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Comment by neotek | Hacker News Reader

The cynic in me wants to dismiss this as just another marketing video from a company yet to show us anything tangible, but the child in me desperately wants this to be a reality. Please, please let this be real.

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Am I the only person who doesn't want this tech? I love what's going on with VR and tried out a Vive this weekend, but this kind of AR just seems like it would be somewhat annoying. It would be tons of pop-ups, notifications, etc that would detract from one's quality of life. I suspect keyboard/mouse and monitor will hard to unseat in the workplace, the same way we didn't give up on laptops and desktops for ipads.

I'm already fighting this battle with my android watch. Every so often some app decides that I want notifications and then my watch vibrates what's essentially a marketing message and I, of course, check thinking its a text message or email. Thankfully this is easy to disable on a per app basis, but I can imagine it'll be much worse on AR when developers have our entire field of view to post marketing messages on. AR gaming seems like it would be pleasant, but do I really want my living room the background of all my games? Seems to me VR is the better solution in gaming, especially with cameras mounted on VR headsets like the Vive has.

AR is starting to feel like the Kinect or Google Glasses all over again. We're getting these amazing demos and everyone is excited, but no one is really thinking usability, interfaces, social exceptions, and realistic applications. Or considering how much more mature VR is right now and how it might just eat AR's lunch. With VR you are at least socially signaling "I am in a different space and not here with you", but with AR you are socially signaling "I'm here but I'm projecting a mustache on you for my own amusement and partially ignoring you while I watch funny youtube clips" which will make people uncomfortable the same way Google Glasses did.

AR or MR is the endgame. Once the technology is capable of blocking out the world then you have VR in MR. Similar attempts have been made with passthrough video with VR[1]; the tech will converge at some point, it's inevitable.

So while you may not be the only one who doesn't want this tech to come about you and anyone else who shares your sentiments are wishing for something that absolutely won't happen. As for your usability concerns, those always come later as the tech matures.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxM4vN_4jJY

It will happen in the sense that AR technology will become viable and cost-effective. I think it's far from set in stone how much it will be used outside of niche applications. Smartphones are an enormously powerful technology but they have a social limit. For instance, if you're building an app which requires people to use their phones while in conversation, and overlay information on top, that is clearly going to come up against social barriers. Just because you can build something, it doesn't mean people will use it.

It is almost undoubtedly going to be very useful in particular professional contexts, how much it goes beyond that is anyone's guess.

The problem, like you state, is not AR itself, it's that " no one is really thinking usability, interfaces, social exceptions, and realistic applications".

There is a movement that tries to move the world in a different direction, and I hope many more people will invest some serious time reading about the subject.

http://livable.media/

Here's a great place to start if you're interested:

http://nxhx.org/dfa/

> "no one is really thinking usability, interfaces, social exceptions, and realistic applications"

How true is that? It seems to me that the usability and interface concerns are actually trivial.

I'm pretty sure the bottleneck has always been a technical one, not a creative one.

You're not the only one. I personally am not a fan of VR either.

BUT... There is one use case where I would totally adopt AR/VR for, that I don't see a lot of people talking about.

If someone could make an VR/AR app that simply gives me a floor to ceiling monitor and used eye tracking, I'd be thrilled.

I currently use a pair of 4K monitors (@ 1:1) for work, and I still feel like I could use more real estate. I would guess that a pair of goggles would cost less than having more monitors, and take up less space.

The biggest issue preventing that is that to do better than your dual 4k monitors the VR goggles will have to have many more pixels on the much smaller screens, which is hard to do reliably from a manufacturing standpoint and would require an enormous amount of processing power to render at the 90FPS that VR requires to be comfortable.

Would it need more pixels if all it is doing is scrolling up and down a virtual monitor though?

If you want to see more on the screen at any one time than your current 4k screen it's going to require more pixels no matter how you arrange everything else. If you want to put it 'deeper' into the VR world than just placing the exact same screen data onto the VR screens will require multiple real pixels per fake VR screen pixels.

Also don't forget you have to have 2x panels with the increased resolution at smaller sizes than the existing monitors.

Finally if you are just scrolling through a virtual screen there's no reason that can't be done on today's monitors and we already have eye tracking tech available without having to jam that tracking into already crowded glasses.

I am willing to accept tradeoffs in resolution for more working area.

I basically have the equivalent of 8 1080p monitors, but if I can get the equivalent of more 1080p monitors over a larger area but at a lower pixel density (downscaling is ok provided I can zoom in and out), I'd be totally good with that.

Almost every article and demo I've read and watched about AR in the last couple of years mentions huge virtual screens everywhere. It's in all the Hololens demos, for example.

I haven't seen any examples where the entire field of view is basically a giant Windows or Mac desktop, which is what I'm talking about. Most of the stuff I've seen are just like the video linked in the parent thread.

There's been loads of fantasy AR interfaces designed and kicked around for ages, but before anyone can start making them though you have to get to the point that the technology is available to test on. VR was stuck in the same place that you bemoan about for AR for ages before things like the Rift started showing up and available for people to actually experiment with. Heck we're still in the crummy interface stage of VR and most of the games that have come out aren't that deep or engaging coma

> "I am in a different space and not here with you", but with AR you are socially signaling "I'm here but I'm projecting a mustache on you for my own amusement and partially ignoring you while I watch funny youtube clips" which will make people uncomfortable the same way Google Glasses did.

I don't think the difference here is as big as you make it out to be and what most people didn't like about Glass was the camera not the screen. Neither of those messages are particularly acceptable when a person wants to talk to you. If AR is actually useful social etiquette will adapt like it has for every distraction machine that has come along.

The bottom has fine print saying the entire video was shot directly using magic leap technology and using 0 post processing with the only addition being [this] text explanation.

Given the slow movement, wonder if there was a person wearing the their tech, or if it's mechanical.

Looks like someone is wearing it.

My concern while watching the video was that things just happened without the user's intervention.

The user might as well have been watching a video.

Agree, seemed odd. If it were me, I'd find a single, complete, simple, yet "magical" behavior to demo/release; users, not tech is what matters.

yeah, the biggest plus of AR is interaction. They failed to showcase that.

That's sort of like watching a video game cinematic trailer, and saying no post processing was done on the rendered video. That might be true, but it doesn't represent the gameplay, or in this case, the experience of using the device.

Most of this video makes absolutely no sense. What messages is the user browsing? E-mails, or some type of Magic Leap messaging system? How is the 3D map of Everest generated, a trail marked out and animated on it, and attached through a message by a child? Or what about the storefront browsing 3D shoes? We could have 3D scanned shoes displayed on the internet at the moment, but no one wants to see 3D shoes, they want to see a few high resolution photos of the actual product.

Right now, they're not showing any real world use cases, and just prerendering fictitious interfaces. I feel like this demo is completely out of touch with reality. No one is going to be sending 3D presentation messages. No one is going to be making 3D storefronts. It has nothing to do with technological limitations, they're just not efficient or practical.

This demo is trying to show how it can enhance my daily life while browsing messages and content online. So, let's see someone interacting with Gmail, Spotify, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, etc. Show me why I'd want to use this device and not pull out my phone to browse e-mails or storefronts.

> No one is going to be making 3D storefronts.

This is right there with visionary phrases such as "640KB is enough". Probably not going to happen next year though.

I stand by that statement for the foreseeable future. If you look at how technology and the internet has changed in the past two decades, it's going in the opposite direction of this video. This reminds me of Flash in the late 90s, early 00s. There were countless extravagant sites with 3D elements during that time period, and they all died to make way for more efficient user experiences to consume content.

This technology has lots of interesting use cases, but what's demonstrated in the video isn't one of them.

There were probably more people making 3D storefronts twenty years ago than there are today.

Given that it's new technology and the applications that could make use of this don't exist, I think you have to give them a little more leeway with their marketing material. I agree that most of the "apps" are likely custom-built just for this demo (I'm basing this on the appearance that the apps are interactive rather than just canned videos projected into space) but that doesn't mean it's invalid to showcase those as possibilities.

What would have been really neat is to have the Everest map fixed in space and the user could walk around it and lean in to zoom. Sort of like how many sci-fi movies have 3D mapping projections (Avatar, Prometheus, etc. etc.) that the characters can walk around and sometimes physically interact with. That would have been a good demonstration that it's not just canned video.

A few decades ago, someone would have been considered totally correct to say that no one is going to be streaming live video over the internet as it's just not efficient or practical. As bandwidth, storage, and processing power tend towards infinity, all those impractical ideas suddenly become possible. Imagine being able to search the entirety of the internet instantly as you type each keystroke. Impractical? Maybe Google will crack that some day.

i agree. the parent points out some reasonable objections, like certainly the 10 year old didn't make a 3d magic-leap mount everest project for gradeschool science fair.

However, the point you make is how I interpreted it. We have the ability to do what google glass couldn't amd overlay realtime data into the real-world, also they can use data to provide contextual information.

Is it a long way off? Maybe. Maybe not. A lot of video game trailers give you a good picture of gameplay. I would play this game...

they wrote it that way specifically for perceptive people like you

Nokia got caught using professional camera gear to show off their amazing smartphone camera.

Faking this kind of stuff is not unheard of.

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