Off the top of my head I can think of streaming TV, a physical TV set, AI, and self-driving cars.
Is there any evidence Apple has any advantage over the already quite competent, well-funded players who have already demonstrated significant progress in this area?
And who exactly would that be? In terms of HMD shipments Microsoft is the only one doing anything serious with AR and even the Hololens form factor, FOV, PPD, battery etc... are nowhere near ready for mainstream. I can only think of one "well funded" AR company and they aren't doing so hot. That's not to denigrate my brothers over at Meta, Avegant and others who are working hard on HMD and who we love.
In sum total there has been just south of $5B of public investments or acquisitions into the AR development market since about 2014. Basically nothing when you consider what has to go into making the AR ecosystem work.
In fact I don't know if people really understand what it's going to take to make consumer AR huge, which is why I wrote this handy guide[1].
My take is that Apple has the best shot because it bought Metaio (at the time the largest AR company in the world) for pennies a long time ago and absorbed all of the knowledge they had been building since 2003.
The trick is whether Apple has figured out how to do a sleek, wide FOV HUD with SLAM, quality 3D rendering and a decent battery life - likely as an attachment to the iPhone.
[1] https://virtualrealitypop.com/heres-what-it-s-going-to-take-...
If the Hololens could be brought down to a price point where the Pokemon Go crowd could use it, it would be a success for that alone.
How good does AR need to be to do HyperReality?[1] Not much better than the HoloLens. More field of view would be needed. The ability to draw dark would be nice, but isn't essential for that, because it's explicitly a bright overlay on the world.
How good does AR need to be to do HyperReality?[1] Not much better than the HoloLens
You're underestimating the problem significantly. Read the link I posted previously because I lay it out there in detail. (I don't get paid or referrals or anything if you read it, it's just that I already wrote it all out there and don't want to do it again). FOV and draw dark are far from trivial issues, not to even mention content and geolocalization/georectification.
The VR headsets, on the other hand, are still about as clunky as they were in the 1990s. The head tracking is much better, and the resolution is a little better. They're still too heavy, too bulky, badly balanced, and need cables.
What about Facebook and Google? They aren't hardware companies. As a content producer, I don't trust them to be a good technology partner for consumer products.
e.g. Consider the publicity shots for VR. As fashion, they are self-parody.
Though IMHO key is heads-up display only - ie no creeping camera. This subtraction destroys AR, and so much related value... it's something a google could never bring itself to do. But Apple has demonstrated time and again that they will omit so-called "crucial" features if they undermine the offering. Another fairly rare strength...
Got to be honest, I think they missed a big opportunity to make the watch fashionable and popular by simply choosing a square face, reminiscent of nerdy calculator watches from decades past, rather than a nice circular face, like most other watches.
Most people won't get an Apple Watch not because it isn't useful, but (I think) because it just doesn't look right, doesn't fit into the "fashion" that it claims to be.
Apple's gamble seems to be targeting people whom have never owned or even wanted to own a traditional watch and for whom the traditional shape holds no intrinsic emotional value.
Nor for that matter is square an unknown shape even for higher end watches:
http://media.gq.com/photos/56c61128b9dd6cd82e6f7bb5/master/w...
http://media.gq.com/photos/56c61128585fc86b2f2497c6/master/w...
>Apple's gamble seems to be targeting people whom have never owned or even wanted to own a traditional watch...
That should be who. People who have never owned... is the noun phrase acting as an object of targeting, and who is the subject of the modifying phrases who have never owned and [who] never even wanted to own. I'm not trying to be a pedant. By using whom, you're signaling that you care about grammar; so I thought I'd give feedback. Feel free to ignore.
The goal should be simplification.
The bigger problem is that Apple Watch never became its own fashion statement. The hype fizzled out quickly and it never reached the same cultural peaks as some of Apple's other products like the iPod or iPhone, products that became their own status symbols in their primes.
And that comes back to function, because the Apple Watch is still a solution in search of a problem.
"Hey dude, something is happening, take out your phone!"
It's not a very compelling value.
For the years to come all apple designs made look the competition like ridiculous old technology.
Today, Apple designs like the watch and Macbooks follow the same tired idea of curvy, minimalistic Braun-like devices while some competitors are leapfrogging to new design paradigms, maybe trying to pull the same 2001 success of the iPod; Perhaps no one is there yet, but many years have passed and the taste of design is eager for the next thing.
Which competitors/designs do you think are beating out Apple?
Even many newer smart watches are trending to more Apple-like
Yeah, I mean they're only the second largest watchmaker in the world, barely popular at all!
Can I get a Siri that can actually answer my questions instead of "Here's what I found on the web for that" ....
I don't think it's geared towards interaction. You can connect any bluetooth device to it, because it's just a Windows 10 machine, but it seems unreasonable to expect the user to be sitting down with keyboard and mouse or to assume they have some kind of gyroscopic mouse. There are some cool games that show what's possible, but data visualization seems to be a huge possibility. At least until they standardize more forms of input.
I'm not. Not everyone is up on new tech. But, there's probably only 5 people in developed nations that have not heard of Apple and that they are a big tech company.
The goal here is ad revenue and for that, one needs clicks and for that, one needs Apple in the headline to reach more people.
> Is there any evidence Apple has any advantage over the already quite competent, well-funded players who have already demonstrated significant progress in this area?
Yes. They obviously have world-class expertise in miniaturization, which is the key challenge for augmented reality glasses.
They also just released last year their AirPods, which have a custom chip for delivering low latency wireless streams of audio. Video or light field is the next step, but AirPods are on the market which means Apple already has an MVP out. That's a huge advantage.
The other key missing piece for any kind of mobile AR or VR is inside-out tracking. That, again, requires custom low-power silicon which is very much a strength for Apple. Compared to Google, Oculus, HTC, or any of the startups, Apple has much more experience with custom silicon. They acquired Metaio and Flyby, which build their machine vision base.
Apple's share of mobile phone market can be helpful if they want to bring in functionality that requires special features from the handset.
Also if we think about some more down to earth stuff, Apple could become "number one AR vendor" by just putting the features to next iPhone models. If the stuff actually works and if Apple allows, this might bring in 3rd party developers.
The latter has certainly disappeared. See e.g. the stampede away from the Mac.
For the former: it's debatable how much untapped consumer interest there is in AR.
Glasses would work if they were slim and stylish. But if the motivation is to "beam content into the eyes of the user" and not to empower users to do non-gimmicky cool new things they couldn't before - that's not going to happen.
It's the difference between a power tool approach and a menu approach. If you give people power tools and let them play with them, they'll do amazing things.
If you give people a menu of options - tweak a photo, tweak a photo a different way, take a 180 degree panorama, passively watch a VR movie - that's extremely unexciting.
Cook has always been more of the latter type than the former.
Apple's core advantage is that they set the standard for mobile smart devices and consumer will follow them if they're able to gain momentum.
Question at that point swings back to how they'll try to do it, which becomes highly speculative.
If I had to guess, they'll morph the iPhone to a AR device like the morphed the iPod to a phone; meaning the first step is to add AR to the iPhone and gain traction.
...eventually, maybe; probably after someone else has first.
The technology backing this is the stuff that the kinect was based on, by PrimeSense; it's for 3d spatial scanning, and it's super cool tech, but it's no more 'AR' than the kinect was or the leap motion was; turns out that even if you have a point cloud, AR is still hard.
The sad thing is that there's no sign that Apple is actually building any kind of meaningful product with it.
Any kind of competitive advantage Apple might have as a company hinges on them actually building something novel and meaningful in this space.
I know they like to be all ninja and secret with their R&D, but you can't just hide in a closet for 6 months with a million dollars and pull out a strong AI; that sort of technological leap just doesn't happen very much any more, and certainly not without a lot of people noticing the massive amount of money it consumes to produce.
Being novel also isn't that important. For example, Apple's white earphones played a major role in getting the public to see that their devices were mainstream, but there was nothing truly novel about them.
I believe parent comments are mostly making the point that we still have another generation before Apple would have anything sufficiently advanced enough that they could do their post-90s "polish and package" magic.
I could see them making a Google Cardboard-like mounting bracket / dock for the iphone I guess, maybe with better cameras and sensors.
Not going to happen (any time soon). That's an insurmountable engineering challenge for the foreseeable future.
It's nobody's ideal, but a clip-on/necklace style power solution might be sellable to the public if the value proposition of the glasses is good enough.
Maybe very thick oversized (by today's standards) frames will come into style and something like that will be on the border of possibility, but it seems like a real stretch within the next 10 years.
We agree that power consumption is a limiting factor no matter what. In my imagined system, only something on the order of 1W would be delivered to the glasses. Delivering 1W over 10cm with large-ish coil area at >50% efficiency using NFMR isn't really a breakthrough, but it's only a way of eliminating the LiPo bulk and nothing more.
The thing is, I don't think we're near the boundary of power efficiency even with today's silicon. The way forward is to push all the feature tracking and other low-level vision tasks down to the ASIC level, while accepting some strict limitations on the rendering side. So a lot of it comes down to scope of features. Its most immediately useful applications are little more than a glorified HUD -- project some GPS data here or an info overlay there. Blit a video source on top of a marker, that sort of thing.
This sort of practical product, by 2027, I'll say yes. Mindblowing, transform-your-world stuff? No. But let's see what happens...
3D sensing is not a new technology and was initially adopted by Microsoft‘s Kinect and Lenovo‘s Tango-enabled Phab2 Pro.
Anyway, my prescription glasses are maybe 25 grams (0.89 ounces). I think the current technology is a long way from giving us something as light as that even if the bulk of it rests in our pocket. I expect to read about the upcoming AR revolution for many years.
I think this is easily an area that any number of players could really ratchet up & take, but not one solid reference implementation exists right now.