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Comment by charliemil4 | Hacker News Reader

What's happened is a very, very weird thing. Our 'capabilities' with computers have gone parabolic, but our personal 'possibilities' have not.

The next great technology revolution will give people (developers and consumers) the ability to imagine new possibilities. Some would say that requires new hardware embodiments (AR/VR), while others would say it's a merely a psychological change from the folks who build today (FB/Google repenting).

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I am far less technically inclined than most on HN. I find the premise of AR to be very exciting, but only if I am - as a nontechnical user - provided with tools for solving my own problems and augmenting my life experience as I see fit rather than merely consuming a series of curated experiences.

At the more extreme end, Keiichi Matsuda's "Hyperreality"* absolutely is a nightmare. It's not even the intensification of media that I find so abhorrent. It's the coercion and lack of user agency.

*https://youtu.be/YJg02ivYzSs

Bret Victor has captured this really well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4

Dynamicland is the best form of 'AR' right now. Apple is taking a note via App Clips and the physical version of that - whatever they call it.

That's true, we're the bottleneck now.. and also society got the brakes off on the web. Computing is now a double edged sword instead of a fun tool.

I'm not sure AR/VR will make a big diff but time will tell.

On the AR/VR note, does anyone know offhand if there's any decent "hacker friendly" AR and/or VR hardware out there? And by "hacker friendly" I mean "you can develop for the platform without having to buy some expensive / proprietary toolchain and SDK and need permission from the hardware vendor to load apps". Even better would be if the device firmware itself were F/OSS, but I realize that might be asking too much...

Relativity was shared on HN a while ago. I can't speak to the quality of the hardware as I haven't tried it, but it fits your requirements, partially. For various reasons (and please correct me if I'm wrong) all VR compositors are tied directly to a store/platform because everyone has an appstore in 2020. wxrc (Wayland VR compositors) is in development but it looks like it's not quite ready for wide usage. That means PCVR is still mostly directly tied to Steam and standalone VR is mostly tied to Facebook...

There should be a betting pool for the month and year the first VR pop-up ad scares someone to death.

Yeah upon a cursory evaluation, almost everything we have today was possible 20 years ago -- the software possibilities have barely changed. We read web pages, send messages, play games, edit photos and post them online. There are a couple things that weren't around, like high-fidelity VR, smartwatches, or always-online cars, but otherwise, the ways we interact with and use technology day-to-day have not really changed. I thought things would be a lot different by now, compared to what I imagined when I was first dabbling on the internet in the 90's.

Maybe we just already figured out what works well. For example I interact with my kitchen sink in almost exactly the same way as someone 3 generations ago. It works fine, so why change it.

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