Facebook's Bet on an Augmented Reality Future
forbes.com
forbes.com
I think AR will be a game changer, but honestly it's still a long ways out, maybe another decade even.
The arc of progress is long.
This is an article of faith taken for granted by software people, but keep in mind this had only been happening because of specific improvements to wafer process technology. It's not a guaranteed trend.
Throwing money at this is necessary to solve the issues outlined, but not today and not next year. It’s also possible thst in a decade we’ll discover that other issues arise which require, surprise, more time and money to solve. Remember that for most people AR/VR still has to compete with traditional displays, which get cheaper, have higher resolution, and are lighter and thinner than ever before.
If really flexible screens or holographic tech makes a leap in that decade+ too, then AR/VR could find that it’s no longer even that desirable as more than a niche tool/toy.
But the big issue is the dearth of content. There are a handful of high quality games for the thing, and a large number of amateur early-access dreck. I really want to spend time with the thing but haven't found anything thats' compelling for more than a handful of hours (and even those run $20+). It's a medium that's still waiting for its Pacman IMO
Definitely still think it's niche for now but the more polished experiences are starting to trickle out.
i even know a few people working there; they're smart dudes.
but.
they're being managed by an organization whose ops group can't remember to renew certs and whose marketing group thinks it's cool to demo first person shooters at NRA events the day after a mass shooting where you play the part of a deranged mass shooter killing random people on a train platform.
as smart as the tech guys are, the organizational + business guys aren't really the sharpest tools in the drawer.
Do you have a source for this?
> play the part of a deranged mass shooter killing random people on a train platform
It's just a regular shooter game with some novel time-warp mechanics in it, that happens to take place in a futuristic train station.
To be clear: I'm not saying you are consciously condemning Oculus for having the wrong politics, but maybe the right politics/wrong politics angle is coloring your view of the business world. Which it shouldn't.
First interview was scheduled at a not-so-great time (I was in a different timezone, which they knew, but didn't seem to care enough to pick a less inconvenient time). My interviewer never showed up on skype. They apologized, rescheduled (I insisted on a more reasonable time). The interviewer showed up quite late, and only one of the two showed up. It went well, but had to schedule a follow up with the other one. That one went well also. We eventually got to the point where I was talking to HR about specifics of the offer, and everyone went completely silent. I tried to follow up a few times, but never heard back. I assume they found someone else, but have the respect to write back.
Years later, I watched one of Carmack's talk and one of his complaints was just how bad they (he had joined Oculus at this point) were at stores infrastructure, discovery and payment and all of that. Seems pretty clear to me there's problem inside the non-core engineering aspect of the company.
If you let that mentality bleed into things like setting up every part of your organization to be awesome you get this siloing effect. If you are a ONLY HIRE A-PLAYERS type company, that doesn't mean only hire great engineers. It means everyone needs to be great at what they do. Including HR, operations, etc. A lot of companies with super smart guys miss this. They still go on to success but I know from experience and at least a couple of friends that went very large in valuation and growth on the typical startup path that not taking more time on their company culture and instilling their values in ALL of the organization before it went meteoric caused them no end of grief and made them dislike their company, even though they built awesome engineering organization at the end of it all.
(edit: sample size of two from personal experience, but based on observation, this seems almost axiomatic based on how so many startups go when you read their stories)
It's robots[0] not "random people", but yeah lets not let facts get in the way of your editorialising.
[0] https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Bul...
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/26/17054392/facebook-cpac-oc...
What I don't understand (beyond why Facebook would be at CPAC to begin with....) is why they would demo 'Bullet Train' in 2018.
This demo was considered too much of a murder simulator, and eventually became the VERY POPULAR game ROBO RECALL in 2016. In that game the guns are much more sci-fi, and it eliminates many of the violence concerns. It's an awesome game. Why didn't they bring that instead of a ~4yr old demo?
Sounds much cooler than hypocritically cancelling an event just because of the unfortunate news cycle.
* It was a game killing random robots, not people.
* It wasn't an NRA event, it was CPAC where the NRA was one of many presenters.
* It was not the day after, it was a week after.
You could argue that these are minor errors, but that's not the point. You've already tarnished your credibility so it's hard to take anything else you retort with at face value.
It's unfortunate because I think you had a decent point about optics.
> where you play the part of a deranged mass shooter killing random people on a train platform
Even if they were humans, it would be "Half Life 2", not "No Russian".
In fact, these ideas might only make sense under circumstances where there is literally nothing to do for really, really long periods of time, waiting around in tight quarters until you’re able to unbuckle and move freely. In other words during space travel.
I hope that’s where this is going. Any other setting or context for application of such technologies doesn’t make any normal amount of sense. And this fits, since space travel isn’t exactly normal yet.
My intuition tells me Carmack and Zuckerburg have discussed this WRT rocket ships and outer space. And that combination of subject matter, legitimate credibility, intellect and wealth is the only thing that makes sense, to justify such a bet.
If there's anything that'll kill AR before it's really had a chance it's a million different APIs that aren't compatible with each other, leading to developers choosing to support different platforms and users not knowing which one is actually suitable for them.
As for what could kill AR "before its had its chance" (AR has actually been around for a long, long time) - lack of wearable hardware. AR apps on phones/ipads/handheld devices are nice, and getting better all the time, but generally don't have the potential to increase productivity to the extent that hands free glasses/headset can. Wearable hardware needs to get more powerful, less intrusive, and have better/ubiquitous connection (more bandwidth than current cellular, potentially 5G could solve this issue).