The State of Augmented Reality
sayduck.com
sayduck.com
Instead I read a description of Apple products and a sales pitch for OP’s company.
Title is perhaps a tad inaccurate.
In fact AR is especially bad compared to VR where the experience is fully immersive. With AR you get a confused blurry reality where you can literally see the seams and this messes with your brain that something isn’t right.
That is not to say that on your face AR is any good yet, only that phone AR is mostly pointless IMO.
I did get to use a Magic Leap at GDC this year to shoot aliens coming out of portals in a physical living room stage. The graphics were PS2 level but the attachment to the real world in that contrived setup was rock solid as was the virtual gun projected in my hand. As I ran about the living room the portals with aliens coming through mapped to the walls of the living room worked well. It at least shows a step toward real AR.
WebAR is OK but too limited. Just give me some javascript control of not just the objects but how people interact with them and I’ll make you something awesome.
I think there’s a huge missed opportunity here for Apple, for developers, for users.
- usdz (standardized zip file of pixar usd and assets) - reality composer (proprietary new format in iOS 13. you can add limited interactivity, but all scripting is in a limited graphical language) - also apps with ARKit + your custom render or SceneKit
Kinda feels like AR needs smart glasses to be adopted culturally before it has its moment. Thoughts?
The shopping experience is one of those, but to me, not anything like a killer app.
The sandbox of minecraft I think offers some more exciting and unique possibilities for AR.
The current state of AR is * Hardware is not there yet. Phone-based AR is the current hardware until then. * Fantastic content is still in the work. Content creators and developers are aware that app download is the biggest slog on distribution. Nobody is going to download (and keep) your app to experience AR for 5 minutes. Most AR experiences last less than 30 seconds. * True Web AR, where you can literally go to a link on your browser and experience interactive AR, is the best medium for content delivery. Write HTML, CSS, JS and get AR content. This works on both short-form (< 5 minutes) experiences and long-form (>5 minutes) experiences. * Foundational layers of AR are either missing or vendor lock-in: persistence object (e.g. come back to the same space tomorrow and see the same thing), multiplayer (e.g. see the same content from your own angle with your friend), distribution (e.g. the same content getting specialized for different form factors), creation tools (e.g. environment scanning, object scanning, ...).
Many (see other comments) people are correct when they say that phone AR is not what AR should be. That even the Hololens or the Magic Leap are not it. This will change with time but it's a catch-22. You need some hardware to get more content to get more hardware to get more content.
- the whole thing was overblown, overhyped, etc.
- tech nowhere near ready at the level of expectation they built. Basically was more limited than Hololens (narrow field of view) but some cool effects. Resolution/performance was apparently not good to see.
- Software wasn't much evolved either.
The entire thing was a borderline scam, despite big names etc. who apparently got hyped like the rest of us.
Agreed, AR is big. Very big. This is going to be a fascinating century if we keep the current pace of acceleration.
AR is about creating a purely individual visual experience. Much more the domain of art than business.
What will be world changing about it?
Unlike a sibling comment, I don't think it's a "borderline scam", but I do think the company is struggling to live up to their own hype. When it was released, it had a lot of problems. The latest OS update is much better. I first tried it around OS v0.17 and it was pretty shaky and crashed a lot. By v0.20, it was running much better, but that was like 6 months later. I think they felt pressured to release earlier than they should have.
I've been pretty busy at work with a mobile VR project, so haven't touched the Magic Leap in a while. Current OS version is 0.22. Curious to see how it's doing.
[0] I keep a full list of my hardware here: https://seanmcbeth.com/vr.html Ask me anything about anything on the list. The notes on the page are a little outdated, as I have now used all of the hardware I have (and have it all readily accessible on a shelf at work). Maybe I'll update the notes tomorrow.
Magic Leap has always raised a swath of significant red flags, but for me, one of those red flags is that the company is based in Florida. As Roger Stone famously said, "Florida is a sunny place for shady people". I'm pretty skeptical of any company or person based there that makes transformative claims.
I would love to be downvoted and proven wrong about this in comments below, so if you have good counter-examples, please share.
Hands.
Stumbling around trying to interact with a magic window your holding is a crappy experience. AR is “second-nature”, now?
Very few bother with the novelty a second time.
That is the primary way that most people interact with a computer and has been for years, so "second nature" seems pretty accurate. The people "stumbling around" are the ones with the VR goggles strapped to their heads, getting headaches and vertigo and running into furniture.
>Very few bother with the novelty a second time.
I feel like a few Ingress and Pokemon Go players might disagree with you.
Sure.
But they aren't the same thing that hololens or magic leap are trying to do, and conflating them with that kind of AR is silly.