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It's true that VR and AR has not lived up to the hype. However, history has many examples of a technology that disappoints for decades but continually improves

by MarkMc 10y ago

It's true that VR and AR has not lived up to the hype. However, history has many examples of a technology that disappoints for decades but continually improves to the point where it suddenly reaches a critical mass: eg. flat screen TVs, touch screen input, air conditioning, powered flight.

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
I think we're more likely to see direct neural interfaces before we see AR in a form factor that appeals to consumers. It's almost as hard to consumerise the latter as the former. You really need to improve component density and power efficiency by an order of magnitude or two to make AR portable and useful, and that's not an easy thing to do. It's also much easier to consumerise voice/haptic AI than display-in-your-eye AR. There are plenty of applications where voice/haptic gives a better consumer experience. I think that was supposed to be the point of Apple's Watch. The product launched too early without the AI support it needed, so it ended looking like a rather pointless wrist terminal/failed fashion accessory. But it's not hard to imagine Watch becoming a much smarter on-wrist assistant with links to phone and desktop. The real shift won't be to AR, which is barely a display technology, but to a SmartOS model, where there's a single unified cloud and compute OS that stores personal data and projects, and can be accessed using a variety of mobile and static hardware endpoints. The problem in the industry now is smallthink Balkanisation. We have too much nostalgia for the Internet business culture of 2000, with too much emphasis on developing incompatible market enclosures to monetise advertising eyeballs and encourage content sales. There's too little interest in bringing it all together to give users new ways to invent cool stuff.
- dirtyaura 10y ago
  You are underestimating the difficulty of direct neural interface, while overestimating the difficulties of AR. With brain-computer interfaces, we are still in the very early research phase. With AR, we are building first real products. We have been steadily increasing component density and power efficiency for decades, so if that is the problem of AR, then AR is just around the corner.

by MarkMc 10y ago

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago

I think we're more likely to see direct neural interfaces before we see AR in a form factor that appeals to consumers. It's almost as hard to consumerise the latter as the former. You really need to improve component density and power efficiency by an order of magnitude or two to make AR portable and useful, and that's not an easy thing to do. It's also much easier to consumerise voice/haptic AI than display-in-your-eye AR. There are plenty of applications where voice/haptic gives a better consumer experience. I think that was supposed to be the point of Apple's Watch. The product launched too early without the AI support it needed, so it ended looking like a rather pointless wrist terminal/failed fashion accessory. But it's not hard to imagine Watch becoming a much smarter on-wrist assistant with links to phone and desktop. The real shift won't be to AR, which is barely a display technology, but to a SmartOS model, where there's a single unified cloud and compute OS that stores personal data and projects, and can be accessed using a variety of mobile and static hardware endpoints. The problem in the industry now is smallthink Balkanisation. We have too much nostalgia for the Internet business culture of 2000, with too much emphasis on developing incompatible market enclosures to monetise advertising eyeballs and encourage content sales. There's too little interest in bringing it all together to give users new ways to invent cool stuff.

dirtyaura 10y ago
You are underestimating the difficulty of direct neural interface, while overestimating the difficulties of AR. With brain-computer interfaces, we are still in the very early research phase. With AR, we are building first real products. We have been steadily increasing component density and power efficiency for decades, so if that is the problem of AR, then AR is just around the corner.