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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

Why will AR require a persistent full-scale model of the globe? Isn't the whole point of AR that it takes the existing environment, generates a local map on the fly, and overlays something useful on it? My 2025-model AR sunglasses don't need to know nor care what shape the Arc de Triomphe is, they just need to know the names of the people in my field of view[1], or where the walls and floor of my house are, or maybe the next 500m of the road I'm driving on.

[1] This is my dearest hope for AR, that someday all the people around me will have MMO-style nameplates, because I have many strengths but remembering the names of people I've just met is not one of them.

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> someday all the people around me will have MMO-style nameplates

No, thank you, kind user. Just because you are unable to remember the names of relevant people around you, there is no particular reason why anyone sensible should agree to have personal data be transmitted to random people around them at all times.

Such name identification on the fly then contributes to a (still fictional for the public) global real time people location service. Great, because 5 people are in line-of-sight of George McGeorgeface he is now confirmed to be at the dildo store in downtown Nairobi although he claimed to be sick for work, thank you face recognition APIs!

It's bad enough that we get tracked and screwed for ad data nowadays which just happens to not even stay in the ad space.....

You bring up some good points, but I would be happy with having that info for people in my Contacts list. I would see it like this, each user has an id, and I would be able to tie that id to a name. And it would only be visible if they were in eye-sight.

To circumvent this, I think it would be great if user had to option to make a geofence. Like they could enable their Contact details being detected in a Conference/Meetup? networking event,as the person himself/herself will benefit from this. Then, outside a particular location your ID gets locked down sort of like location based -Smart Lock in smartphones.

Almost certainly this is already possible with Facebook's graph and the current state of facial recognition in photos.

Speak for yourself. I would permit and embrace it.

Woah, OK, we clearly picture this service working very differently. I'm not asking for everyone to be geotagged in some publicly accessible database. Ew. I just want locally running facial recognition paired with speech-to-text which is smart enough to recognize introductions, so that when five people introduce themselves to me in quick succession after I stumble off a red-eye flight, and then three weeks later one of them comes up to me acting like they know me, I have some chance of knowing who the hell they are.

It’s amazing how much anxiety this would remove from my life. A very significant amount, like, I’m ready for this now please.

"Why will AR require a persistent full-scale model of the globe?"

The 'Mirrorworld' described here is not just an AR application. It's an indexable, queryable database of "everything" that is built.

Don't think about nameplates above people.

Think about service crews coming to inspect the local sewer network, who get an "xray" view of the pipes running under the street.

That "xray view" could actually be created from the cameras that were worn by the service crew that installed the pipes in the first place. That way it could be accurate even if the pipe maps aren't, and e.g. it might be able to warn about other nearby pipes that aren't present on the map.

That's pretty cool and all, but that's not "AR" (although it could be used for it).

AR : Mirrorworld :: The Internet : Google Maps

You don't get to choose the definition. Mirrorworld is just one usage of AR.

AR is augmented reality and the pipes example is a great example of that.

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