8 ms·

It seems like Apple and Microsoft really nailed with focusing on AR instead of VR.

tootie 7y ago
My company does some AR/VR development on behalf of customers along with more traditional web/mobile app development. We've done quite a few at this point and been successful from an internal point of view that we can concept, design and develop a high-quality product at a manageable cost. That being said, I see us struggling mightily to come up with an experience that's actually compelling in any way. We've got customers lining up asking us to help them get on this bandwagon and I see nothing but eye candy designed for a 30-second moment of joy and no real utility. I've seen some really cool experiences being built, but they're still mostly gimmicky and serving a tiny niche. There's rampant speculation that Apple will deliver a glasses experience where Google already failed. I think this is possibly the last chance for AR to get traction before going back to the shelf for another 20 years.
ss3000 7y ago
Is VR not just a special case of AR?
- Gaelan 7y ago
  I don't think Apple or Microsoft's (released) AR stuff can be used for VR. Apple's ARKit just runs on a phone screen (which obviously isn't AR) and HoloLens doesn't have the field of view to be VR. So they'll probably converge eventually but the products right now solve one or the other, but not both.
  - 1propionyl 7y ago
    > which obviously isn't AR Really? Why not?
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Because it feeds the world through a camera onto a flat sheet of glass, instead of being a translucent surface onto which computer-generated images are projected.
    - Gaelan 7y ago
      My bad, meant to say "obviously isn't VR."
- mwfunk 7y ago
  IMO it's the other way around, AR is a special case of VR. To make an AR system, you need to basically do all the work involved in making a VR system, then somehow integrate it with a video feed of the outside world, then convincingly add digital content to that video feed in a way that complies with the real world's geometry, which you have to extrapolate from the video. Basically it's much easier to accurately place virtual objects in a virtual world than it is to put virtual objects in the real world. You know the geometry of the virtual world but can only make educated guesses about the geometry of the real world.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    When did AR become what you describe? I stopped at AR being overlaying data on top of the things you actually see - i.e. there's no "real world video feed", just semi-transparent displays. I'm not sure what's going to happen first - technology to do proper AR like this, or fast enough, high-resolution (both spatial and color) enough cameras and displays being available to do the "AR via VR" option.
  - mbreese 7y ago
    That’s why I’d think of VR as a special case of AR. As you said, VR is in many ways is “easier”. So I’d think of VR as a special case of AR where the environment is also computer generated. In other words, moving from VR to AR would require a ton of extra work to integrate the real world. But moving from AR to VR should be much more straightforward, albeit in many ways equally challenging because now you have to worry about two worlds - the normal overlay of AR and the environment from VR. Now that I’ve said that, maybe I should think of them as more like related disciplines instead of special cases of each other...
    - moron4hire 7y ago
      Depends if you're talking from the perspective of the hardware/OS developer, or the application software developer. For the system, AR is definitely harder. For the software developer, AR is "easier", if you're like most developers and are only treating an AR headset as a bad VR headset and just plunking 3D content down in some random place on the user's floor. You don't have to create the environment--the user supplies that. And you user's input modalities are so limited that you don't really have a lot of options on what sort of interactions you can design. For smartphone AR apps, you're basically just making a standard smartphone app that happens to have a 3D view in it. For headset AR apps, you're basically just making the "hunt-and-peck" version of what you could make on modern VR systems with much higher fidelity control systems.
- paxys 7y ago
  Not at all. They are completely different problems, both from technical and product perspectives. VR is all about total immersion - sights, sounds, movements and everything else. The entire world needs to be contained in the headset, and what's happening outside it is irrelevant. AR, on the other hand, is about interacting with your surroundings. Immersion is cut down, but the system now has to be intelligent about the outside world - recognizing objects, projecting at the right places etc.
throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
What do they have to show for it exactly?
ipsum2 7y ago
Google was actually the first company to release an AR-capable phone, with depth sensing capabilities, back in 2014[0]. Due to their inability to properly market the device (or maybe the market wasn't ready at the time), they cut back on that division. One of Google's big tactical mistakes, imo. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tango_(platform)#Devices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tango_(platform)#Devices
- OnlineGladiator 7y ago
  > One of Google's big tactical mistakes, imo. It's entirely plausible that AR ends up being a dead end. It's 5 years later and still not really a big market.
  - beenBoutIT 7y ago
    True, although you could say the same thing about jpegs back when chatting online involved reading descriptions and guessing what the OP looked like. It takes time for new technologies to become widely adopted and utilized. The difference is that any sighted person can view and appreciate pictures, while there's an IQ requirement of some kind for a person to understand and appreciate what's going on spatially with AR. There's some chunk of society that isn't mentally tall enough to ride and messing with it will just frustrate them.
    - leadingthenet 7y ago
      > while there's an IQ requirement of some kind for a person to understand and appreciate what's going on spatially with AR. Could you expand on this, please? I didn't realise this was a significant concern until now.
      - beenBoutIT 7y ago
        Can a young child utilize AR on a handheld device? Maybe, although before a certain age 'y' the answer will typically be 'No'. That age y should tend to be more advanced than age 'x' when a typical young child would be able to utilize a picture, say of a cow or a chicken on the same handheld device. Spatial intelligence, IQ, having the full use of one or both hands, etc. are all part of the requirements that determine whether or not any given individual will be able to fully appreciate what's going on with AR on a handheld device. It's entirely possible that adults with different issues will be unable to satisfy these requirements and fully appreciate AR, which should in turn reduce the market for AR on handheld devices.
jayd16 7y ago
You could argue Hololens is positioned to do well even though it hasn't delivered anything consumer ready yet but Android fully implements any iOS AR feature. I don't see how you can say they're ahead of Google or made a better play.
drdaeman 7y ago
One thing that immediately comes to mind is that AR doesn't have that in-VR movement problem, that's notoriously hard to solve. And it doesn't require those weird-looking and weird-feeling controllers to interact with the world. So... maybe VR is not yet there, because the hardware does not allow for the full immersion that we unconsciously expect/want from a virtual reality?
- moron4hire 7y ago
  It's not hard to solve. We've known the solution for years now. Don't do it. You can either keep your experience confined to the user's play boundary. You can teleport people to new locations. You can let people walk to the edge of their boundary and use a gesture of some kind (e.g. flicking one of their thumbsticks on their controller) to turn them around to do "redirected walking". You can provide a "strong stomach" mode to walk at constant velocity in the direction the person is looking. Or you can stick the user in a "vehicle" with clear visual cues that they are in said vehicle. And that's it. There is nothing else you can do.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Or a treadmill. There's also that option (though obviously it won't be a mass-market thing).
    - ericflo 7y ago
      That actually doesn't work as well as you would think - there's still the mismatch between your inner ear and your eyes, which is what causes discomfort.
  - CrackerNews 7y ago
    While those techniques are tricks that diminish sickness, they result in an experience that doesn't live up to a traditional gaming experience, but now VR and immersive. For example, Doom VFR only has teleportation movement and it results in an experience that doesn't feel very Doomlike. Instead of blitzing around like a rabbit with a gun, now Doomguy is a magical genie with a gun.
moron4hire 7y ago
I don't agree, for several reasons. First of all, Apple's ARKit (and by extension, Google's ARCore) is not a good experience. It has some "gee whiz" factor to it, and then once you get over it, you realize that there really aren't very many things you can do with it that you can't do better with a smartphone or a VR headset. Case in point: I spent a lot of time at my previous employer working on self-service/guided-repair AR apps for the iPad Pro. It's a ridiculously bad concept (though my previous employer is kind of known for chasing ridiculously bad concepts). 1) Your hands are occupied with the tablet, so you're not actually able to perform the repair tasks without putting the tablet down, thus largely negating the usefulness of the overlaid 3D animations we created, and 2) who is going to take a $1000 Apple product with them out to a repair job? We also spent a lot of time making large posters into 2D animations for conference expos. You could have had the same, exact experience for 1% of the cost if you just bought gigantic TVs and turned them to portrait view. I mean, I didn't complain about getting the money, per se, but it just was not good stewardship for our clients to even propose that contract from the sales team. There are distance measuring apps that presume the tracking is accurate and precise, which it is not. For a very long time, ARKit had very little concept of how far away any given surface was. Instead, it was good about scaling objects so that visually they did not appear to be moving closer to you as the tracking point jittered wildly on the Z-Axis. At best, it's better than walking off steps to get rough measurements of a space, but anything more than that and you're going to have an easier, faster, more reliable time with a $10 retractable tape measure. Second, the HoloLens is an amazing device, but it's nowhere near ready for any mainstream use. I think it does have a good use case in industrial repair scenarios (which was originally how we got the iPad work, I had built an app for HoloLens that did the same thing, but then the suits got involved and wanted to push our Apple partnership). There are specific features of the HoloLens that make this work, and there are specific features of the job that make the HoloLens work. Specifically, HoloLens' built-in, completely free voice recognition is a huge boon for being able to build systems that you can use while your hands are occupied with the job. Second, having physical objects (the machine you're trying to repair) on which to hang virtual graphics causes a huge improvement in believability of the visual and usability of the application (primarily related to issues of object permanence being hindered by the limited field of view). That last point wouldn't be so bad if the HoloLens were visually and performance-wise up to spec with much, much cheaper VR headsets in terms of grpahics and visual fidelity. But so long as you're paying literally 10x as much for half to a quarter as good of visuals (not to mention the input systems being otherwise mismatched), you have a lot of ground to catch up on to make an AR-only experience as valuable and meaningful to a user as you could a VR experience. AR will continue to be a lackluster consumer user experience for a long time. Most developers making apps for these devices don't understand how to make a real AR app. In AR, the user supplies the context to the developer. In VR, the developer supplies the context to the user. This fundamental dichotomy makes good, meaningful AR application design significantly harder than VR design. In my own evaluation, easily 80% of the extant software in the HoloLens and Magic Leap stores take no cues from the user's immediate vicinity, in their context, to which they are tying their experience. In essence, they are just crappy VR experiences. In comparison: VR is cheap, it works, it is relatively easy to design for, and there are already a ton of great apps available for it.

My company does some AR/VR development on behalf of customers along with more traditional web/mobile app development. We've done quite a few at this point and been successful from an internal point of view that we can concept, design and develop a high-quality product at a manageable cost. That being said, I see us struggling mightily to come up with an experience that's actually compelling in any way. We've got customers lining up asking us to help them get on this bandwagon and I see nothing but eye candy designed for a 30-second moment of joy and no real utility. I've seen some really cool experiences being built, but they're still mostly gimmicky and serving a tiny niche. There's rampant speculation that Apple will deliver a glasses experience where Google already failed. I think this is possibly the last chance for AR to get traction before going back to the shelf for another 20 years.

ss3000 7y ago

Is VR not just a special case of AR?

Gaelan 7y ago
I don't think Apple or Microsoft's (released) AR stuff can be used for VR. Apple's ARKit just runs on a phone screen (which obviously isn't AR) and HoloLens doesn't have the field of view to be VR. So they'll probably converge eventually but the products right now solve one or the other, but not both.
- 1propionyl 7y ago
  > which obviously isn't AR Really? Why not?
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Because it feeds the world through a camera onto a flat sheet of glass, instead of being a translucent surface onto which computer-generated images are projected.
  - Gaelan 7y ago
    My bad, meant to say "obviously isn't VR."
mwfunk 7y ago
IMO it's the other way around, AR is a special case of VR. To make an AR system, you need to basically do all the work involved in making a VR system, then somehow integrate it with a video feed of the outside world, then convincingly add digital content to that video feed in a way that complies with the real world's geometry, which you have to extrapolate from the video. Basically it's much easier to accurately place virtual objects in a virtual world than it is to put virtual objects in the real world. You know the geometry of the virtual world but can only make educated guesses about the geometry of the real world.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  When did AR become what you describe? I stopped at AR being overlaying data on top of the things you actually see - i.e. there's no "real world video feed", just semi-transparent displays. I'm not sure what's going to happen first - technology to do proper AR like this, or fast enough, high-resolution (both spatial and color) enough cameras and displays being available to do the "AR via VR" option.
- mbreese 7y ago
  That’s why I’d think of VR as a special case of AR. As you said, VR is in many ways is “easier”. So I’d think of VR as a special case of AR where the environment is also computer generated. In other words, moving from VR to AR would require a ton of extra work to integrate the real world. But moving from AR to VR should be much more straightforward, albeit in many ways equally challenging because now you have to worry about two worlds - the normal overlay of AR and the environment from VR. Now that I’ve said that, maybe I should think of them as more like related disciplines instead of special cases of each other...
  - moron4hire 7y ago
    Depends if you're talking from the perspective of the hardware/OS developer, or the application software developer. For the system, AR is definitely harder. For the software developer, AR is "easier", if you're like most developers and are only treating an AR headset as a bad VR headset and just plunking 3D content down in some random place on the user's floor. You don't have to create the environment--the user supplies that. And you user's input modalities are so limited that you don't really have a lot of options on what sort of interactions you can design. For smartphone AR apps, you're basically just making a standard smartphone app that happens to have a 3D view in it. For headset AR apps, you're basically just making the "hunt-and-peck" version of what you could make on modern VR systems with much higher fidelity control systems.
paxys 7y ago
Not at all. They are completely different problems, both from technical and product perspectives. VR is all about total immersion - sights, sounds, movements and everything else. The entire world needs to be contained in the headset, and what's happening outside it is irrelevant. AR, on the other hand, is about interacting with your surroundings. Immersion is cut down, but the system now has to be intelligent about the outside world - recognizing objects, projecting at the right places etc.

throwawayhhakdl 7y ago

What do they have to show for it exactly?

ipsum2 7y ago

Google was actually the first company to release an AR-capable phone, with depth sensing capabilities, back in 2014[0]. Due to their inability to properly market the device (or maybe the market wasn't ready at the time), they cut back on that division. One of Google's big tactical mistakes, imo. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tango_(platform)#Devices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tango_(platform)#Devices

OnlineGladiator 7y ago
> One of Google's big tactical mistakes, imo. It's entirely plausible that AR ends up being a dead end. It's 5 years later and still not really a big market.
- beenBoutIT 7y ago
  True, although you could say the same thing about jpegs back when chatting online involved reading descriptions and guessing what the OP looked like. It takes time for new technologies to become widely adopted and utilized. The difference is that any sighted person can view and appreciate pictures, while there's an IQ requirement of some kind for a person to understand and appreciate what's going on spatially with AR. There's some chunk of society that isn't mentally tall enough to ride and messing with it will just frustrate them.
  - leadingthenet 7y ago
    > while there's an IQ requirement of some kind for a person to understand and appreciate what's going on spatially with AR. Could you expand on this, please? I didn't realise this was a significant concern until now.
    - beenBoutIT 7y ago
      Can a young child utilize AR on a handheld device? Maybe, although before a certain age 'y' the answer will typically be 'No'. That age y should tend to be more advanced than age 'x' when a typical young child would be able to utilize a picture, say of a cow or a chicken on the same handheld device. Spatial intelligence, IQ, having the full use of one or both hands, etc. are all part of the requirements that determine whether or not any given individual will be able to fully appreciate what's going on with AR on a handheld device. It's entirely possible that adults with different issues will be unable to satisfy these requirements and fully appreciate AR, which should in turn reduce the market for AR on handheld devices.

jayd16 7y ago

You could argue Hololens is positioned to do well even though it hasn't delivered anything consumer ready yet but Android fully implements any iOS AR feature. I don't see how you can say they're ahead of Google or made a better play.

drdaeman 7y ago

One thing that immediately comes to mind is that AR doesn't have that in-VR movement problem, that's notoriously hard to solve. And it doesn't require those weird-looking and weird-feeling controllers to interact with the world. So... maybe VR is not yet there, because the hardware does not allow for the full immersion that we unconsciously expect/want from a virtual reality?

moron4hire 7y ago
It's not hard to solve. We've known the solution for years now. Don't do it. You can either keep your experience confined to the user's play boundary. You can teleport people to new locations. You can let people walk to the edge of their boundary and use a gesture of some kind (e.g. flicking one of their thumbsticks on their controller) to turn them around to do "redirected walking". You can provide a "strong stomach" mode to walk at constant velocity in the direction the person is looking. Or you can stick the user in a "vehicle" with clear visual cues that they are in said vehicle. And that's it. There is nothing else you can do.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Or a treadmill. There's also that option (though obviously it won't be a mass-market thing).
  - ericflo 7y ago
    That actually doesn't work as well as you would think - there's still the mismatch between your inner ear and your eyes, which is what causes discomfort.
- CrackerNews 7y ago
  While those techniques are tricks that diminish sickness, they result in an experience that doesn't live up to a traditional gaming experience, but now VR and immersive. For example, Doom VFR only has teleportation movement and it results in an experience that doesn't feel very Doomlike. Instead of blitzing around like a rabbit with a gun, now Doomguy is a magical genie with a gun.

moron4hire 7y ago

I don't agree, for several reasons. First of all, Apple's ARKit (and by extension, Google's ARCore) is not a good experience. It has some "gee whiz" factor to it, and then once you get over it, you realize that there really aren't very many things you can do with it that you can't do better with a smartphone or a VR headset. Case in point: I spent a lot of time at my previous employer working on self-service/guided-repair AR apps for the iPad Pro. It's a ridiculously bad concept (though my previous employer is kind of known for chasing ridiculously bad concepts). 1) Your hands are occupied with the tablet, so you're not actually able to perform the repair tasks without putting the tablet down, thus largely negating the usefulness of the overlaid 3D animations we created, and 2) who is going to take a $1000 Apple product with them out to a repair job? We also spent a lot of time making large posters into 2D animations for conference expos. You could have had the same, exact experience for 1% of the cost if you just bought gigantic TVs and turned them to portrait view. I mean, I didn't complain about getting the money, per se, but it just was not good stewardship for our clients to even propose that contract from the sales team. There are distance measuring apps that presume the tracking is accurate and precise, which it is not. For a very long time, ARKit had very little concept of how far away any given surface was. Instead, it was good about scaling objects so that visually they did not appear to be moving closer to you as the tracking point jittered wildly on the Z-Axis. At best, it's better than walking off steps to get rough measurements of a space, but anything more than that and you're going to have an easier, faster, more reliable time with a $10 retractable tape measure. Second, the HoloLens is an amazing device, but it's nowhere near ready for any mainstream use. I think it does have a good use case in industrial repair scenarios (which was originally how we got the iPad work, I had built an app for HoloLens that did the same thing, but then the suits got involved and wanted to push our Apple partnership). There are specific features of the HoloLens that make this work, and there are specific features of the job that make the HoloLens work. Specifically, HoloLens' built-in, completely free voice recognition is a huge boon for being able to build systems that you can use while your hands are occupied with the job. Second, having physical objects (the machine you're trying to repair) on which to hang virtual graphics causes a huge improvement in believability of the visual and usability of the application (primarily related to issues of object permanence being hindered by the limited field of view). That last point wouldn't be so bad if the HoloLens were visually and performance-wise up to spec with much, much cheaper VR headsets in terms of grpahics and visual fidelity. But so long as you're paying literally 10x as much for half to a quarter as good of visuals (not to mention the input systems being otherwise mismatched), you have a lot of ground to catch up on to make an AR-only experience as valuable and meaningful to a user as you could a VR experience. AR will continue to be a lackluster consumer user experience for a long time. Most developers making apps for these devices don't understand how to make a real AR app. In AR, the user supplies the context to the developer. In VR, the developer supplies the context to the user. This fundamental dichotomy makes good, meaningful AR application design significantly harder than VR design. In my own evaluation, easily 80% of the extant software in the HoloLens and Magic Leap stores take no cues from the user's immediate vicinity, in their context, to which they are tying their experience. In essence, they are just crappy VR experiences. In comparison: VR is cheap, it works, it is relatively easy to design for, and there are already a ton of great apps available for it.