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Comment by pradn | Hacker News Reader

I want to share an amazing experience I recently had. I was looking through TV consoles on Crate & Barrel and found one I liked. I was unsure if it'd be too tall for my room (it's an extra 9 inches of height over my current TV stand, which is actually just a coffee table repurposed.) The listing page had a QR code I could scan with my iPhone. I was taken to a page that asked me for camera permissions and I said yes. In a few seconds, it placed a 3D model of the TV console in my room and I was able to get a good idea of how it looked. All so quick and easy - no extra apps to download - and actually useful. Putting Pikachu in my space is fun, but this is actually worth the extra lidar tech in the iPhone Pro.

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I feel a weird sense of loss for Google Glass. I feel like the controversies that set it back also set back the entire AR space.

I wonder what life would be like if I could wear a HUD that showed me an AR overlay. It might bubble up an alert to remind me to drink a glass of water to stay on track for the day. A to-do list might slide in from the side if I tap a button near my temple. A friend calls and their animated avatar hangs out in the corner of my sight while I continue doing what I was doing... It feels like these things are very close, but society is struggling to integrate the amassing tech innovations we're encountering.

A camera in glasses is always going to be too intrusive I think. Norms may change, but even if there's a clear light indicating that a photo or video is being taken, it's offputting to feel the possibility of a recording happening at any moment. Perhaps the middle-ground is to have glasses with just a HUD, but no camera. You can still get useful info, but without the imposition on other people.

if companies and govt hadn't broken our trust so often wrt privacy, snooping, data-hunger, their might not have been so many controversies... I think the struggle is good if it stops or slows down these things.

The water alert will also mention that you would be better hydrated if you bought ElectroX, the electrolyte drink for serious thinkers. The to-do list will include an item to check out the latest release of Banging Cans, your favorite band. By allowing you to see your friend and his surroundings, you are implicitly allowing through images of the products that are visible, and therefore they will be added to your cloud targeted ad profile.

Not to mention what you won't see. When you drive by protesters about a topic that makes you uncomfortable, your SuperFlow2030 app will blur out the words and images on their signs so they don't disturb you.

The latest safety feature will use facial recognition to highlight anyone you don't know or is not typically in an area, so you can keep an eye on them. Coincidentally, a high percentage of those highlighted people will have a different skin color from you, which deep down in the weights of its classification model is still being used as a handy heuristic even though the developers tried to specifically exclude it.

I, too, wonder what life would be like. Sadly, I don't have to wonder too much, because it appears that it would be like it is now, only more so.

I definitely had a naive little image in my mind of how things would be, but I see where you're coming from. I think one of the things that would push monetization techniques like the ones you mentioned would be if the hardware doesn't have enough compute power to process video, audio, etc. Having to be tethered to a cloud would make it more feasible to do those sorts of intrusive things, ie how Alexa picks up audio but Amazon servers process it.

Although speculative cyberpunk is usually dystopic and oppressive, it fascinates me how much of those predictions have come through or are in the process of occurring. I think the major breaking point will be climate refugees moving toward cities, which could lead to megacities, which have notoriously been imagined as highly populated by an impoverished class of people.

Thanks for the little dose of reality. I hope we can nudge our future by starting these sorts of conversations.

If everybody used VR headsets all the time, you wouldn't even need a TV console in your room. In fact, you wouldn't need much besides a comfy chair.

This whole AR thing is just a transition technology, that will go away with time.

>If everybody used VR headsets all the time

You just described Ready Player One, which in some sense is a dystopian nightmare.

With the comfy chair reference, I saw Wall-E. Cartoonish dystopia is still dystopia.

> VR headsets all the time

I love VR headsets, but that's not going to happen - for so many reasons - I want to get up and get a coffee, I often read while half watching TV, or sit and chat with the family while watching TV and so on, fold the laundry with the TV on and so on. You can't do anything else when wearing a VR headset.

Assuming your life is spent in a virtual world consuming media, that is. For people who want to live in the physical world with maybe a few augmentations here and there, AR could be around forever.

Yeah, this is more and more popular. Apple has this built in on their product pages, and recently I saw it on Sonos’ website too. You can even preview some cars using AR.

A photo with a new McLaren next to your garage adds a lot of credibility to all of the “honey, I bought a new car” pranks ;)

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