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Also remember how there were widely reported rumors that Apple had canceled the entire project a little while back, which made no sense given that this is the f

Also remember how there were widely reported rumors that Apple had canceled the entire project a little while back, which made no sense given that this is the future of computing and every big tech company has been investing heavily for years. Given the wild swings of rumors (launching 2020! Canceled! Launching 2023!) it’s almost like Apple is deliberately seeding the market with leaks in order to confuse its real intent. Which would be smart. My guess with no insider information is they launch smartglasses in 2020 or 2021. First version may not have optical display but still does something cool with a camera. My reasoning is basically, 1) Snapchat spectacles are getting closer to normal glasses, all you need to do is miniaturize those ridiculous bug eyed lenses 2) ergo Apple needs to get in the market with something fashionable and useful before someone else steals their lunch 2022 is too late, IMO.

derefr 7y ago
Or "all the rumours could be true at once", through a simple misinterpretation of how Apple's internal politics work. Like, say, Apple could have an AR department with several parallel hardware R&D efforts, where they're constantly cancelling projects when they realize they're dead-end concepts, and putting the staff from them onto new projects.
- mindgam3 7y ago
  Yeah, it’s within the realm of possibility that Apple truly is that dysfunctional these days (ie MacBook Pro debacle). However I don’t think that’s the case here. You have to believe that they have their best resources working on wearables/smartglasses. Look at how Apple Watch and even more so AirPods are just crushing it. Because laptops are the past and wearables are the future. I would wager that this level of dysfunction is kept far from AR.
  - derefr 7y ago
    I'm not seeing how my description was of a dysfunctional business practice. I was attempting to describe a "basic research" arm of a company, one that is trying to advance a field. Some research projects pan out, some don't. And you can't keep your best minds on the ones that don't seem to be going anywhere. You can research Human-Computer Interaction just like any other research subject, and I wouldn't put it past Apple to have all their best industrial-design staff working on dozens of different AR design prototypes to feed this HCI research, in the hopes of discovering something that creates a whole new AR wearables market segment, rather than just competing in the existing one. Once they actually "pick an approach" to AR wearables from the firehose of internal HCI R&D projects, then it'd probably be a project of a year-or-so to get it built and shipped (given their existing manufacturing and logistics relationships.) So, when a project is "3-4 years off", I'd expect that to mean—if true—that they're planning on spending the next three years running a tournament of AR approaches; and then build the thing right at the end.
    - mindgam3 7y ago
      I don't really disagree with the possibility that Apple is working on AR in the way you describe. I guess the point I was trying to make — as a longtime believer in Apple's vision with the Macbook Pro/iPhones/Watch/Airpods to prove it — is that they didn't use to make products from a firehose of internal projects. They had a clear vision for the future and shipped it. Not all of them succeeded (Newton) but during the Jobs era they were right more than not. This isn't to say that having a tournament of approaches isn't a viable way to figure out a new product. But it speaks to a different, less visionary approach.
      - derefr 7y ago
        I get what you’re saying. I think the difference isn’t so much a lack of a “visionary”, as a lack of decent AR-centered speculative fiction to pull from. The modern tablet, for example, was essentially designed by the prop designers of Star Trek. The proposed HCI for the device category was entirely laid out by actors fiddling with the prop. No one at Apple needed to have much “vision” to see that if they could pull off something like that without technical constraints forcing any compromises, it’d be a great design. Most of computing for the last 50 years has been like that in one way or another. We’ve had SF writers, artists, and movie-makers leading the way, and industrial designers cribbing as closely to them as they could. (You can still see this today with driverless-car control-panel designs. You think these designs aren’t just directly copying the “cool car” genre from the 80s?) (If you’re wondering: “so what made Apple a visionary company, then? That word must mean something...” It’s mostly that they evolved or “massaged” technology in the directions required to get these hypothetical designs built. Rather than building the designs that were possible with commonly-available tech, they invested capital into “operationalizing” previously research-level tech, in order to put it into their devices. A phone you can turn to watch movies in landscape? Better turn “accelerometers” from a weird replacement for mercury switches into a one-cent part!) But AR is a bit different, in that, while speculative fiction has been somewhat concerned with what AR does (and even more on what VR does), writers in the genre haven’t spent nearly as much time (that I know of, at least) trying to figure out what an AR device that people would be willing to wear would look and work like. So, in this case, the industrial design isn’t just “laying around” waiting for an ID artist to pick it up and say “yes, I’ll make it look like this.” And, on the other side, no audience has been pre-conditioned by this material to think “I want something that looks like the thing I know from book/movie X.” And, even worse for our intrepid industrial designer—even in the movies based on books that do feature AR wearables, in the movie version, the wearable doesn’t tend to appear at all. AR experiences still exist in such movies, but AR devices, if they’re there at all, are implicit; and most of the time, aren’t even supposed to be there, with AR instead literally an augmentation of reality (using holograms or something) rather than an augmentation of perception. (This is usually a choice by the director: actors act better when they can be in the same room as one-another, reacting to a common “thing” they’re seeing; individual-perceptual AR kind of ruins that, just like cell phones kind of ruin slasher movies.) Now, mind you, I’m ignoring the elephant-in-the-room of AR in speculative fiction: cyberpunk. But I don’t think Apple could really sell its consumers on perception-changing brain implants, could they? ;) At least, not in 2019...

derefr 7y ago

Or "all the rumours could be true at once", through a simple misinterpretation of how Apple's internal politics work. Like, say, Apple could have an AR department with several parallel hardware R&D efforts, where they're constantly cancelling projects when they realize they're dead-end concepts, and putting the staff from them onto new projects.

mindgam3 7y ago
Yeah, it’s within the realm of possibility that Apple truly is that dysfunctional these days (ie MacBook Pro debacle). However I don’t think that’s the case here. You have to believe that they have their best resources working on wearables/smartglasses. Look at how Apple Watch and even more so AirPods are just crushing it. Because laptops are the past and wearables are the future. I would wager that this level of dysfunction is kept far from AR.
- derefr 7y ago
  I'm not seeing how my description was of a dysfunctional business practice. I was attempting to describe a "basic research" arm of a company, one that is trying to advance a field. Some research projects pan out, some don't. And you can't keep your best minds on the ones that don't seem to be going anywhere. You can research Human-Computer Interaction just like any other research subject, and I wouldn't put it past Apple to have all their best industrial-design staff working on dozens of different AR design prototypes to feed this HCI research, in the hopes of discovering something that creates a whole new AR wearables market segment, rather than just competing in the existing one. Once they actually "pick an approach" to AR wearables from the firehose of internal HCI R&D projects, then it'd probably be a project of a year-or-so to get it built and shipped (given their existing manufacturing and logistics relationships.) So, when a project is "3-4 years off", I'd expect that to mean—if true—that they're planning on spending the next three years running a tournament of AR approaches; and then build the thing right at the end.
  - mindgam3 7y ago
    I don't really disagree with the possibility that Apple is working on AR in the way you describe. I guess the point I was trying to make — as a longtime believer in Apple's vision with the Macbook Pro/iPhones/Watch/Airpods to prove it — is that they didn't use to make products from a firehose of internal projects. They had a clear vision for the future and shipped it. Not all of them succeeded (Newton) but during the Jobs era they were right more than not. This isn't to say that having a tournament of approaches isn't a viable way to figure out a new product. But it speaks to a different, less visionary approach.
    - derefr 7y ago
      I get what you’re saying. I think the difference isn’t so much a lack of a “visionary”, as a lack of decent AR-centered speculative fiction to pull from. The modern tablet, for example, was essentially designed by the prop designers of Star Trek. The proposed HCI for the device category was entirely laid out by actors fiddling with the prop. No one at Apple needed to have much “vision” to see that if they could pull off something like that without technical constraints forcing any compromises, it’d be a great design. Most of computing for the last 50 years has been like that in one way or another. We’ve had SF writers, artists, and movie-makers leading the way, and industrial designers cribbing as closely to them as they could. (You can still see this today with driverless-car control-panel designs. You think these designs aren’t just directly copying the “cool car” genre from the 80s?) (If you’re wondering: “so what made Apple a visionary company, then? That word must mean something...” It’s mostly that they evolved or “massaged” technology in the directions required to get these hypothetical designs built. Rather than building the designs that were possible with commonly-available tech, they invested capital into “operationalizing” previously research-level tech, in order to put it into their devices. A phone you can turn to watch movies in landscape? Better turn “accelerometers” from a weird replacement for mercury switches into a one-cent part!) But AR is a bit different, in that, while speculative fiction has been somewhat concerned with what AR does (and even more on what VR does), writers in the genre haven’t spent nearly as much time (that I know of, at least) trying to figure out what an AR device that people would be willing to wear would look and work like. So, in this case, the industrial design isn’t just “laying around” waiting for an ID artist to pick it up and say “yes, I’ll make it look like this.” And, on the other side, no audience has been pre-conditioned by this material to think “I want something that looks like the thing I know from book/movie X.” And, even worse for our intrepid industrial designer—even in the movies based on books that do feature AR wearables, in the movie version, the wearable doesn’t tend to appear at all. AR experiences still exist in such movies, but AR devices, if they’re there at all, are implicit; and most of the time, aren’t even supposed to be there, with AR instead literally an augmentation of reality (using holograms or something) rather than an augmentation of perception. (This is usually a choice by the director: actors act better when they can be in the same room as one-another, reacting to a common “thing” they’re seeing; individual-perceptual AR kind of ruins that, just like cell phones kind of ruin slasher movies.) Now, mind you, I’m ignoring the elephant-in-the-room of AR in speculative fiction: cyberpunk. But I don’t think Apple could really sell its consumers on perception-changing brain implants, could they? ;) At least, not in 2019...