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If anyone here is in the know with the AR/VR scene, could they shed some light on why AR hasn't taken off yet? VR is cool, but it's seems like such a more usef

If anyone here is in the know with the AR/VR scene, could they shed some light on why AR hasn't taken off yet? VR is cool, but it's seems like such a more useful concept to me to have actual reality with enhanced information. Imagine wearing glasses and looking at a plate of food then having it estimate + track calories and macros, or paint GPS direction arrows on surfaces realtime, or put people's names you've met before above their head so you can avoid awkwardly admitting you've forgotten it. Is it technical limitations, or cost? --- Edit: Many people replied with really informative answers to this already. I genuinely appreciate your time and insight, thank you :)

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
moron4hire 6y ago
Three reasons: The hardware is significantly harder to get right. VR devices work well specifically because they don't care about your environment. AR devices, to be any good, need to have a semantic understanding of your environment. That's very hard to do, especially on the power and compute budgets that mobile devices allow. And an AR device that isn't mobile is a stupid AR device. The software is significantly harder to get right. It's a lot easier to model a static scene and make some physics-based interactions in it than it is to try to figure out how to make overlays that react to a real environment. But I think, much more importantly, the people producing most software in the immersive software space just don't care about your immediate environment. They care a lot more about giving you a canned experience. It's hard to find funding for anything that isn't some sort of media consumption. This is true across both VR and AR. In VR it's ok, because there is no environmental context to exploit anyway. But on AR devices, you just end up with a bad VR app: all the hardware limitations of a mobile AR device with none of the differentiating features. So because you don't get software that cares about your environment, you don't get good user experiences on the hardware. Open up your iPad or HoloLens or Magic Leap app stores and take a survey of apps that are there. How many of them have any understanding of your environment? There are a lot that don't even take into account the "room mesh", the solid surfaces that the device can see--say nothing about what those solid surfaces represent! I'd estimate it's upwards of 50% on AR headsets and maybe 30% on iPad that do absolutely nothing with any surfaces beyond asking you to find a flat space on the floor. That's just crappy VR. As for the ones that attempt to understand what is in your room? Vanishingly few. You can make pretty good consulting career out of making what is largely just a PowerPoint presentation in 3D: a collection of canned elements that the user can click buttons to get scene transitions and animations, all with a directed narrative that is trying to tell you something. Advertisers want it. Media companies want it. A lot of big-industry companies completely unrelated to media want it just to show off at conferences to "prove" they are "forward looking". And you'll get a lot of those clients asking--even demanding--you make that as an AR app, especially on iPads. But it sucks. It's just not anything about what's good in immersive experiences. It fits a little better in VR. It still sucks in VR. But it comes around from backwards priorities. These companies start from wanting VR/AR and work backwards to a use-case. And often they lack any sort of experience or even actual interest in immersive design. What they want is to just do a marketing piece. There are very few companies that start with a use case and then find out whether or not VR or AR is the right solution. But that's where the bread-and-butter money is. And it sucks the air out of the room. It leaves the real, good, immersive experience development to people who are independently wealthy enough to do it on their own, or to hobbyists hacking it together in their spare time.
- yomly 6y ago
  This was insightful - thanks! Do you have any people or communities or reading materials you'd recommend to get more familiar with AR in industry?
  - moron4hire 6y ago
    I've been working on VR and AR stuff for about 8 years now. I started doing it full time about 4 years ago. A lot of what I know has been from just being in the zeitgeist as things develop, so unfortunately I don't have a "reading list" to get people started. I have been trying to start a reading list, but it's woefully incomplete. I'll copy the content here (I don't have it publicly online yet). I'm primarily centered on VR, but I've also done a lot of AR work. I think good application design is very similar in both. or rather, all the "bad" apps I talked about out there are similarly bad in the failure to take the immersiveness of the experience into account. But I do think there is a lot of overlap in terms of needing to take less of a traditional, compartmentalized application mindset and start thinking about immersive software as more akin to clothing, overlays on top of the world. Kent Bye's "Voices of VR" Podcast (Site: https://voicesofvr.com/ https://voicesofvr.com/, Twitter: https://twitter.com/kentbye?s=20 https://twitter.com/kentbye?s=20). Kent Bye has been a singular voice in the VR and AR community for the entirety of the contemporary VR movement. He brings a philosophy and social impact perspective. I think a lot of application design--immersive or otherwise--doesn't take human factors into account often enough. Road to VR (Site: https://www.roadtovr.com/ https://www.roadtovr.com/, Twitter: https://twitter.com/RtoVR?s=20 https://twitter.com/RtoVR?s=20) is also a very long-standing blog on all things AR and VR. They are more focused on gaming, but they also cover industry trends, new hardware, and companies John Palmer has a few blog posts covering spatial interfaces that are very insightful (https://darkblueheaven.com/ https://darkblueheaven.com/) https://darkblueheaven.com/spatialinterfaces/ https://darkblueheaven.com/spatialinterfaces/ https://darkblueheaven.com/spatialsoftware/ https://darkblueheaven.com/spatialsoftware/ This Medium post by Douglas Rushkoff talks about some of the problems with digital media, which I believe VR can help solve (https://medium.com/team-human/digital-media-still-isnt-very-good-at-connecting-people-460b9dc569b9 https://medium.com/team-human/digital-media-still-isnt-very-...) Jaron Lanier is one of the "fathers" of VR, part of the "first-wave" of VR work in the late-80s/early-90s. The Verge did an excellent interview with him (https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/8/16751596/jaron-lanier-dawn-of-the-new-everything-vr-interview https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/8/16751596/jaron-lanier-daw...). You can get to his books from his website (http://www.jaronlanier.com/ http://www.jaronlanier.com/), which are all excellent treatises on humanity's relationship to technology. Incidentally, here's Kent Bye interviewing Jaron Lanier (http://voicesofvr.com/600-jaron-laniers-journey-into-vr-dawn-of-the-new-everything/ http://voicesofvr.com/600-jaron-laniers-journey-into-vr-dawn...) Liv Erickson has an excellent blog on technology that covers a lot of issues in VR, accessibility, and machine learning (https://livierickson.com/blog/ https://livierickson.com/blog/). In particular, "6 Questions to Ask Before Diving Into VR Development" is great primer on VR concepts (https://livierickson.com/blog/6-questions-to-ask-before-diving-into-vr-development/ https://livierickson.com/blog/6-questions-to-ask-before-divi...) Tom Forsyth (Twitter: https://twitter.com/tom_forsyth https://twitter.com/tom_forsyth) has an excellent blog post about different technical aspects of the optics in VR systems (http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BVR%20optics%20and%20why%20IPD%20means%20too%20many%20things%5D%5D http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BVR%20op...) Jesse Schell's article "Making Great VR: Six Lessons Learned From I Expect You To Die" is a little old but still excellent (https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JesseSchell/20150626/247113/ https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JesseSchell/20150626/247113/) This is an excellent article on the importance of audio in immersive applications (https://arinsider.co/2019/10/02/sound-ars-unsung-modality/ https://arinsider.co/2019/10/02/sound-ars-unsung-modality/) This is an interesting video made by a man who spent a whole week in VR, eating, sleeping, working, and living with a VR headset on 24/7 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGRY14znFxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGRY14znFxY)
plutonorm 6y ago
Lots of reasons: No big company has pushed it yet. Battery constraints. Processing constraints. Space constraints, no one wants to look like a cyborg. Software to make it useful is in itself a large undertaking. Making ar reactive the surrounding requires really good machine perception. Which required good sensors and large batteries and powerful processors. It's coming but everyone is waiting for the tech to be ready.
- Animats 6y ago
  Microsoft has pushed it, but it costs too much for Pokemon Go. Everyone remembers the "glasshole" problem with Google Glass.
xt00 6y ago
Presently, to do the AR processing to extract features from a space uses either cameras or some kind of LIDAR or time of flight scheme to get a point cloud of locations of objects around you. The data from a single camera that is say ~1-2Mpixels (say 1280x800 RGB camera) at say 30fps is only processable on an SOC or an asic. If you choose to process the raw image locally then you need to have feature detection, extraction, etc algorithms that can run locally on that processor. For AR, a more realistic approach to a true all-in-one solution that sits on your face is to create an ASIC that simply gobbles up raw camera data, H265 compresses it, then sends it over a low latency link to your phone sitting in your pocket. Then when you consider that the chip also needs to drive a display (or 2 displays) of some sort, then you realize you need to also must have a way to receive that video data (potentially H265 video decoder now also needed), a way to display that video stream and do some potential fix-up on that video stream (at least some kind of GPU needed) -- now you realize you need a relatively capable SOC that runs on your AR device on your head. So you need a cable / battery pack etc -- even if your phone in your pocket is still the main thing running the show. So it just means that the combination of needing to use cameras, drive displays, and receive data wirelessly means you have some fixed costs, power needs, and limited set of SOCs to choose from at present. So its do-able, just its early days for the hardware to support it.
Lammy 6y ago
It’s nice to disconnect from the wall of numbers and just eat the food.
fossuser 6y ago
It's in progress, currently limited by both hardware and cost. There used to be a good blog post from Michael Abrash when he was at Valve that also talked about two main issues. Latency, and drawing black effectively. Latency is critical since low latency is a requirement for things looking real (since humans have fast visual systems), but that's ultimately a hardware problem that should get solved in time. Drawing black is harder because AR uses ambient light and putting a black line on the screen in front of your face doesn't work for focus. Unfortunately it looks like Valve killed their blog, but the way back machine has it: https://web.archive.org/web/20200503055607/http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/latency-the-sine-qua-non-of-ar-and-vr/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200503055607/http://blogs.valv... My bet is that Apple will pull it off Apple watch style with front facing Lidar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5J_6oMMG7Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5J_6oMMG7Y Probably at first they will be mostly for notifications and interacting with apps in a window in your visual field, getting most of the power from the phone. Things like looking at food for calories and names, etc. will come later when a front facing camera is acceptable and there's existing UI in place. I think this is probably the next platform after mobile devices, looking at little glass displays is a lot worse than having a UI in your visual field (if it can be done well). [Edit]: A more recent blog post from Abrash on this topic https://www.oculus.com/blog/inventing-the-future/ https://www.oculus.com/blog/inventing-the-future/
- PaulHoule 6y ago
  Note you can "paint" black by putting an LCD at a focal plane, then you can black out a light source that is in focus. Of course you need a lot of space to route incoming light through that focal plane and then to your eyes.
- Chris2048 6y ago
  Does AR require ambient light? couldn't you use a VR approach where everything is drawn in, and reality is derived from cameras?
  - fossuser 6y ago
    I’d argue that’s not really AR then (though no need to dispute definitions [0]), the blog post talks about that too - whatever that is, it’s not really a satisfying approach and wouldn’t be the next platform. You want to be able to use the full power of human vision when looking at the world, not literally be looking at some subset in a display right next to your face all the time. [0]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7X2j8HAkWdmMoS8PE/disputing-definitions https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7X2j8HAkWdmMoS8PE/disputing-...
xwdv 6y ago
AR is shit. Garbage technology, useless features. Requires too many coincidental factors. That about sums it up. VR is better because you can fabricate entire worlds and spaces for any task. Instantly useful. And if you really needed to combine the real world with generated content, you could theoretically do it by just overlaying content onto a video feed in VR.
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  Well I think it's mainly because nobody has done AR well yet for the mainstream. The only one I can think of is the Vuzix Blade but that isn't really AR. It doesn't recognise you environment, it just projects a picture in your eye in the same spot wherever you look. I played with the Hololens 2 last year and I certainly can see the benefits. Especially when communicating with someone else. However for $6000 that device is not going to happen for me ;) AR needs an "Oculus Quest" approach to be useful to consumers first. I do love VR as well but I do think there is a big usecase for AR once it becomes good and affordable at the same time.
baybal2 6y ago
> If anyone here is in the know with the AR/VR scene, could they shed some light on why AR hasn't taken off yet? Because demand is too low, and prior attempts at hyping it up with marketing ended like google glass? I do work in an engineering consultancy that did a dozen of VR/AR toys over the last 5 years. Some of quite big brands around use our tech, and engineering, though NDAs, NDAs, NDAs... There is no magic trick behind any of product on the market. Physics, and optics of AR/VR glasses is very simple, high school level simple. Just too many companies want to make add "smoke, and mirrors" into the optical scheme... Making AR/VR goggles power efficient, and lightweight enough for daily use is possible even with current day tech. It's not much of a secret now that there is an IP blocker on a critical technology owned by Beijing University that shuts everything down. Microsoft, Facebook, Apple experimenting with lasers now is all about them trying to work around that blocker.
- tetsuto 6y ago
  Any chance on expanding on what the critical blocking tech is?
  - baybal2 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23579078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23579078
    - liamcardenas 6y ago
      Very interesting! > a solid state microled chip with microlenses For someone with no knowledge about AR hardware, how is this different (from the perspective of the end user) than a traditional hololens style display?
      - baybal2 6y ago
        That display type can be made bright enough to be outdoor visible while still keeping power consumption on sane levels. The biggest problem of all waveguide systems is that they are freaking inefficient, with optics consuming 50-90%+ of all light. And it is the same problem with pretty much all complex optical systems in AR/VR glasses. This is why I am a proponent of using mirror optics in this application.
oezi 6y ago
It is not taking off in the consumer space because of cost. Hololens 2 is the best headset available today that has a relevant software platform and it isn't even sold to end customers anymore but just to enterprises. What keeps costs up are the technical limitations. Microsoft and Magicleap invested both more than a billion each to solve the tech challenges, but the truth is that the displays are not good enough. Framerate is too low (compare with VR what would be necessary), FoV still rather limiting, colors and blacks are still to faint for many environment lighting conditions, room scanning is still too inaccurate, battery life too short. This is not to say there hasn't been great progress. Hololens 2 solves the comfort problem and is a nice step with resolution and FoV. They just messed up with image quality (color banding/rainbows are a big issue).
modeless 6y ago
Lots of opinions here, but it's simpler than most people are saying. The display technology doesn't exist yet. It can't succeed in the mass market until it looks like regular non-dorky eyeglasses and has specs exceeding current VR displays plus transparency and sunlight-level brightness. To a first approximation nothing else matters.
briefcomment 6y ago
I think the deluge of information would get old really quickly. Two dimensional flashing lights really pales in comparison to the real world. And I think having that be in your face all the time decreases the experience of the real world instead of augmenting it. Just think of how it feels to look at your phone halfway through a long hike. I always feel it lessens the magic, and introduces low grade anxiety.
shafyy 6y ago
Short answer (as others have said): It's harder to make AR than VR. There are a couple of reasons, but most importantly it's because of the way optics work. You can read more on my post here, where I've also linked some further resources that go deeper into the issues: https://shafyy.com/post/ar-vr-two-sides-of-the-same-coin/ https://shafyy.com/post/ar-vr-two-sides-of-the-same-coin/

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

moron4hire 6y ago

Three reasons: The hardware is significantly harder to get right. VR devices work well specifically because they don't care about your environment. AR devices, to be any good, need to have a semantic understanding of your environment. That's very hard to do, especially on the power and compute budgets that mobile devices allow. And an AR device that isn't mobile is a stupid AR device. The software is significantly harder to get right. It's a lot easier to model a static scene and make some physics-based interactions in it than it is to try to figure out how to make overlays that react to a real environment. But I think, much more importantly, the people producing most software in the immersive software space just don't care about your immediate environment. They care a lot more about giving you a canned experience. It's hard to find funding for anything that isn't some sort of media consumption. This is true across both VR and AR. In VR it's ok, because there is no environmental context to exploit anyway. But on AR devices, you just end up with a bad VR app: all the hardware limitations of a mobile AR device with none of the differentiating features. So because you don't get software that cares about your environment, you don't get good user experiences on the hardware. Open up your iPad or HoloLens or Magic Leap app stores and take a survey of apps that are there. How many of them have any understanding of your environment? There are a lot that don't even take into account the "room mesh", the solid surfaces that the device can see--say nothing about what those solid surfaces represent! I'd estimate it's upwards of 50% on AR headsets and maybe 30% on iPad that do absolutely nothing with any surfaces beyond asking you to find a flat space on the floor. That's just crappy VR. As for the ones that attempt to understand what is in your room? Vanishingly few. You can make pretty good consulting career out of making what is largely just a PowerPoint presentation in 3D: a collection of canned elements that the user can click buttons to get scene transitions and animations, all with a directed narrative that is trying to tell you something. Advertisers want it. Media companies want it. A lot of big-industry companies completely unrelated to media want it just to show off at conferences to "prove" they are "forward looking". And you'll get a lot of those clients asking--even demanding--you make that as an AR app, especially on iPads. But it sucks. It's just not anything about what's good in immersive experiences. It fits a little better in VR. It still sucks in VR. But it comes around from backwards priorities. These companies start from wanting VR/AR and work backwards to a use-case. And often they lack any sort of experience or even actual interest in immersive design. What they want is to just do a marketing piece. There are very few companies that start with a use case and then find out whether or not VR or AR is the right solution. But that's where the bread-and-butter money is. And it sucks the air out of the room. It leaves the real, good, immersive experience development to people who are independently wealthy enough to do it on their own, or to hobbyists hacking it together in their spare time.

yomly 6y ago
This was insightful - thanks! Do you have any people or communities or reading materials you'd recommend to get more familiar with AR in industry?
- moron4hire 6y ago
  I've been working on VR and AR stuff for about 8 years now. I started doing it full time about 4 years ago. A lot of what I know has been from just being in the zeitgeist as things develop, so unfortunately I don't have a "reading list" to get people started. I have been trying to start a reading list, but it's woefully incomplete. I'll copy the content here (I don't have it publicly online yet). I'm primarily centered on VR, but I've also done a lot of AR work. I think good application design is very similar in both. or rather, all the "bad" apps I talked about out there are similarly bad in the failure to take the immersiveness of the experience into account. But I do think there is a lot of overlap in terms of needing to take less of a traditional, compartmentalized application mindset and start thinking about immersive software as more akin to clothing, overlays on top of the world. Kent Bye's "Voices of VR" Podcast (Site: https://voicesofvr.com/ https://voicesofvr.com/, Twitter: https://twitter.com/kentbye?s=20 https://twitter.com/kentbye?s=20). Kent Bye has been a singular voice in the VR and AR community for the entirety of the contemporary VR movement. He brings a philosophy and social impact perspective. I think a lot of application design--immersive or otherwise--doesn't take human factors into account often enough. Road to VR (Site: https://www.roadtovr.com/ https://www.roadtovr.com/, Twitter: https://twitter.com/RtoVR?s=20 https://twitter.com/RtoVR?s=20) is also a very long-standing blog on all things AR and VR. They are more focused on gaming, but they also cover industry trends, new hardware, and companies John Palmer has a few blog posts covering spatial interfaces that are very insightful (https://darkblueheaven.com/ https://darkblueheaven.com/) https://darkblueheaven.com/spatialinterfaces/ https://darkblueheaven.com/spatialinterfaces/ https://darkblueheaven.com/spatialsoftware/ https://darkblueheaven.com/spatialsoftware/ This Medium post by Douglas Rushkoff talks about some of the problems with digital media, which I believe VR can help solve (https://medium.com/team-human/digital-media-still-isnt-very-good-at-connecting-people-460b9dc569b9 https://medium.com/team-human/digital-media-still-isnt-very-...) Jaron Lanier is one of the "fathers" of VR, part of the "first-wave" of VR work in the late-80s/early-90s. The Verge did an excellent interview with him (https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/8/16751596/jaron-lanier-dawn-of-the-new-everything-vr-interview https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/8/16751596/jaron-lanier-daw...). You can get to his books from his website (http://www.jaronlanier.com/ http://www.jaronlanier.com/), which are all excellent treatises on humanity's relationship to technology. Incidentally, here's Kent Bye interviewing Jaron Lanier (http://voicesofvr.com/600-jaron-laniers-journey-into-vr-dawn-of-the-new-everything/ http://voicesofvr.com/600-jaron-laniers-journey-into-vr-dawn...) Liv Erickson has an excellent blog on technology that covers a lot of issues in VR, accessibility, and machine learning (https://livierickson.com/blog/ https://livierickson.com/blog/). In particular, "6 Questions to Ask Before Diving Into VR Development" is great primer on VR concepts (https://livierickson.com/blog/6-questions-to-ask-before-diving-into-vr-development/ https://livierickson.com/blog/6-questions-to-ask-before-divi...) Tom Forsyth (Twitter: https://twitter.com/tom_forsyth https://twitter.com/tom_forsyth) has an excellent blog post about different technical aspects of the optics in VR systems (http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BVR%20optics%20and%20why%20IPD%20means%20too%20many%20things%5D%5D http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BVR%20op...) Jesse Schell's article "Making Great VR: Six Lessons Learned From I Expect You To Die" is a little old but still excellent (https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JesseSchell/20150626/247113/ https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JesseSchell/20150626/247113/) This is an excellent article on the importance of audio in immersive applications (https://arinsider.co/2019/10/02/sound-ars-unsung-modality/ https://arinsider.co/2019/10/02/sound-ars-unsung-modality/) This is an interesting video made by a man who spent a whole week in VR, eating, sleeping, working, and living with a VR headset on 24/7 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGRY14znFxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGRY14znFxY)

plutonorm 6y ago

Lots of reasons: No big company has pushed it yet. Battery constraints. Processing constraints. Space constraints, no one wants to look like a cyborg. Software to make it useful is in itself a large undertaking. Making ar reactive the surrounding requires really good machine perception. Which required good sensors and large batteries and powerful processors. It's coming but everyone is waiting for the tech to be ready.

Animats 6y ago
Microsoft has pushed it, but it costs too much for Pokemon Go. Everyone remembers the "glasshole" problem with Google Glass.

xt00 6y ago

Presently, to do the AR processing to extract features from a space uses either cameras or some kind of LIDAR or time of flight scheme to get a point cloud of locations of objects around you. The data from a single camera that is say ~1-2Mpixels (say 1280x800 RGB camera) at say 30fps is only processable on an SOC or an asic. If you choose to process the raw image locally then you need to have feature detection, extraction, etc algorithms that can run locally on that processor. For AR, a more realistic approach to a true all-in-one solution that sits on your face is to create an ASIC that simply gobbles up raw camera data, H265 compresses it, then sends it over a low latency link to your phone sitting in your pocket. Then when you consider that the chip also needs to drive a display (or 2 displays) of some sort, then you realize you need to also must have a way to receive that video data (potentially H265 video decoder now also needed), a way to display that video stream and do some potential fix-up on that video stream (at least some kind of GPU needed) -- now you realize you need a relatively capable SOC that runs on your AR device on your head. So you need a cable / battery pack etc -- even if your phone in your pocket is still the main thing running the show. So it just means that the combination of needing to use cameras, drive displays, and receive data wirelessly means you have some fixed costs, power needs, and limited set of SOCs to choose from at present. So its do-able, just its early days for the hardware to support it.

Lammy 6y ago

It’s nice to disconnect from the wall of numbers and just eat the food.

fossuser 6y ago

It's in progress, currently limited by both hardware and cost. There used to be a good blog post from Michael Abrash when he was at Valve that also talked about two main issues. Latency, and drawing black effectively. Latency is critical since low latency is a requirement for things looking real (since humans have fast visual systems), but that's ultimately a hardware problem that should get solved in time. Drawing black is harder because AR uses ambient light and putting a black line on the screen in front of your face doesn't work for focus. Unfortunately it looks like Valve killed their blog, but the way back machine has it: https://web.archive.org/web/20200503055607/http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/latency-the-sine-qua-non-of-ar-and-vr/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200503055607/http://blogs.valv... My bet is that Apple will pull it off Apple watch style with front facing Lidar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5J_6oMMG7Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5J_6oMMG7Y Probably at first they will be mostly for notifications and interacting with apps in a window in your visual field, getting most of the power from the phone. Things like looking at food for calories and names, etc. will come later when a front facing camera is acceptable and there's existing UI in place. I think this is probably the next platform after mobile devices, looking at little glass displays is a lot worse than having a UI in your visual field (if it can be done well). [Edit]: A more recent blog post from Abrash on this topic https://www.oculus.com/blog/inventing-the-future/ https://www.oculus.com/blog/inventing-the-future/

PaulHoule 6y ago
Note you can "paint" black by putting an LCD at a focal plane, then you can black out a light source that is in focus. Of course you need a lot of space to route incoming light through that focal plane and then to your eyes.
Chris2048 6y ago
Does AR require ambient light? couldn't you use a VR approach where everything is drawn in, and reality is derived from cameras?
- fossuser 6y ago
  I’d argue that’s not really AR then (though no need to dispute definitions [0]), the blog post talks about that too - whatever that is, it’s not really a satisfying approach and wouldn’t be the next platform. You want to be able to use the full power of human vision when looking at the world, not literally be looking at some subset in a display right next to your face all the time. [0]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7X2j8HAkWdmMoS8PE/disputing-definitions https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7X2j8HAkWdmMoS8PE/disputing-...

xwdv 6y ago

AR is shit. Garbage technology, useless features. Requires too many coincidental factors. That about sums it up. VR is better because you can fabricate entire worlds and spaces for any task. Instantly useful. And if you really needed to combine the real world with generated content, you could theoretically do it by just overlaying content onto a video feed in VR.

GekkePrutser 6y ago
Well I think it's mainly because nobody has done AR well yet for the mainstream. The only one I can think of is the Vuzix Blade but that isn't really AR. It doesn't recognise you environment, it just projects a picture in your eye in the same spot wherever you look. I played with the Hololens 2 last year and I certainly can see the benefits. Especially when communicating with someone else. However for $6000 that device is not going to happen for me ;) AR needs an "Oculus Quest" approach to be useful to consumers first. I do love VR as well but I do think there is a big usecase for AR once it becomes good and affordable at the same time.

baybal2 6y ago

> If anyone here is in the know with the AR/VR scene, could they shed some light on why AR hasn't taken off yet? Because demand is too low, and prior attempts at hyping it up with marketing ended like google glass? I do work in an engineering consultancy that did a dozen of VR/AR toys over the last 5 years. Some of quite big brands around use our tech, and engineering, though NDAs, NDAs, NDAs... There is no magic trick behind any of product on the market. Physics, and optics of AR/VR glasses is very simple, high school level simple. Just too many companies want to make add "smoke, and mirrors" into the optical scheme... Making AR/VR goggles power efficient, and lightweight enough for daily use is possible even with current day tech. It's not much of a secret now that there is an IP blocker on a critical technology owned by Beijing University that shuts everything down. Microsoft, Facebook, Apple experimenting with lasers now is all about them trying to work around that blocker.

tetsuto 6y ago
Any chance on expanding on what the critical blocking tech is?
- baybal2 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23579078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23579078
  - liamcardenas 6y ago
    Very interesting! > a solid state microled chip with microlenses For someone with no knowledge about AR hardware, how is this different (from the perspective of the end user) than a traditional hololens style display?
    - baybal2 6y ago
      That display type can be made bright enough to be outdoor visible while still keeping power consumption on sane levels. The biggest problem of all waveguide systems is that they are freaking inefficient, with optics consuming 50-90%+ of all light. And it is the same problem with pretty much all complex optical systems in AR/VR glasses. This is why I am a proponent of using mirror optics in this application.

oezi 6y ago

It is not taking off in the consumer space because of cost. Hololens 2 is the best headset available today that has a relevant software platform and it isn't even sold to end customers anymore but just to enterprises. What keeps costs up are the technical limitations. Microsoft and Magicleap invested both more than a billion each to solve the tech challenges, but the truth is that the displays are not good enough. Framerate is too low (compare with VR what would be necessary), FoV still rather limiting, colors and blacks are still to faint for many environment lighting conditions, room scanning is still too inaccurate, battery life too short. This is not to say there hasn't been great progress. Hololens 2 solves the comfort problem and is a nice step with resolution and FoV. They just messed up with image quality (color banding/rainbows are a big issue).

modeless 6y ago

Lots of opinions here, but it's simpler than most people are saying. The display technology doesn't exist yet. It can't succeed in the mass market until it looks like regular non-dorky eyeglasses and has specs exceeding current VR displays plus transparency and sunlight-level brightness. To a first approximation nothing else matters.

briefcomment 6y ago

I think the deluge of information would get old really quickly. Two dimensional flashing lights really pales in comparison to the real world. And I think having that be in your face all the time decreases the experience of the real world instead of augmenting it. Just think of how it feels to look at your phone halfway through a long hike. I always feel it lessens the magic, and introduces low grade anxiety.

shafyy 6y ago

Short answer (as others have said): It's harder to make AR than VR. There are a couple of reasons, but most importantly it's because of the way optics work. You can read more on my post here, where I've also linked some further resources that go deeper into the issues: https://shafyy.com/post/ar-vr-two-sides-of-the-same-coin/ https://shafyy.com/post/ar-vr-two-sides-of-the-same-coin/