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Comment by volaski | Hacker News Reader

Someone please enlighten me, maybe I'm missing something, but I don't get why this augmented reality interface is better than having a centralized web page where I can manage them using the good old textual interface. It feels like a very convoluted rube goldberg machine approach to me. For example, the guy says something like "the car knows because I connected my chair to my car." Imagining how he would have done this makes me doubt the convenience. I can imagine he would have started dragging when he left the office and kept his thumb on the screen until he got to the car and finally connected it to the knob. He could have just opened a web page and connected these two devices without having to go through all this trouble.

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I actually agree with you, I think that this is really interesting, but I don't really think this is much more useful than: http://nodered.org/

However, the reason that this is interesting to people is that it makes device discovery easy, and effectively makes the node-red interface builder available as an AR thing.

This is important because it represents the next step in allowing regular, non-technical (but increasingly tech-familiar) consumers to set up and maintain their own networks and systems.

Setting up a webpage to control a network of lights, monitors, garage doors, thermostats, cameras, etc. might seem simple to you and to most of HN, because many here are familiar with the hardware, the languages, the ISA's, the basic device networking principles and best-practices that make these things work. You are in the very small minority of the 300m people in the US and the 7bn people in the world. For everyone else, visually dragging and dropping will be a much easier way to visualize and set up networks.

This product is not for you - it's for the vastly larger market outside of computer scientists/embedded engineers.

When you can demonstrate this value prop to the mass consumer market, under the MIT brand nonetheless, big companies like Audi will start to pay attention because they see an avenue to market an increasingly heterogeneous product (luxury sedan) to the rich, older folks who buy these things based on cool new features - automated avoidance, tying volume into acceleration, "Intelligent Drive" [1], projected HUD [2], etc.

As we see from the video, Audi has granted this researcher access to APIs that would be completely inaccessible otherwise. This is another key - API access. Could you control the features in your car through a webpage? No, because you don't have access to your windows or your stereo, unless you do some intensive and illegal hacking.

M2M and IoT has been contained mostly to the realm of industrial/auto applications so far. So once big companies start to see the consumer market opening up through a simpler, more intuitive interface, they might start opening up APIs to new machines and products.

Of course, allowing access to these APIs opens up a whole new can of safety worms...but that's going to be an increasingly large issue that we will have to deal with as we continue to integrate software and connectivity into new products.

[1] https://www.mbusa.com/mercedes/technology/videos/detail/titl...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg3mmfVILRA

I think you're assuming a lot of things about mainstream users. If AR was that intuitive, it would have already been mainstream. Many apps tried to port existing good old text based interface into AR but none have yet to gain traction. You need to remember the mainstream users do know how to use computer and do know how to access websites and enter forms. But they do not know how this geeky augmented reality technology works. Also my point here was not criticizing AR itself, I'm just saying his approach makes things needlessly convoluted for the sake of making it look cooler. Read my comment about how someone would drag and drop his chair in his office to his car.

I believe the research has value in its own right though.

I would agree though with the view that it's a bit convoluted as shown. Without even building out prototypes you might arrive at this as a V1 in an iterative thought experiment and quickly move on.

A slightly more user friendly iteration might be using image recognition to detect devices in your surroundings and build a database of them for use in a different, more suitable UI. If glass took off this data collection could be happening seamlessly with visual feedback while you are just looking at stuff. RFID tech may be a good alternative to image recognition. Ownership(authorization, authentication) sounds like a real challenge in any case. To work with minimum friction digital ownership might need to be assigned at the time of purchase.. In which case you wouldn't need image recognition OR RFID to build a database of your internet things..

Ok so then you wouldn't even need to connect your stuff together because there would be a database of stuff and everything would be able to self connect. You'd just be left with managing preferences similar to phone notifications. "Your chair would like to interface with your lights; Allow(Y/n)?".

Transferring ownership.. Lots of problems to work out.

I think the AR UI in the video is pretty cool. The trouble is, AR itself hasn't taken off. My theory is people really dislike reality. Reality is ugly, it's dirty, and when people operate upon information, they(we) do want abstraction over reality, want simplicity over complexity, desire focus over distractions.

What AR technology exists, and how good is it really?

I think the big thing for AR is hands-free/HUD devices. There are niche use cases for phones, but they're described as CV problems rather than AR.

It's so you can use the 'codes' presented on the objects and create these connections live. There's less steps and it's much more fluid than taking a picture of this code, saving that object, clicking on a features dropdown, and selecting another objects feature you want this to be attached to.

I would argue this was on the wrong track the moment it started out with QR code. "Why don't we bring two geekiest technologies--QR code and Augmented Reality--together? Sure! That will make it mainstream!"

The challenge of innovation is to see the possibilities. That's what makes it hard; anyone can see potential flaws - if that's what it took everyone would do it. I'd much prefer that we focus on the former.

What new possibility does this bring to the table? Connected devices concept has been around like forever. Sure it looks cool (like flying cars, or those impractical UIs from minority report) but how does this make things more convenient? I just was put off by how this guy makes it sound like he came up with all these concepts. "Imagine you could ... " ==> all the things he mentioned with this phrase are nothing new. The only thing that's novel in the video is the UI and I was pointing out how he talks as if it's his new UI that makes all these imaginations possible, but in fact in my opinion it's actually worse than existing solutions (just looks cooler).

The UI is the pitch - technology people can't use is useless to people (tautology).

It's a commercial-like video to attract attention - but fair enough if it doesn't impress you. It's hard for me to judge UI without using it myself.

It's cool that they're at least trying to solve the problem of a better UI because I believe that's a problem that exists. It reminds me of one of Brett Victor's talks.

I don't see what value that adds to the discussion; why do I care?

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