants to wear a headset if it makes them look stupid. If AR glasses are a dead end then mass adoption of AR outside of gaming/enterprise is likely DOA.
Bluetooth headphones were "stupid looking" and endlessly mocked. Now airpods are in vogue. Social perceptions easily change, especially when there are billions of dollars invested in making them change.
In all cases, I think it was more the “look how I’m more interested in my own world than in people around me” than the actual looks of the device.
Possibly, the fact that early portable tech typically is fairly impractical (for example in battery life or in base ergonomics) added to that.
Back in October, when Facebook made a lot of "metaverse" noise, I wrote a thread looking at the history of stereoscopic 3D from the 1850s to the present as a way of explaining why I think facehugger VR is going nowhere. Somebody turned up to complain that going back to the Civil War era wasn't sufficiently big picture for him: "You need a long view. All the serious players are still in the Mercury phase. The Gemini a…
I don't know. I would say the historic trend is computing becomes more and more ubiquitous. Truly ubiquitous computing would need an always available display and AR wearables seems like the solution there. "Its too expensive right now" isn't really a damming argument, is it?
It's true that computing has become more and more ubiquitous in recent decades. Will that continue? We'll see. Will it continue with VR and AR? Maybe, maybe not. Your approach to this is fine for asking "Is this SF short story plausible?" But it's not at all sufficient to justify billions of dollars in spending.
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I don't think there is a market for AR on a consumer's face except like a side display like Google Glass. I think the market for AR is in industrial operations, military, etc. where people won't care what they look like.
I want product reviews as I look at items on shelves in stores, without holding my phone in front of my face the whole time.