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Comment by jayd16 | Hacker News Reader

What makes the difference in my mind is that AR technology is gaining steam. There's a chance that we'll have a new desire to link the spatial, physical world to spatial and virtual interactions.

The push to own the metaverse seems like a land grand.

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It seems like AR is the key to making the Metaverse a thing. VR is neat, but the current experience reminds me of 3D TVs from a few years back - gimmicky and awkward. Even if parts of the physical and digital worlds bifurcate, I still think there's a lot more AR could do by linking them and making it possible to build a digital world on top of the physical.

The Daemon series by Daniel Suarez showed an impressive vision of what AR could do in a not-so-distant future where online information is linked to physical entities. The things to make it work like haptic suits or lightweight AR classes with overlays and a HUD are getting fairly close technology-wise.

Honestly I doubt that will happen. Every glitzy ad showing the possibilities of AR are a lie... we will only have that sci-fi world when holography reaches mainstream adoption in the way we see it in sci-fi

* lightweight AR glasses

really? I have yet to seen anybody that actually cares about AR at all in my day to day interactions

Quite a few people interested in the circles I walk in, but pretty much everyone also agrees that the technology just isn't particularly close to viable yet (cost is high, general usability is low). And that's ignoring the google-glass style problems there would be with general use.

There are both technology and social aspects.

The technology has to be at the point where you can casually wear fashionable glasses which overlay easily readable information.

And other people would need to be OK with the fact that people are wearing said glasses that put them on candid camera at all times.

Microsoft is pushing Hololens dev, Meta is pushing AR features into the Quest, Snap just put out some AR spectacles. There's development interest but the consumer devices aren't quite ready yet so there's no real market quite yet.

>AR technology is gaining steam

Can you give some mainstream examples? Anything that has 1mm+ users?

Hasn’t VR been gaining steam for a while now, as in, never coming around? All I see are companies massively pushing for it, but I don’t see any real take up. Anything that I’ve seen seems like a gimmick and not something that will actually stick or resonate with people.

There's ~15 million VR units sitting around and there's steady growth. That's much more than the zero from a few years ago but you're right its not massive popular. There's just enough that some VR game devs are finding success but by no means is it a gold rush and I don't mean to imply that.

I think sitting around is the key point. :P I have a PlayStation VR headset that does just that. There was only one game that ever actually drew me in with VR, and that was Thumper.

My theory is that I think the companies that sell these things are just really good at hyping and selling the headsets. I just don't see what the end game is. It's certainly possible that I'm wrong about all this though.

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