> Instead, a lack of effort in developing their own operating system a decade ago might be Facebook’s biggest regret. And this has come back to bite them today.
Crazy that it came to this.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/12/22326875/facebook-reality...
AR... maybe. My personal opinion is the needed electronics (and especially the battery tech) aren't small enough yet, if we're talking AR glasses.
If we're talking AR on phones, where's the killer app? Pokemon go?
Off the top of my head, some very big ideas that are being worked on: * Clothing fit without actually going to a store and trying things on. * Construction assistance (being able to know where things are in walls, being able to measure things accurately in 3 dimensions, check out the leica RTC360) * Furniture arrangements or additions in a home. e.g. use the ikea app to plop down a SÖDERHAMN to see how it would work and look in your space. * See what a room would look like with different paint. I've actually tried this with an app on my iPad recently, and it is still a little glitchy, but was really freaking cool vs using paint swatches or buying test pints of paint. * Troubleshooting and repair. I tried out this really cool app last year called inspectAR (https://www.inspectar.com/). The desktop app was mindblowing and at my last job when I did lots of circuit board repair/manufacturing adjustments this would have been insanely useful! I can only imagine how nice this would be to have on a trip to Shenzhen for troubleshooting production issues.
Beyond this, yes, games are a huge potential for AR. Brush it aside as something unimportant since it isn't "useful" or whatever, but games are a huge part of people's lives at this point. I've been waiting for a company called TiltFive which basically spun out of valve to launch their AR hardware, it looks and sounds really impressive.
The list goes well past this, but AR has some serious potential.
My prediction is that Pokemon Go will prove to be by far the biggest splash to have been made in the phone AR space, and in the larger scheme of gaming it so far hasn't been more than a long-since-passed fad.
I'm pretty doubtful that even glasses-mounted AR will catch on among consumers in day-to-day life -- but there could be significant specific use cases e.g. education, certain professions, etc. On-the-job type stuff.
Having experienced VR as an owner of a Quest 2 linked to a VR capable PC -- I'm very bullish on VR in the home entertainment space -- not just games but also pre-recorded or live video content, etc. Not sure about social but I'm sure Facebook will try.
I think "nice conveniences" might move slower and get less attention, but in aggregate I suspect they're actually more important for a major long-lasting general-purpose computing platform than "killer apps." We always think of "killer apps" for smaller, narrower, shorter-lived platforms, like a particular gaming console when it launches, but less so for bigger, broader, older platforms like the Internet, personal computers, or smartphones. These huge platforms all had some things which were called "killer apps" (mostly early in their history), but I think we should attribute their longevity and ubiquity more to a massive aggregation of what could be called "nice conveniences." And my impression is that Facebook's bet is that AR/VR will be one of these huge, broad, ubiquitous, long-lasting platforms.
Agreed. A killer app is something you use daily.
That said, I can't wait for the furniture testing app. That would be very useful.
I imagine similar things were send about planes in the early 1900s. "It's not natural!"
But in all seriousness I think they'll solve this (motion sickness) one way or another.
Maybe I sound more sceptical than I am. The second they put out a VR system that doesn't make me sick (and isn't linked to Facebook) I'll be queueing for one. I'm just not sure when that will happen.
At that point, the "killer app" becomes the ability to augment your own senses and memory with, for instance, facial recognition that reminds you of who this person is, useful facts you know about them, etc. Or walking or driving directions that are overlaid directly on your view of the actual paths/streets/etc. Or even virtual tours of places—either places you're physically in, or places you're nowhere near, but have a space of comparable size you can walk around in!
The danger, as we saw with Google Glass, is twofold: on the one hand, allowing an unregulated tech titan like Google or Facebook to have access to cameras attached to people's faces; and on the other hand, the fear of allowing anyone to walk around with an always-on (or potentially always-on) camera, whether its recordings ever left the device or not.
Charlie Stross's Accelerando has a chapter where the main character is basically crippled because ... he lost his AR glasses and can't function without the info in them.
Last one is available online:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...
To think they won't solve motion sickness (or N other teething issues), like it's general AI vs. a problem of incremental improvement is a little short sighted.
What do you think it's a matter of then? I guess I would add latency to the list, but those 3 metrics seem to capture the difference in visual perception between vr and the real world?
There is also focal length, which is fixed (generally at 2 meters) in VR and creates discomfort, especially when reading. Facebook has eye tracking and motorized varifocal lenses to deal with this, but they're too big and loud and they haven't been able to put them in commercial headsets.
However, I've noticed that with time my brain seems to have learned that VR is a different mode. I no longer get dizzy from it, but I feel a strange numb feeling in the back of my head. It's like my mind knows not to trust my eyes anymore for balance when in VR.
It's too bad, because I would really like to be able to do virtual walking tours of places while on the treadmill, but as soon as the camera moves anywhere but where I'm looking at the time, I want to vomit.
Maybe also a latency problem (a big part of why it's in the list above).
When I almost fell was a situation where in the VR simulation I was swinging on a rope >360 degrees around a horizontal ledge while spinning around 180 degrees with the stick and trying to aim a bow with my hands.
( Windlands 2 )
Remember when FPS games would never take off because they gave people motion sickness?
Maybe Occulus does it better, I'll never know though.
This is particularly evident when considering Apple's lead in silicon, which will allow Apple's AR products to be lighter, faster and longer lasting than their competitors. Apple's vertical integration means that there should be more AR "apps" and better software integration than any of their competitors. Apple's pro-privacy push means that consumers will be far more willing to strap Apple branded AR glasses to their face all day.
Facebook might be able to out-compete Apple in VR (silicon performance and efficiency is not as critical for VR), however VR likely will not have the same mainstream appeal that AR will have.
It's really a surprise Facebook was so blindsided by this, they should've known better.
When FB released its first “phone” it was still unwilling to take mobile seriously. They left the head of mobile position open for a very long time. Zuck himself has said he missed mobile.
With the IPO around that time, making some major strategic investment in tech was not an option when the company was likely under a lot of pressure to make the stock price only go one way.
You give Apple Maps as an example, but that product was a major fumble at release. To the point Apple fired the exec in charge over it.
It’s taken major investment over many years to get that app sorted out and it still needs a lot of work.
I think FB did know better they just had a competing problem of revenue growth that was at odds with laying claim to the future.
If anything, I think FB is making an ongoing strategic mistake in lack of any obvious work to establish an Alphabet structure.
FB can recover by building a social network that monetizes via payments and subscriptions. This could be hooked up to a new fortnite-seeded metaverse and run exclusively through oculus.
The opportunity for a FB-parent Corp that distinguishes a new, private network away from the damaged brand of FB is still there.
Leadership just has to be way more daring now in what it’s willing to do.
It really has to or the ruling metaverse social network will be built by someone else for Apple hardware.
They fumbled, but that really didn't matter in the long run. Apple now has a perfectly competent mapping application. They've siphoned data away from Google and redirected it to themselves. Maps is now a key component to Apple's products and service, and has clearly become a cornerstone of Apple's AR roadmap. Apple Maps is now part of Apple's moat, and nobody can take that away from them. There is no situation in which Apple would go back to Google Maps. Sounds like a strategic win to me.
I’m saying Zuck / FB could not stomach it at the time.
They knew money came from ads and tracking and the web and the other thing did not move the needle.
I think Zuck, having taken the market from Orkut, Friendster and MySpace, decided he will not let anyone take it from him, no matter what.
E.g. Skype was still on every phone in 2014; it’s not about install base - it’s about potential to become a social network, which WhatsApp had, and Skype didn’t.
WhatsApp is a social network because of groups. I think I never had a group with Skype. I don't even know if they are a thing there.
I'm currently using WhatsApp and Telegram groups to chat and exchange pictures and links with groups of friends and colleagues. I'm trying to move from WA to Telegram starting with the most technical friends (as always has been with new things.) I'm basically not using Facebook anymore. I appreciate that those apps let me partition people in groups with well defined boundaries. I believe FB has something like that but the UI was more about posting something and let all contacts see it.
Anyway, everything I post there is meant to be lost. I'm backing up images, messages not so much. Definitely not on WA which is pretty much hostile to backups as it doesn't give us the key to decrypt the local databases. Maybe it is not to break E2E encryption and not let other apps decrypt messages, but I should be able to download the key from somewhere if I ask for it. Uploading to Google Drive an unencrypted database is not good.
On the other side Telegram has a kind of distributed database on all my devices. Probably bad for E2E encryption unless every devices has its own key and messages are encrypted for all of them, or another equivalent system. I didn't investigate how it works.
Also Facebook has only been top dog for a little over 10 years.
Facebook can go die in the grave they dug for themselves.
Enter the iPhone/iOS and ChromeOS. (Android and Windows still have an escape hatch, and are still plagued with malware. macOS's escape hatch is basically irrelevant at this point, to the point of nonexistence.)
In those circumstances, if you aren't publishing the OS and holding the secret keys to the certs in bootloaders, you are only a sharecropper, and your access to the namespace of programs that are allowed to run on end user devices is entirely outside of your control.
Your milkshake is now someone else's. Epic and Facebook are upset about this, understandably.
I personally believe that people should be able to run Facebook spyware on the devices they bought, even if it is worse for them and the world. We aren't free if we aren't free to act against our own interests.