The End of Marae – my attempt to build the AR cloud
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Tangent: why is AR so attractive to people?
I've had VR since the first Oculus Quest came out, so I definitely understand the value in a good spatial experience. I've never had the desire for that immersion to lessen so I can start working with holographic oversight. Much like transparent displays, I think the idea of AR is a lot cooler than it will work in practice. It's fitting function to form, which is the wrong way to approach a problem like this.
VR could replace your TV
VR will replace your TV
AR could replace your phone
Sure, more people will likely prefer AR to VR in terms of comfort, but you need to manage your expectations. A "light set of glasses" isn't going to come within spitting distance of the resolution, FOV, contrast or brightness of even the earliest VR headsets.
And there are lots of examples:
- seeing the upcoming birthdays/recent messages/interests you have in common etc of people you meet above their heads as you walk around.
- having a map projected onto the sky of the world around you (like you're on a globe inside a globe looking up)
- removing visual clutter, like unwanted adverts
- allowing each user of a house or space to have it decorated the way they like
- having x-ray vision to see things like cables, pipes etc in walls
- seeing historical reconstructions in the same place as the real thing
- visualizing a new item in the real world and manipulate it before you 3d print it
- time-inverted trails - having an inverse trail showing you had to do movements you're trying to learn.
- when trying to build something, seeing the exact places and actions you need to take in the real world
- adding panes of information into the world where otherwise you don't have easy access to the internet. Like having a mobile phone of whatever size you want that hovers next to you.
- leaving virtual objects in locations for friends
- embodying virtual assistants into daemon like creatures
In fact, with well implemented AR (a much harder problem of course than VR), you can have all the same experiences you can have in VR plus versions of those experiences that blend in the real world and environment you are in. It's strictly a superset of VR.
That's your crux. You can talk a big game about how cool the concept of AR is, but we're still far off from implementing anything remotely similar to what you've just described.
> It's strictly a superset of VR
Nope, it's the other way around actually. It might logically follow that augmenting reality is easier than virtualization it, but AR technology is only as good as the VR technology it's based on.
Absolutely. Well, you can do poor implementations of quite a few of these already but not at all at the level that would make them compelling yet.
But that's not surprising. True AR has all the same challenges as VR plus realtime detection, location, registration, occlusion, lighting... And much stricter constraints on portability, brightness, etc.
But you shouldn't be surprised that something with so much potential is interesting to people.
> augmenting reality is easier than virtualization it
Not at all! It's massively harder. Well, to do real AR (which in my opinion involves actual engagement with the real environment). To do floating HUDs is much less of a challenge, and also much less interesting.
Classically Augmented reality has been just to add things to the visual perception of the world that were not there but with advancements in various geometry manipulative neural networks and processing power creating new things will probably take a back seat to visually changing what is already there.
Also as facial recognition becomes a much more public and available technology we are going to see AR net platforms emerge that allow people to “rate” and “comment” on other people which will be something permanently and publicly associated with their biometric geometry. The potential for offensive and unremovable graffiti and reputation sabotage is extremely high.
Needless to say there are significant and negative real world implications for this and other similar emerging technologies which will cause major social conundrums which have not yet had to be considered.
One issue with these things is the only method for doing anything about it is legislation. AR and VR can be just considered just a significant extension of what we call the human imagination although there is one major difference, this imagination can be shared with anyone whereas ones imagination is available exclusively to the individual.
Or, why is the idea of AR so attractive to people? We haven't seen much AR yet. Magic Leap was faking it. The Microsoft Hololens had some great demos, but was too expensive and not very useful. Google Glass was somewhat useful but socially unacceptable. Pokémon GO was wildly successful but googles are still too expensive for it.
OK, so you can annotate the world. Now what? Games? Customer relationship management? Equipment maintenance guides? Doordash picking guidance?
I have the horrible feeling that most people who wear AR goggles will be wearing them because their employer told them to. The goggles tell them what to do.
(As usual, see "Manna" and "Hyperreality").
https://youtu.be/watch?v=GbpqwUUfMAQ
The Magic Leap they actually delivered:
https://www.geekwire.com/2021/microsoft-awarded-army-contrac...
VR is like the PC you use at home / in office, AR is more like smartphones on the go. There is obviously quite a big technical gap :)
Also, your second analogy is paradoxical. If AR is capable of doing "everything [the] Oculus Quest can do", why does VR even exist today?
I understand the concept of AR, I just want to talk to someone actually involved in the hardware space about what they're doing to move the market forwards.
But pretty much only Yelp was able to succeed. There just aren't a lot of highly-monetizable applications that are primarily map-based. No one knew the limits at the time, though.
I think AR is in kind of the same place. The demos are mindblowing and there's enthusiasm, but there aren't a lot of killer apps with the state of the technology. For location-based apps, they really required a second piece in order to really open up the space: the smartphone. It may be that AR is waiting for some other supporting technologies before it becomes obviously laden with utility.
AR has a peripheral problem. There's just no easy way to interact with it.
Unfortunately, this is really hard. Mark Zuckerberg calls it "one of the hardest technical challenges of the decade". There are lots of fundamental technical breakthrough required to make it a reality. In different prototype labs, people are excited to see feasibilities being proved out in individual fronts. But moving all of them into production ready consumer grade hardware is a completely different story.
Give it another 5 years, we might be able to see whether it's indeed possible.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-calls-ar-glass...
Or I guess if it's some kind of direct brain implant, though there's no way in hell I'm ever voluntarily implanting a Facebook product.
Was this a startup of a personal project? Was much money raised? Post mortem analysis is good though this is quite an exposition for a relatively short lived venture.