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Whenever I transpose my comments to HN, I usually do some light editing. The following comment is unedited because this headline kinda fired me up. Considering
by Andrex 5y ago
Whenever I transpose my comments to HN, I usually do some light editing. The following comment is unedited because this headline kinda fired me up.
Considering how Google’s treated AR and VR in the last 10 years, hyping people up then quietly pulling back support and finally cancellation after just 2-3 years, I don’t see this going well.
They had a toehold 6-10 years ago which they could have easily kept iterating on and making small marketshare gains, but I guess that wasn’t good enough. Now instead of entering 2022 with 10-20% marketshare, a mature platform, and developer/user mindshare, they’re starting the new year with none of that and the idea “Hey maybe we should try AR/VR stuff again.”
Get bent Google. You shouldn’t have cancelled Daydream and killed the small amount of goodwill you were starting to cultivate. Lenovo got burned, developers got burned, users got burned. And they still want to try again?
Instead of taking your Google Glass ball and running home with it after everyone was mean about the idea, maybe listen to the feedback and change the product? But no, despite Glass being introduced almost purely around consumer-targeted ideas and concepts, it’s now an “Enterprise” product out of reach of us mere mortals.
ARCore, with its many naming and branding changes, has also failed to catch on like Google hyped.
Google, you’re charging into battle with Apple and Zuck and you got a dildo made of American cheese. Good luck.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DkXnLUpXgAEz6Yg.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DkXnLUpXgAEz6Yg.jpg (via HBO's Succession)
- pjmlp 5y agoAdd SceneForm to it, announced with fanfare at IO and slowly forgotten.
- n8cpdx 5y agoNot just forgotten, deprecated with no notice after my team built our product with a dependency on it. You might say, “why would you be so stupid to build your AR product on top of Google’s primary, supported, promoted, first-class way of doing AR?” And I would say Apple hasn’t fucked me over like this. In fact, Apple has continued investing in their AR offering and now makes Google’s ARCore and SceneForm look like a fucking joke. Google Maps AR - oh yeah, that’s an API feature of ARKit now. Want to have high precision location with Google ARCore? Go fuck yourself. (I’m directly quoting Google here, don’t @ me for the language; when you’re getting gaped by Google day after day, I guess some blue language slips in)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bsanr2 5y agoTango did, 7 years ago, everything ARKit does today. All they had to do was loss-lead on a showstopper of a phone with one killer app. They basically stripped down Tango to create ARCore, and lost the SLAM space to Apple and Niantic. No one realizes it yet, but this is about as bad as Microsoft losing the web to Google.
- egypturnash 5y agoIsn't Niantic something from Google? checks https://nianticlabs.com/en/about/ https://nianticlabs.com/en/about/ Keyhole made what got renamed Google Earth when Google ate them, ten years later the core of that team started Niantic Labs inside Google, made Ingress, a few years later Niantic left Google (with funding from Google, Nintendo, and Pokemon) and made Pokemon Go. Niantic has acquihired a few companies working in related spaces.
- bsanr2 5y ago>Google let Niantic go. Oh, I didn't know that. That's even worse. Niantic is positioning itself to be a competitor to Apple in the global spatial map game. Explains why Go released on Android first, though. Neat. I hope that doesn't change now that they're running with 6d.ai.
- jayd16 5y agoI think Asus did have Tango phones but it wasn't quite powerful enough. It couldn't compete with sexier flagships of the same year.
- pjmlp 5y agoMostly because ARCore tooling looks like desktop Linux UI/UX just like everything else that Google has produced in 3D tooling space for Android. I guess SceneForm was the best that they could manage to come closer to Metal Frameworks, and they just killed.
- gonehome 5y agoGoogle seems unfocused - AR is an example of this, their messaging platforms and failure to leverage Google voice for 10yrs after the acquisition are too. I’d bet on Apple, FB, or some new entry (harder without the underlying OS). DeepMind is the most interesting thing coming out of Google imo.
- AlwaysRock 5y agoIt's not impossible to "focus" Google but lets not pretend Google is making these decisions to focus on something or not. It's small groups of people or singular people who make these decisions and those visionaries can easily change their focus or be offered a more compelling role at a start up doing the same thing after they spend 12 months learning how to do it at Google. I don't love Facebook/Meta but it looks like they put a lot of eggs into the Metaverse bucket. Google has never really done that. They have dabbled and because its Google people assume its going to be big or meaningful. But once people internally make enough progress to get promoted and move around internally its not going to continue to be supported without guidance from the top and the top doesnt care about AR/VR/Metaverse. Or at least they havnt until now.
- gonehome 5y agoI’m a little confused by your first sentence because it sounds like we’re mostly in agreement? Google does a bunch of random things kind of haphazardly. Whether this is caused by incentive problems around promo or something else I don’t know. I don’t think they compare favorably to Apple, Zuckerberg, or modern Microsoft. I’d guess it comes from the top.
- potatolicious 5y agoThe two statements don't really work together: > It's small groups of people or singular people who make these decisions and those visionaries can easily change their focus or be offered a more compelling role True! All companies face this problem. Smart, capable people have options and frequently will decide to leave and do something else/go somewhere else. > but lets not pretend Google is making these decisions to focus on something or not This is where the disconnect is. As a company you decide what things are priorities, and you build teams to pursue those priorities in a way that is resilient to people leaving - even extremely senior leadership individuals. If a project withers and dies because a key player leaves, then it never had the company's focus. Part of effectively managing a company is to ensure your most important things don't have a low bus factor (or in Google's case, a bug factor of exactly one). MS, FB, Apple, etc, all have a record of being able to relentlessly pursue a particular goal despite being subject to the same workforce attrition forces that affect Google.
- bsedlm 5y agowasn't Microsoft also in this race with the HoloLens?
- loeg 5y agoNot past tense -- HoloLens is a product they charge real money for.
- monkeybutton 5y agoAnd soon to be mass producing. They will be supplying 120k units the US army.
- iamricks 5y agoI have a friend who works at a company that uses HoloLens, their use case is so that mechanics working on planes can be remotely guided by a more experienced mechanic (not sure if they're engineers?) on what they have to do to repair the aircraft.
- emptyfile 5y agoWhat Microsoft did with Hololens is a great example of what Google should've done. But that actually requires management with a vision.
- penjelly 5y agodaydream was my intro to vr, now a proud index user. Im also sad they completely dropped support for it, imagine buying a new phone and it losing an awesome feature for seemingly no reason (yes i understand google wouldve had to spend money supporting it)
- rvz 5y agoExcept they are trying again, but this time with the acquisition of North. [0] We'll see how this goes against what Meta and Apple has to offer for AR glassess. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/30/google-acquires-north-augmented-reality-glasses-start-up.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/30/google-acquires-north-augmen...
- dwighttk 5y agoGlass was not AR. It was a tiny screen you had to shift your focus to. I should change my usernames to glasswasnotar because I feel like I am always saying that when people talk about glass and ar
- zucked 5y agoHow is a tiny screen overlaid in an accessible field of vision, not totally obscuring your perception of reality, NOT "augmenting reality"? I agree it barely meets the threshold, but I don't write it off as not AR full stop.
- a4isms 5y agoAR is colloquially understood to mean overlaying your field of vision with graphics that interact with reality in your field of vision. By way of a real-world example, military pilots have heads-up displays that overlay IDs of aircraft on the aircraft as they appear to the pilot. That's AR. My volvo has a heads-up display that show me my speed, the current speed limit, warnings, lane guidance... But none of that points to anything in my field of vision. Not AR. Mercedes also have heads-up displays, and while I don't own one, I saw a demonstration where when you are using adaptive cruise control, it highlights the car it is following. That's AR. The above is my lay understanding. If you buy this distinction between "heads up display" as a general term, and "AR" as a specific use of a heads up display, then Glass was not AR. It was just a heads-up display.
- dwighttk 5y agoGlass had no overlay. You don’t see reality and the screen at the same time. It is reality or the screen. (Just like a phone that isn’t running an AR app) Looking at the screen does obscure your perception of reality because your eye has to change focus. The little prism was transparent but it may as well have been translucent because you couldn’t focus on the screen and the world at the same time.
- panzagl 5y agoSounds like it was just shitty AR
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agoNow they can call it MetaGlass!
- mikro2nd 5y agoSounds like they read some headlines along the lines of "Meta... metaverse... blah, blah, blah..." and had a bout of tech-envy. Again.
- abstrakraft 5y agoGoogle projects are like Rule 34: if you can think of it, someone at Google is working on it.
- pavel_lishin 5y ago> Considering how Google’s treated AR and VR in the last 10 years You mean how they've treated a large proportion of their customer-facing products?
- alfiedotwtf 5y agoi read the title, and thought of Google Reader, then came for the comments.
- potatolicious 5y agoThe moment I saw the headline I was itching to express this exact sentiment. Google seems unable to plan long-term - they had some of the most interesting VR and AR tech early-on but completely squandered the early lead by lacking any institutional commitment to the field. Google was among the first to put specialized sensors on devices to gain a structural understanding of your surrounding physical environment. They canned it. Google was among the first to ship accessible, affordable VR devices via Daydream. They canned that, too. Google's SLAM implementation was best-in-class for a while, and has basically failed to turn that into anything while FB caught up. The company as a whole seems to have no concept of long-term strategy. Every endeavor is dipped into with the most tepid of toes, and abandoned at the first sign of difficulty (see: Stadia, Allo, oh boy I can continue). A ton of fantastic research and work goes into products that the company should continue investing losses in for long-term strategic advantage, but the company ends up pursuing the worst of both worlds: paying for the R&D and then changing strategies on a whim. I know the messaging thing is a dead horse but it deserves to be beaten some more: Google should be fielding an iMessage competitor by now, if only to complete the platform narrative, even if it will always lose to WhatsApp. But instead it has no iMessage competitor and has rebooted its messaging strategy 10x for no discernible results. The minimum of what they needed to do was just to field a competent, stable messaging app that serves as a usable baseline for Android users... and they failed even that. And having been inside the sausage factory myself there's one huge lever that can be pulled here: Google upper management needs to get way more obsessive about products and long-term roadmaps. The reason why these projects die so easily is because they tend to be owned by mid-level managers and junior execs, a tier of the company where there is intense turnover. Projects die when their patrons leave the company, get promoted, move orgs, or just generally lose interest. There is frequently no champion for the project besides whichever manager/junior exec owns it. If the company hopes to invest in a field long enough for it to actually bear fruit, the commitments need to come directly from the top. A lot of this is the hangover of Google+, whose shadow every project (even non-social media ones) lives under. The company seems desperately afraid of making multi-year commitments to things unless they are bearing immediate fruit, out of fear that they'll pull another G+, where failing ideas continued to get disproportionate investment via dictat. I don't know what the right solution to that is, but it certainly isn't what they're doing right now.
- ksec 5y ago>Google, you’re charging into battle with Apple and Zuck and you got a dildo made of American cheese. Good luck. This is rare on HN. But true. Google's new CEO still have a lot to prove. The problem with Google was they were not found upon a product DNA. They have very little if any product sensibility. At this rate, Google search may be first to be disrupted before Facebook. Apple has its cracks but still far too minor. It is also interesting this is finally the mainstream view, at least the top HN comment. Prior to 2016, people still believe AMP in good faith, Firefox compatibility was not Google's fault, ads by Google were Ok.
- eitland 5y ago> At this rate, Google search may be first to be disrupted before Facebook. Apple has its cracks but still far too minor. After a few years of using DDG which is equally bad as Google but has less and less annoying ads I tried out Kagi last week. The difference is so big I don't care to verify with neither DDG nor Google: I know based on long experience how bad their results are. Kagi has so far been a breath of fresh air, a taste of how search used to work when Google actually found the things I asked for, not the thing an insanely annoying AI think I want.
- ksec 5y agoYes. And I forgot to mention in my original post, I only just realise very recently, in a lot of cases every single results in the first page are now Ads. Every single one. I have to scroll down to below the fold to get the result I wanted. I dont think any one at Google cares about UX anymore.
- Zak 5y agoIt seems to me that Google only iterates on things that are immediately successful. That doesn't work for something like consumer AR that hasn't really been done before; multiple iterations will be required to get it past the toy/demo/beta phase.
- rl3 5y ago>Google, you’re charging into battle with Apple and Zuck and you got a dildo made of American cheese. Good luck. Zuck's vision is trash to the point I question whether the man's had an original idea in his life, so I'm not completely discounting the American cheese monstrosity as somehow prevailing. I don't really care for Apple either, but I suspect they're going to "win" by virtue of focus and culture alone. Of course, if any of these three entities win, it is the world that loses. Rather, continues to lose—depending on how you look at it.
- urthor 5y agoWhilst I'm all for ragging on Facebook's missteps, their vision seems pretty good if I was in Zuc's shoes. They want to be vertically integrated, discount Apple in this space. They're deploying cost effective hardware combined with vertically integrated software stacks that "just work." And they are leveraging things Facebook does extremely well, targeting extreme volume for cost amortization, UX and building microtransaction loops. Like it or not those are things you can't say Facebook is bad at that stuff generally speaking. Everything about the Facebook metaverse vision is cynical from a societal aspect. But the business case is fine. They won't make any money for about 10 years, but after 10-15 years of Quest like products, they will be doing well for themselves.
- rl3 5y ago>Whilst I'm all for ragging on Facebook's missteps ... I prefer ragging on their very existence, but to each their own. :) Certainly not disputing they know how to make money. I'm sure they'll make a killing on AR/Metaverse bullshit.
- pjmlp 5y agoUsers of React, React Native, Folley, GHC, Flow,.... seem to appreciate their existence.
- monkeynotes 5y agoI think it's possible to respect the software their developers create and dislike the business goals and cynical approach to making money. Facebook has made some wonderful software, and it has fundamentally degraded humanity.
- jaegerpicker 5y ago100% I was a massive Google VR/AR adopter. Usually I'm a big iOS fan but I switched for a while because of Google's work there. I believe strongly that AR is the next major platform but I HIGHLY doubt Google will have a place in that market. They ignored Daydream and then killed it. ARCore is terrible to work with and pretty far behind ARKit and even Unity/Unreal's AR lib's. I'll never trust Google again given how terrible they have been to AR/VR.
- N1H1L 5y agoThis is because in Google, you are promoted/feted based on products you create, not what you maintain unless that's bringing in so much ad revenue that you can be spun off into a separate division.
- ilamont 5y agoConsidering how Google’s treated AR and VR in the last 10 years, hyping people up then quietly pulling back support and finally cancellation after just 2-3 years, I don’t see this going well. Not just AR/V like Glass. Web and mobile software, hardware, and platforms. We've seen so many projects launch with incredible hype and die on the vine a few years later or wither to insignificance from lack of customer support, developer resources, or a workable strategy. Nexus. Blogger. Stadia. Music. Plus. Wave. The lesson is clear: Google can't be trusted.
- throw10920 5y ago> Considering how Google’s treated AR and VR in the last 10 years, hyping people up then quietly pulling back support and finally cancellation after just 2-3 years s/AR and VR/half of the products that Google develops/ Google has some kind of inability to develop stable, boring, long-lasting products, instead prioritizing UX churn and new half-baked features over fixing old bugs or optimizing for performance. There was a very insightful comment on the Teams 911 thread a few days ago[1] - the entire thing is worth reading, but the most important point is "Google is not setup in same way and internal incentives are not like that, judging by hoard of messaging apps. They are simply setup to make very short projects that do not require long-term commitment." I do not trust Google to make stable (or privacy-preserving, which is especially relevant to AR...) products. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29496753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29496753