5 ms·

Personally I see more in Augmented Reality than Virtual Reality, certainly regarding applications. It's also not that commercial interesting that a big percent

Personally I see more in Augmented Reality than Virtual Reality, certainly regarding applications. It's also not that commercial interesting that a big percentage of people gets sick of VR. We stopped demoing because of this. AR seems to have less of those problems from empirical experience. I can use a Hololens for hours without feeling anything while with an oculus rift I get queasy after a couple of minutes. The only thing that I'm still waiting for is project northstar (http://blog.leapmotion.com/northstar/ http://blog.leapmotion.com/northstar/) so the devices becomes cheaper. The high price seems to hamper the adoption a lot.

melling 8y ago
Doesn’t everyone see more in AR, at least in the near term. Even conservative Apple is was working on AR. The ability to augment the real world has lots of useful benefits.
- jobigoud 8y ago
  I don't. I believe in AR but not short-term. I think AR will go into a "winter" soon and will be picked up by the mainstream some years later after key technology challenges are solved. I think AR (glasses) is at where VR was in the nineties. Currently AR has two form factors, phone and glasses. Phone-based AR is gimmicky. It can be fun and can work in some scenarios but it's monoscopic, has a ridiculous field of view, requires holding your phone in the air, and it's not really augmenting reality anyway, it's augmenting a video stream of reality (increased latency, reduced dynamic range, motion blur, etc.). Glasses-based AR will be great but currently has fundamental challenges with field of view, latency, optics, and integration of augmentations in the real world (e.g: procedural objects dynamically matching physical obstacles). It requires new inventions in hardware and software to fully realize the vision we have of it. On the other hand VR has a clear technological path for the next decade into human-like field of view and visual fidelity. The full enclosure means we can get +200° and fit eye tracking cameras in the headset. Foveated rendering, only render what you actually look at at full res. The advent of ray tracing hardware (easier foveated rendering and non-linear optics). There is no fundamental barrier to get from here to 60 pixels per degree at 200° fov.
  - mojomark 8y ago
    > I don't. I believe in AR but not short-term. I think AR will go into a "winter" soon and will be picked up by the mainstream some years later after key technology challenges are solved. I think AR (glasses) is at where VR was in the nineties. > Currently AR has two form factors, phone and glasses. > Phone-based AR is gimmicky. It can be fun and can work in some scenarios but it's monoscopic, has a ridiculous field of view, requires holding your phone in the air, and it's not really augmenting reality anyway, it's augmenting a video stream of reality (increased latency, reduced dynamic range, motion blur, etc.). > Glasses-based AR will be great but currently has fundamental challenges with field of view, latency, optics, and integration of augmentations in the real world (e.g: procedural objects dynamically matching physical obstacles). It requires new inventions in hardware and software to fully realize the vision we have of it. > On the other hand VR has a clear technological path for the next decade into human-like field of view and visual fidelity. The full enclosure means we can get +200° and fit eye tracking cameras in the headset. Foveated rendering, only render what you actually look at at full res. The advent of ray tracing hardware (easier foveated rendering and non-linear optics). There is no fundamental barrier to get from here to 60 pixels per degree at 200° fov. I 99.9% agree with this assesment, particularly with respect to the timeline of product maturity/adoption. However, I also agree with Andybak above, that AR & VR applications are complimentary, but largely different. One will not displace the other, but the technologies will merge such that you can seamlessly transition from AR to VR nd back using the same hardware (likely Virtual Retinal Display-based displays) and operating system. I use VR in my job (evaluating power plant designs), and for that, I need to be immersed in a 3D model as opposed to AR where not being fully immersed would be unnecessarily distracting. On the other hand, after a plant is constructed, AR will be extremely useful (not yet, but eventually) in identifying where the actual design departs from the contractual model, or for training (new people learning how to operate the plant), or for monitoring (seeing overlays of temperature/pressure/planned maintenance data/etc., and so forth). VR right now is mature in that the quality of display and ease of UI make it useful. It's still a pain to set up and get the models imported. It also still suffers from relatively low resolution. Resolution is still too low to say, emulate a computer monitor (i.e. present a virtual desktop computer monitor and use it at normal seated viewing distance - which requires a minimum 35PPD). For my needs, it's hard to read even large text on virtual signage in VR (you have to get VERY close to the virtual sign to read it). So, unlike the above comment, I think the VR industry has quite a bit of work to get from it's current sub-35PPD to a 60PPD display approaching the limits of human eye resolution.
- andybak 8y ago
  They are complementary and overlapping. You don't want AR if you're aiming for a sense of immersion. The real world just gets in the way. You don't want VR if you also need to engage with your environment. Taking a headset on and off is a productivity killer. But VR can approximate AR with pass-through cameras. And AR will at some point approximate VR if it's overlaying enough of it's own stuff that the real environment is entirely obscured (display tech is far away from this point however. It really depends whether you're talking about productivity or presence. And that's not the same as "entertainment" vs "business" as some business applications require immersion (architectural viz) and some entertainment apps don't. VR has the advantage of being a much more mature technology with much lower technical hurdles. AR display tech is a very tough nut to crack. The best current tech - as demonstrated by the Hololens 2 - is woefully low on field of view, luminosity and affordability. 53 degrees horizontal FOV, non-functional in strong sunlight with a several thousand dollars price tag? Fairly niche...
  - miketuritzin 8y ago
    Exactly. AR and VR are different sides of the same coin and will converge. I am certain that Facebook is investing so much into VR because of the ultimate promise of AR as a platform, not because of a belief in VR "over" AR.
- michaelt 8y ago
  A bet on regular VR is conservative in the sense that there are existing games, game engines, game fans and game companies. All of them used to 3D and fancy graphics cards and spending money. Given the choice between spending $X on porting Skyrim to VR, and spending $X on an all-new AR game, and spending $X on trying to find an unmet industrial need AR can fulfil, I know which I think is the safer bet!

melling 8y ago

Doesn’t everyone see more in AR, at least in the near term. Even conservative Apple is was working on AR. The ability to augment the real world has lots of useful benefits.

jobigoud 8y ago
I don't. I believe in AR but not short-term. I think AR will go into a "winter" soon and will be picked up by the mainstream some years later after key technology challenges are solved. I think AR (glasses) is at where VR was in the nineties. Currently AR has two form factors, phone and glasses. Phone-based AR is gimmicky. It can be fun and can work in some scenarios but it's monoscopic, has a ridiculous field of view, requires holding your phone in the air, and it's not really augmenting reality anyway, it's augmenting a video stream of reality (increased latency, reduced dynamic range, motion blur, etc.). Glasses-based AR will be great but currently has fundamental challenges with field of view, latency, optics, and integration of augmentations in the real world (e.g: procedural objects dynamically matching physical obstacles). It requires new inventions in hardware and software to fully realize the vision we have of it. On the other hand VR has a clear technological path for the next decade into human-like field of view and visual fidelity. The full enclosure means we can get +200° and fit eye tracking cameras in the headset. Foveated rendering, only render what you actually look at at full res. The advent of ray tracing hardware (easier foveated rendering and non-linear optics). There is no fundamental barrier to get from here to 60 pixels per degree at 200° fov.
- mojomark 8y ago
  > I don't. I believe in AR but not short-term. I think AR will go into a "winter" soon and will be picked up by the mainstream some years later after key technology challenges are solved. I think AR (glasses) is at where VR was in the nineties. > Currently AR has two form factors, phone and glasses. > Phone-based AR is gimmicky. It can be fun and can work in some scenarios but it's monoscopic, has a ridiculous field of view, requires holding your phone in the air, and it's not really augmenting reality anyway, it's augmenting a video stream of reality (increased latency, reduced dynamic range, motion blur, etc.). > Glasses-based AR will be great but currently has fundamental challenges with field of view, latency, optics, and integration of augmentations in the real world (e.g: procedural objects dynamically matching physical obstacles). It requires new inventions in hardware and software to fully realize the vision we have of it. > On the other hand VR has a clear technological path for the next decade into human-like field of view and visual fidelity. The full enclosure means we can get +200° and fit eye tracking cameras in the headset. Foveated rendering, only render what you actually look at at full res. The advent of ray tracing hardware (easier foveated rendering and non-linear optics). There is no fundamental barrier to get from here to 60 pixels per degree at 200° fov. I 99.9% agree with this assesment, particularly with respect to the timeline of product maturity/adoption. However, I also agree with Andybak above, that AR & VR applications are complimentary, but largely different. One will not displace the other, but the technologies will merge such that you can seamlessly transition from AR to VR nd back using the same hardware (likely Virtual Retinal Display-based displays) and operating system. I use VR in my job (evaluating power plant designs), and for that, I need to be immersed in a 3D model as opposed to AR where not being fully immersed would be unnecessarily distracting. On the other hand, after a plant is constructed, AR will be extremely useful (not yet, but eventually) in identifying where the actual design departs from the contractual model, or for training (new people learning how to operate the plant), or for monitoring (seeing overlays of temperature/pressure/planned maintenance data/etc., and so forth). VR right now is mature in that the quality of display and ease of UI make it useful. It's still a pain to set up and get the models imported. It also still suffers from relatively low resolution. Resolution is still too low to say, emulate a computer monitor (i.e. present a virtual desktop computer monitor and use it at normal seated viewing distance - which requires a minimum 35PPD). For my needs, it's hard to read even large text on virtual signage in VR (you have to get VERY close to the virtual sign to read it). So, unlike the above comment, I think the VR industry has quite a bit of work to get from it's current sub-35PPD to a 60PPD display approaching the limits of human eye resolution.
andybak 8y ago
They are complementary and overlapping. You don't want AR if you're aiming for a sense of immersion. The real world just gets in the way. You don't want VR if you also need to engage with your environment. Taking a headset on and off is a productivity killer. But VR can approximate AR with pass-through cameras. And AR will at some point approximate VR if it's overlaying enough of it's own stuff that the real environment is entirely obscured (display tech is far away from this point however. It really depends whether you're talking about productivity or presence. And that's not the same as "entertainment" vs "business" as some business applications require immersion (architectural viz) and some entertainment apps don't. VR has the advantage of being a much more mature technology with much lower technical hurdles. AR display tech is a very tough nut to crack. The best current tech - as demonstrated by the Hololens 2 - is woefully low on field of view, luminosity and affordability. 53 degrees horizontal FOV, non-functional in strong sunlight with a several thousand dollars price tag? Fairly niche...
- miketuritzin 8y ago
  Exactly. AR and VR are different sides of the same coin and will converge. I am certain that Facebook is investing so much into VR because of the ultimate promise of AR as a platform, not because of a belief in VR "over" AR.
michaelt 8y ago
A bet on regular VR is conservative in the sense that there are existing games, game engines, game fans and game companies. All of them used to 3D and fancy graphics cards and spending money. Given the choice between spending $X on porting Skyrim to VR, and spending $X on an all-new AR game, and spending $X on trying to find an unmet industrial need AR can fulfil, I know which I think is the safer bet!