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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

Here's hoping it's not just another Hololens flash in the pan. I've been holding out hope for 5 years now that Apple will come in and do it right, and trigger another paradigm shift for computing akin to the mobile revolution. AR is absolutely going to be a game changing technology some day, but the current hardware is simply nowhere near what's needed for mass consumer adoption.

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There's hardware considerations that are way outside Apple's expertise. They need display manufacturers to get smaller, sharper, brighter by another order of magnitude before we'll see something small enough to go into a pair of glasses that can deliver the visuals that Magic Leap promised 5 years ago. The software is definitely still work in progress but has made huge strides and is probably good enough to do some amazing things. The biggest problem by far is field of view.

As long as apple keeps their image as the company keeping up with the best tech (doesn’t matter if it’s true or not), it’ll be huge for them to release anything. It’ll make others jump in and bring a lot more money into the industry.

The AirPods are a good first step in showing they can make small, lightweight devices that are easy to use. The glasses will probably need a charging case in the same way. Also, they are keeping their high end phones a bit overpowered for normal smartphone usage which means they can use that extra power to do the required rendering. This allows them to offload it all from the glasses to the phone. I believe we are some time off from standalone glasses.

The Apple we love is the Apple which takes decades to line up the technologies, materials, and interfaces needed to polish a future vision down to the gem which will totally change how we interact with technology.

The wearables unit of Apple does seem like it’s where the big innovations are happening, even if a lot of that innovation is in materials and just perfecting the user experience of something basic like charging.

Holding out since 96' here, while a consumer-level device with mass adoption is still some way off, the tooling to produce content is advancing at an impressive rate, given content, as opposed to new technology, is the main driver of media technology it's exciting to see what the next few years will bring and it's great to have another large company on board to drive adoption.

As long as you need to wear a headset or glasses, I have a hard time believing it will take off beyond the niches it has already found believers in.

A real tech fatigue seems to be setting in with lots of people and the last thing many of us want (including many here) is more tech in their lives. I think it's especially true of tech that isolates you like AR and VR does.

I don’t think people will think twice about wearing a headset if the content is intensely compelling or the use cases it enables are genuinely revolutionary.

Most importantly it needs to be packaged in a way that you don’t need to be a motivated techie to pick apart the offerings, understand specs, setup a bespoke system, and just generally try so hard to get onboard.

I’m not sure about the thesis that people want less tech in their lives. Look at the widespread adoption of “smart speakers” which to me seems like the ultimate expression of superfluous technology.

Smart speakers are superfluous? Only if you don't find them useful. My wife comes downstairs every morning and says "okay Google what's the weather?" My daughter says "Alexa, play [some pop singer]".

As a technology person, I tend to agree with you that these devices fall short of real life changing functionality, yet obviously many people out there love it.

> I’m not sure about the thesis that people want less tech in their lives. Look at the widespread adoption of “smart speakers”

I think smart speakers aren't fatiguing because they are so passive. They sit idle, doing nothing until you call for them. Then they respond and return to idle. If using an Apple HomePod required special headphones, it wouldn't have sold at all.

That said, I think there's a decent market for AR/VR devices but I don't think it's gigantic. It might be Playstation big (10^8), but probably not iPhone big (10^9).

A startup called Tilt Five recently concluded a Kickstarter for their initial AR game system. The demos look cool enough that I was tempted to participate, but I’m not a gamer so $600 for two kits is out of my budget.

It looks like they already “sold” just shy of 5000 units, with estimated delivery in mid-2020.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tiltfive/holographic-ta...

I'm not sure how much of a "flash in a pan" Hololens was. It did not seem intended for mass consumption and instead had an extremely small niche for enterprise or business use. Microsoft is going to release its second iteration this year. I suppose it is a way for Microsoft to get real world data for incremental improvements without alienating the wider public from the current limitations.

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