5 ms·
The question I'm asking is why they don't have a great product. Why is it bulky, weird looking, expensive, etc? Why does their marketing fail to explain the pro
by npunt 7y ago
The question I'm asking is why they don't have a great product. Why is it bulky, weird looking, expensive, etc? Why does their marketing fail to explain the product's value?
There are tons of ways to implement AR. They chose 'general AR', the kind of thing you see on Westworld or Black Mirror. That was a bad choice, because the tech isn't there and won't be for a long time, and it only follows that the implementation was going to be bad.
There are alternative ways to find a good v1 for AR. Take a look at this tweet storm for more of my thoughts on what that could be:
https://twitter.com/nickpunt/status/1253087195159654400 https://twitter.com/nickpunt/status/1253087195159654400
As far as VR goes, it's further along. Quest is a quality stand-alone product, but VR is young and content is still lacking. Its also completely sold out, even before coronavirus. They aren't producing them in Sony/MS console numbers but its not a failure, just a stepping stone to success. Unlike the Rift or Vive, with cords hanging out of them and an appeal only to hardcore gamers, Quest is definitely on the path to mainstream, or mainstream-adjacent success.
- abacadaba 7y agoI've only used the quest for a short demo, but I have a hard time seeing what full AR gets you that a quest in camera augmented setup mode can't. What's the point of crappy half dim see-through display when you can just pipe the camera output to a normal VR screen?
- TwoBit 7y agoCurrently the cameras are low fidelity, but perhaps that will improve enough in the future.
- tsbinz 7y agoCamera quality is the easy problem. The hard problems are getting camera latency down and dealing with depth of field and all the other things you lose when you replace the incoming light field with camera images.
- Robotbeat 7y agoI’m pretty impressed with the depth of field the Quest is able to develop in Passthrough+ mode just using the 4 wide field tracking cameras and a smartphone processor from 3 years ago. A residual, after-thought capability like that on a $400 device is pretty impressive, IMHO.
- idavidrein 7y agogiven the rate of improvement in camera tech, I'd say we are very far away from passthrough to be usable
- wastedhours 7y ago> we are very far away For different definitions of "very far away". We're only talking about 15 years since we started getting proper video recording in phones, and only about 4 since the big players started focusing on software enhancements.
- idavidrein 7y agothat's a fair point, but vision is such a high-dimensional and dynamic input that my feeling is the last 20% of super-fast autofocus, auto color balancing, high dynamic range, removing motion-blur, etc. will be very difficult to improve upon. it seems that just increasing brightness/fov by making better waveguides or MEMS will be much easier. that being said, magic leap's lack of success doesn't bode well.
- npunt 7y agoWearable anywhere. AR's unique value is not big bulky things you play with at home, they're to be a nearly invisible accessory you wear everywhere. You get a few grams to hang off people's faces in the form of glasses, not a half kilogram. Otherwise, you're right - VR meets the need well enough.
- lmeyerov 7y agoPlatform != product If there was even 1 amazing game, they'd be ok. Think halo->xbox, sonic->sega, mario->nintendo+gameboy, ... . But apparently not. Nothing people want to buy.
- wpietri 7y agoIt was a bad choice if they wanted a successful consumer product. But I think the simplest explanation here is that the company's real product was fancy demos for investors. $2.6 billion in revenue! In operation since 2011! Thousands of jobs created! I'd call it great choice. They wouldn't have been able to make nearly as much money on a purposeful, targeted device, because nobody's put in that much money for a narrow market. Worse, it would have been much easier for investors to figure that the more modest product would fail. Much better to sell moonbeams, to sell the glorious possibility of AR just like they saw on Westworld and Black Mirror. I mean sure, the wheels had to come off eventually. After a while, you run out of fools. But most startups fail eventually, and you have to admit that 9 years is a great run for something that never worked, and probably never could have worked.
- kangaroozach 7y agoI’m printing and framing this. SPOT ON!
- disqard 7y agoWhile sounding slightly cynical, I have come to believe that your comment is a good description of the current state of "the latest buzzword" startups.