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> could anyone have imagined walking into a living room 30 years ago and seeing everyone hunched over a phone? True, but I don't recall smartphones ever being
by landhar 3y ago
> could anyone have imagined walking into a living room 30 years ago and seeing everyone hunched over a phone?
True, but I don't recall smartphones ever being unveiled with promotional videos of people all being hunched over them at dinner.
Smartphones were promoted by enabling us to do things on the go: making and receiving phone calls, getting directions, finding restaurants in the area. This is why this feels different: the experience that is promoted is one that feels already slightly dystopian.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tromp 3y agoI wonder if anyone will feel brave enough to wear this on a bike... Until the time they're arrested for using a smartphone while biking, or for relying on the computer not to malfunction just to avoid riding blind.
- swader999 3y agoSkiing was what I was wondering.
- cogogo 3y agoSpecialized AR goggles exist. Not for me but I guess I can understand the appeal to some. https://ostloong.com/sirius/ https://ostloong.com/sirius/
- jsjohnst 3y agoRecon Jet made an HMD that is sorta similar to Google Glass, but designed more like ski goggles / sunglasses. One of its use cases when it came out around ten years ago was skiing, but I never used it for that. I mainly used mine biking with its ANT+ integration.
- chasd00 3y agoOr driving. It would interesting to have directions overlaid on the view of the road. The exit I need to take could be outlined and highlighted for example.
- Turskarama 3y agoUntil it crashes, and then you crash. It's not proper AR, It's VR with passthrough which means it's purely active. If it fails it goes black.
- scarface_74 3y agoThere is a separate processing path for the video pass through that is suppose to be distinct from the OS. If one crashes the other shouldn’t. Yes I know the difference between in theory and practice .
- bee_rider 3y agoI can’t imagine putting a CPU as complicated as the M2 in between my eyeballs and the road. It is too big and complicated. I guess we don’t really know what the R1 does. It is hypothetically possible that there’s a failsafe road-eyeball path just goes through that chip, maybe that could be made as reliable as various other critical computers…
- Turskarama 3y agoIt's not as failsafe as glass. I guarantee you Mercedes or Lamborghini would _love_ to have a fully enclosed interior with screens instead of windows, but it's a critical safety feature and anything that makes it less likely to work is just not happening.
- mrtranscendence 3y agoWasn’t there a vampire movie maybe fifteen years ago, where the vampires drove fully enclosed cars via camera during the day? Daybreakers?
- brandall10 3y agoI'm thinking it might have an onboard battery that affords a few minutes after the current battery is depleted to allow hot swaps. Not a great solution to using these in such situations, because bugs as you say, but it might be a feature that allows people to feel so daring. Oof.
- scarface_74 3y agoThe iPhone was introduced as having three features: 1. An iPod - that was already isolating people 2. A phone 3. An internet communicator
- brookst 3y agoI’m confused. Are we judging a product category based on how it’s promoted, or how it’s used? I don’t think my opinion of smartphones would be any different if early promotions had shown the downsides, or bigger upsides, or bizarre and unrealistic scenarios. Am I wrong to be anchored on how they’re actually used, which literally nobody foresaw?
- sanderjd 3y agoWe're judging it based on the vision for how it will be used, as evidenced through its initial promotion.
- brookst 3y agoDo you judge Viagra based on how well it reduces blood pressure? I agree that demo was dumb and dystopian. But it's silly to latch on to one imagined usage, ignore the others, and have no interest in what the reality will be.
- sanderjd 3y agoIt would be silly to latch onto it, if it were the vision of some random fan, but it is the vision of the company creating the product, so no, it's not silly to consider it critically.
- lolinder 3y agoI don't think OP is saying smartphones aren't dystopian in practice, just that no one set out to create the dystopia. That part of the Vision demo showed that the designers thought that this additional contribution to our dystopia was a positive thing, and that's concerning.
- alexvoda 3y agoPrecisely. And you can withness this in sibling threads. For some reason, today some people actually openly desire or pretend to desire the dystopia. My suspicion is that this is related to the longtermist movement.