Hacker News Reader

Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

It seems like so much consumer tech has reached a point of diminishing returns. Going from candles to electric light is a huge deal. Going from flipping a switch on the wall to turn on a light to waving your arm or speaking out loud to turn on the light is not that big a deal, although it requires huge advances in the underlying technology.

Going from paper maps to Google maps? Huge.

Going from Google maps reading you directions through a phone speaker to Google maps reading you directions through a speaker woven into your clothes? Meh

View on HN

Going from Google maps reading you directions to seeing a heads up display with a big arrow pointing to your destination in your vision is a big leap.

Similarly being able to pull up metadata on anything by looking at it and gesturing or turning things on and off by looking.

I think an AR interface is the next big jump whenever the technology gets good enough. Everything we're dealing with now is laying the ground work for pieces of it, but we don't have the killer hardware to make the UI really great.

> Going from Google maps reading you directions to seeing a heads up display with a big arrow pointing to your destination in your vision is a big leap.

HUDs and HMDs have provided this specific usecase long before google maps existed (~1980s). Obviously it wasnt immersive AR (which we still don't have), but it was still an indicator in your field of vision

We are all waiting for the "iPhone moment" - when it goes from existing to being a good experience.

Alas, Steve is no more and people who can realize ‘iPhone moments’ are far in between.

HUDs have an even longer history back to WW2 fighter airplanes. They didn't project much more than the gun recticle, but they were real optical HUDs displaying dynamic information. IMHO helmet mounted displays from the 90's(?) and later can be described as immersive AR displays, e.g. they don't just display information "floating in the air", but they can overlay information on top of real world objects.

Disclaimer: flight-simming armchair pilot speaking ;)

i think the point is that a leap like going from paper maps to google maps is built on top of a huge number of little tiny boring things. Jacquard is cool tech but it's boring because nobody's found a good use for it yet.

Maybe somebody will eventually find something significant to do with it. Or maybe nobody will ever find anything useful to do with it, but inventing a whole lot of useless things is also part of the process.

The app for soccer players seemed compelling as a use case for competitive teams. Perhaps this is already being done by other means, but it seems like you could pretty simply track detailed performance data at the individual player level and whole team level. I can see it being big in this space.

Also, maybe health applications? Vital monitoring? Posture tracking? who knows. To me, any new platform like this opens up at least some interesting opportunities for niche use cases.

You’re right, it’s already being done. When you see top pros train they wear something that looks like a bra on top of their shirts. This tracks their movements via GPS and also monitors vitals like heart rate. There are firms that provide the hardware and analyse the data as well.

unfortunately, tracking athletes like that is another example of the tech outpacing the ideas. there's all kinds of cool sensors you can put on athletes, but the products for actually doing something useful with that data once you've collected it are all pretty mediocre, and mostly limited to generating pretty graphs to help convince your funders that you've spent their money on cutting-edge tech.

All I want is something that projects the name of the person standing in front of me to the inside of my glasses, if I have them as a LinkedIn contact.

That's all I need from AR. It would significantly improve my life, and it seems very do-able with current tech (but outside my skillset so I don't know that).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com