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I've been very bearish on AR and especially headset AR for years. Building useful UX in front of someone's face is incredibly hard and doing it with such poor v

by tootie 4y ago

I've been very bearish on AR and especially headset AR for years. Building useful UX in front of someone's face is incredibly hard and doing it with such poor visual precision is impossible. I worked at a digital design shop a few years ago and they were throwing devices at us and asking us to come up with just some compelling demos and I don't think we really succeeded. We need multiple optics breakthroughs before we can even think about what these could be good for. Magic Leap pivoted to enterprise and the US military just paused the Hololens project. The market is not clamoring for this stuff and industry has not convinced anyone in 10+ years of trying. Phone-based AR is both more vivid and more accessible and still hasn't really caught on at all. Word Lens and Pokemon Go were so long ago at this point and there's been no major followup.

vineyardmike 4y ago
Small nit: the US didn’t pause the HoloLens, they said it wasn’t rugged enough to deploy as is, and they wanted more design before they bought a bunch for field use. That isn’t a particular damnation because it’s a very particular use case that has super tough requirements. I think phone-based AR is completely different from face-mounted fwiw and phone-based has no reason to catch on because I’d you have to hold a phone, the UX is extra terrible. I do agree that the experiences aren’t ready yet for facemounted either, however.
- tootie 4y ago
  Phone and headset AR have different affordances for different situations. Phone AR actually works right now and is deployed to everyone's pockets. And phones are much more capable input devices that headsets which allows for things like Pokemon Go. And you don't need to worry about obscuring the user's view so they can do full occlusion of real images and not worry about someone walking into a telephone pole. You can't do immersive, but immersive isn't the only or even the best approach.

by tootie 4y ago

vineyardmike 4y ago

Small nit: the US didn’t pause the HoloLens, they said it wasn’t rugged enough to deploy as is, and they wanted more design before they bought a bunch for field use. That isn’t a particular damnation because it’s a very particular use case that has super tough requirements. I think phone-based AR is completely different from face-mounted fwiw and phone-based has no reason to catch on because I’d you have to hold a phone, the UX is extra terrible. I do agree that the experiences aren’t ready yet for facemounted either, however.

tootie 4y ago
Phone and headset AR have different affordances for different situations. Phone AR actually works right now and is deployed to everyone's pockets. And phones are much more capable input devices that headsets which allows for things like Pokemon Go. And you don't need to worry about obscuring the user's view so they can do full occlusion of real images and not worry about someone walking into a telephone pole. You can't do immersive, but immersive isn't the only or even the best approach.