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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Sadly I'd also qualify most of these as things that consumers are overly excited about but will never reach their expected potential (at least in our lifetimes) due to technological limits. Same as flying cars, 3D TVs, 3D printing, household robots, holograms, AR glasses.

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3D TVs will come of age once autostereoscopic displays reach the right level of quality. After being blown away by my first glimpse of a display in around 1998 I fully expected them to be useable years ago. I guess we might still be another "10 years" away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereoscopy

I really doubt that there's going to be huge desire for 3D TVs at any point. People can already look at video on a 2D display and interpret 3D visuals from it. And if you want to be fully immersed in something, maybe you want VR instead.

"People can already look at video on a 2D display and interpret 3D visuals from it. " way off, depends heavily on contrast sensitivity which is a function of brightness and displays have long way to go (esp with ambient around) +HDR even breaks current VR chain because stray light.

Google Starline seemed amazing to me. I would love to have a large immersive 3D display for videotelephony, sports, nature documentaries, etc.

I want 3D TV for sports but apparently I'm the only one.

What happens when two people want to watch the TV?

Well, I'm assuming autostereoscopic displays of the future will solve issues of multiple sets of eyeballs on the same display.

AR glasses will hit a wall but passthrough AR will be converged on rapidly. Starting 2022

Any particular insight why 2022?

Hololens 2 has shown that it isn't so easy to advance the field.

I don't think an Apple device is forthcoming or likely to leapfrog.

> Any particular insight why 2022?

Facebook, Apple and others are releasing their first AR glasses then.

And there will be approximately zero non-gimmick software for them until at least 2032, if it ever materializes at all.

AR "FaceTime" (beaming in an avatar of another person to spend time with) will be a killer app.

But you aren't "spending time" with that person. You're spending time with that person's poorly rendered avatar. You can't even hear them properly. You can't see them at all. You can't touch them or read a lot of the nonverbal cues. And for the privilege of not being in their presence, you also need to pay several hundred (if not thousands, this being Apple) dollars, and both sides need to use Apple products. I very strongly suspect that all but the most ardent Apple fans will pass on this generous offer.

Passthrough AR isn't glasses AR, and is much more likely to be rapidly made capable. Lynx-R launches in Q1, and Meta's and Apple's headsets will likely use passthrough AR next year.

https://lynx-r.com/

I definitely hope for something novel with video see-through HMDs as they used to call them in 2002 [1] when I last worked on them. Latency wasn't solved last I checked and viewpoint offset is still an issue that throws users off.

[1] https://static.aminer.org/pdf/PDF/000/273/730/ar_table_tenni...

Latency is pretty good on Quest 1 - I haven't tried Quest 2. Looking forward to getting a Lynx to gauge how close we are to something good.

>flying cars At least you can buy them now.

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