Google is building a new augmented reality device and operating system
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Considering how Google’s treated AR and VR in the last 10 years, hyping people up then quietly pulling back support and finally cancellation after just 2-3 years, I don’t see this going well.
They had a toehold 6-10 years ago which they could have easily kept iterating on and making small marketshare gains, but I guess that wasn’t good enough. Now instead of entering 2022 with 10-20% marketshare, a mature platform, and developer/user mindshare, they’re starting the new year with none of that and the idea “Hey maybe we should try AR/VR stuff again.”
Get bent Google. You shouldn’t have cancelled Daydream and killed the small amount of goodwill you were starting to cultivate. Lenovo got burned, developers got burned, users got burned. And they still want to try again?
Instead of taking your Google Glass ball and running home with it after everyone was mean about the idea, maybe listen to the feedback and change the product? But no, despite Glass being introduced almost purely around consumer-targeted ideas and concepts, it’s now an “Enterprise” product out of reach of us mere mortals.
ARCore, with its many naming and branding changes, has also failed to catch on like Google hyped.
Google, you’re charging into battle with Apple and Zuck and you got a dildo made of American cheese. Good luck.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DkXnLUpXgAEz6Yg.jpg (via HBO's Succession)
I’d bet on Apple, FB, or some new entry (harder without the underlying OS).
DeepMind is the most interesting thing coming out of Google imo.
Adhd people can be very focused
Stable products and visions are definitely not interesting to Google.
[0] levels.fyi
It feels like a little trick being played on the employees, kind of like unlimited PTO. I'm sure some people actually enjoy the full benefits of what they're promised, but I'd be surprised if that's a majority.
Which place aside from Google?
Also, even with a 1-year cliff, for most people it'll still basically be indistinguishable from cash? Leaving (or getting fired) before you hit the 1 year mark is pretty rare, and after the first cliff it usually transitions to something like every 3 months.
The reason I brought up taxes (which might seem odd to people since compensation usually ignores them) is because they will significantly change the equation for various reasons. (AMT, RSUs taxed as short term gains and not long term, state tax affecting comp regardless of cost of living, etc.)
Ultimately, any compensation number that rolls all of this up into one number is mostly useless for actually knowing how much money you’ll have in N years, but it is useful for comparing offers, which is fine - but then these numbers shouldn’t appear without qualification in the type of discussion where personal finance is involved.
Not to mention that since this is a forum where many people are involved in startups, a 50k salary often (ok, maybe not often but I’m on 1/1) turns into several millions in a few years. Does that mean founders should claim they were making $2 mil per year? I don’t think so - but that’s the only comparison available if you use levels.fyi.
This doesn't make sense as well. You don't need to work at Google for a year to get the first year's equity. So there is no one year cliff.
The frequency of how often you vest is also monthly. Specially at the L6+ levels. So you will lose at most of one month's equity (i.e. 1/48th of the grant) if you are bad at planning your last day. So to put actual numbers again, let's say your offer is 240k cash + 240k RSUs every year. So you vest 240k/12 = 20k in RSUs every month on say 20th of the month. If you leave on the 19th of your 12 month of the employment (i.e. before finishing one year), you don't lose on 240k of RSUs but just 20k of RSUs. So you will earn 220k of cash + 229k of RSUs before you leave.
> You can leave a job (by choice or otherwise) where you worked for a year and were making "1 million a year" with less than $300k in total compensation.
For the purposes of discussing compensation at FAANG & similar, this is basically untrue. If you work at those companies for a year you'll take home (short of a massive movement in stock price) something approximately resembling what was promised to you. Taxes do not change the equation on this, since vested RSUs are taxed as income (_not_ short-term gains; them being the same rate is irrelevant - they are in fact just reported as income on your W2, without being broken out from your salary, it's literally one number). AMT applies regardless of whether your income is derived from vested RSUs or base salary - if you work at Netflix you're probably getting hit too. I don't see how state income taxes are relevant, since, again, those apply exactly the same way to RSUs as they do to salary.
> Ultimately, any compensation number that rolls all of this up into one number is mostly useless for actually knowing how much money you’ll have in N years
Uh, no? You can straightforwardly project your take-home pay over time; if you want to be really precise you can do it as a probability density function to take into account the potential movement of the stock price over time based on the volatility.
This is all a bit of a distraction from your main point:
> I'm sure some people actually enjoy the full benefits of what they're promised, but I'd be surprised if that's a majority.
Untrue! Obviously, trivially untrue, as demonstrated above.
That's not correct. RSUs get taxed as normal income. So whether you get $600k cash or $300k cash + $300k of RSUs, your tax bill is the same. The gain on the RSUs get taxed as short or long term capital gain. That comes into picture when you sell. If you auto-sell, there is no/very little gain, so no additional tax there and for intents and purpose, it's as if getting $600k in cash.
The numbers reported on levels.fyi are not useless. They give you a good idea of what one can get if they started working there at that moment. You can extrapolate more out of it by understanding the stock gain.
This is setup to favor people who don’t understand taxes, so they don’t screw themselves over. It ends up screwing people who do understand taxes.
The gain you get on the stock from vest till you sell is a bonus anyway compared to if you were just given straight cash.
I would advise you to run some actual numbers to get this. I don't need to as I have been getting paid this for last 5 years at Google.
It's a common trick.
In the 1990's Bill Clinton famously categorized people who made $200,000 a year as "millionaires." Why? Because they "should" be able to save a million dollars within five years.
People in power find it easy to play word games with other people's money.
In palo alto / atherton no less.
I'll agree though that DeepMind would not have been able to exist really without Google's ongoing funding and hardware, so maybe it is Google's creation at this point.
The Hangouts > Chat transition is exactly this. Objectively, they've made it worse and more buggy on their own Android platform. Ever since the transition I talk to friends less on Google services. Many of us jumped to Discord
Don't even get me going on the Gmail rollout...
Google was once an innovator (search, Gmail, Docs) but I'm not expecting quality from any of their future product rollouts... especially if it's an existing product.
I too don't expect quality from anything Google anymore. It's become an untrustworthy brand.
One nice thing I'll say is Google's data tools and privacy controls are great. It's very easy to export/delete/control your data there from the settings if you dig through them.
The only thing I still use regularly for personal accounts is YouTube premium.
Thankfully no friends use hangouts and I was able to move the stragglers to signal. I personally don't like discord either, but it's harder to get people out of that one (for now).
Docs was from an acquisition.
I think what matters with an acquisition is how it’s managed and how the technology is developed. I think it’s unarguable Google has put significant investment into docs and done a good job developing the product so I have no problem at this point giving them credit for it.
I don't love Facebook/Meta but it looks like they put a lot of eggs into the Metaverse bucket. Google has never really done that. They have dabbled and because its Google people assume its going to be big or meaningful. But once people internally make enough progress to get promoted and move around internally its not going to continue to be supported without guidance from the top and the top doesnt care about AR/VR/Metaverse. Or at least they havnt until now.
> It's small groups of people or singular people who make these decisions and those visionaries can easily change their focus or be offered a more compelling role
True! All companies face this problem. Smart, capable people have options and frequently will decide to leave and do something else/go somewhere else.
> but lets not pretend Google is making these decisions to focus on something or not
This is where the disconnect is. As a company you decide what things are priorities, and you build teams to pursue those priorities in a way that is resilient to people leaving - even extremely senior leadership individuals.
If a project withers and dies because a key player leaves, then it never had the company's focus. Part of effectively managing a company is to ensure your most important things don't have a low bus factor (or in Google's case, a bug factor of exactly one).
MS, FB, Apple, etc, all have a record of being able to relentlessly pursue a particular goal despite being subject to the same workforce attrition forces that affect Google.
Google does a bunch of random things kind of haphazardly. Whether this is caused by incentive problems around promo or something else I don’t know.
I don’t think they compare favorably to Apple, Zuckerberg, or modern Microsoft. I’d guess it comes from the top.
They did with Google Plus, and they eventually killed it.
Also DeepMind didn't come out of Google, it came out of some British boffins that got acquired for squillions (comparatively, I mean it's only a serious and arguably somewhat successful attempt at building general AI, it's not like it's adtech or finance or something else really important...) and as far as I can see the number one thing Google has done to help them, other than throwing money at them, is to otherwise leave them the hell alone.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the current mainline Linux. There’re issues on desktop, sure. But VR/AR stuff is not similar to desktop, quite the opposite, it’s similar to embedded. For newer mobile GPUs, Linux even support Vulkan in addition to GLES.
Zuck's vision is trash to the point I question whether the man's had an original idea in his life, so I'm not completely discounting the American cheese monstrosity as somehow prevailing.
I don't really care for Apple either, but I suspect they're going to "win" by virtue of focus and culture alone.
Of course, if any of these three entities win, it is the world that loses. Rather, continues to lose—depending on how you look at it.
They want to be vertically integrated, discount Apple in this space.
They're deploying cost effective hardware combined with vertically integrated software stacks that "just work."
And they are leveraging things Facebook does extremely well, targeting extreme volume for cost amortization, UX and building microtransaction loops.
Like it or not those are things you can't say Facebook is bad at that stuff generally speaking.
Everything about the Facebook metaverse vision is cynical from a societal aspect.
But the business case is fine.
They won't make any money for about 10 years, but after 10-15 years of Quest like products, they will be doing well for themselves.
I prefer ragging on their very existence, but to each their own. :)
Certainly not disputing they know how to make money. I'm sure they'll make a killing on AR/Metaverse bullshit.
Facebook has made some wonderful software, and it has fundamentally degraded humanity.
This is what I find so hypocritical on Facebook complaints, washing over how the meat for the sausage is paid for and the animal was slaughtered, only because it tastes good and the complainers want more of it on their plate.
If what Facebook does is so amoral then don't use software paid with selling their customers' data.
You mean how they've treated a large proportion of their customer-facing products?
This is rare on HN. But true. Google's new CEO still have a lot to prove. The problem with Google was they were not found upon a product DNA. They have very little if any product sensibility.
At this rate, Google search may be first to be disrupted before Facebook. Apple has its cracks but still far too minor.
It is also interesting this is finally the mainstream view, at least the top HN comment. Prior to 2016, people still believe AMP in good faith, Firefox compatibility was not Google's fault, ads by Google were Ok.
After a few years of using DDG which is equally bad as Google but has less and less annoying ads I tried out Kagi last week.
The difference is so big I don't care to verify with neither DDG nor Google: I know based on long experience how bad their results are.
Kagi has so far been a breath of fresh air, a taste of how search used to work when Google actually found the things I asked for, not the thing an insanely annoying AI think I want.
I dont think any one at Google cares about UX anymore.
checks https://nianticlabs.com/en/about/
Keyhole made what got renamed Google Earth when Google ate them, ten years later the core of that team started Niantic Labs inside Google, made Ingress, a few years later Niantic left Google (with funding from Google, Nintendo, and Pokemon) and made Pokemon Go. Niantic has acquihired a few companies working in related spaces.
Oh, I didn't know that. That's even worse. Niantic is positioning itself to be a competitor to Apple in the global spatial map game.
Explains why Go released on Android first, though. Neat. I hope that doesn't change now that they're running with 6d.ai.
I guess SceneForm was the best that they could manage to come closer to Metal Frameworks, and they just killed.
I should change my usernames to glasswasnotar because I feel like I am always saying that when people talk about glass and ar
Re-watch this early promo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErpNpR3XYUw
There are several clear AR features displayed. There's a location based notification about the subway service upon getting close to the entrance. There's overlaid compass based walking directions. There's GPS based location identification and check-in. AR is more than just computer vision driven overlays. Though that tech wasn't available to be put in a HMD at the time, these GPS driven features absolutely were AR features and the original Glass should rightfully be considered the first AR consumer product.
Furthermore, the product still exists as the Enterprise Edition 2 and this current version supports computer vison and object identification applications, further strengthening its AR use cases.
By way of a real-world example, military pilots have heads-up displays that overlay IDs of aircraft on the aircraft as they appear to the pilot. That's AR.
My volvo has a heads-up display that show me my speed, the current speed limit, warnings, lane guidance... But none of that points to anything in my field of vision. Not AR.
Mercedes also have heads-up displays, and while I don't own one, I saw a demonstration where when you are using adaptive cruise control, it highlights the car it is following. That's AR.
The above is my lay understanding. If you buy this distinction between "heads up display" as a general term, and "AR" as a specific use of a heads up display, then Glass was not AR. It was just a heads-up display.
You don’t see reality and the screen at the same time. It is reality or the screen. (Just like a phone that isn’t running an AR app)
Looking at the screen does obscure your perception of reality because your eye has to change focus. The little prism was transparent but it may as well have been translucent because you couldn’t focus on the screen and the world at the same time.
But it wasn’t even mostly always in view… when you weren’t focused on it I guess it could kinda flash and make you focus on it, but it had no overlay ability.
s/AR and VR/half of the products that Google develops/
Google has some kind of inability to develop stable, boring, long-lasting products, instead prioritizing UX churn and new half-baked features over fixing old bugs or optimizing for performance.
There was a very insightful comment on the Teams 911 thread a few days ago[1] - the entire thing is worth reading, but the most important point is "Google is not setup in same way and internal incentives are not like that, judging by hoard of messaging apps. They are simply setup to make very short projects that do not require long-term commitment."
I do not trust Google to make stable (or privacy-preserving, which is especially relevant to AR...) products.
You might say, “why would you be so stupid to build your AR product on top of Google’s primary, supported, promoted, first-class way of doing AR?” And I would say Apple hasn’t fucked me over like this. In fact, Apple has continued investing in their AR offering and now makes Google’s ARCore and SceneForm look like a fucking joke.
Google Maps AR - oh yeah, that’s an API feature of ARKit now. Want to have high precision location with Google ARCore? Go fuck yourself. (I’m directly quoting Google here, don’t @ me for the language; when you’re getting gaped by Google day after day, I guess some blue language slips in)
We'll see how this goes against what Meta and Apple has to offer for AR glassess.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/30/google-acquires-north-augmen...
Google seems unable to plan long-term - they had some of the most interesting VR and AR tech early-on but completely squandered the early lead by lacking any institutional commitment to the field.
Google was among the first to put specialized sensors on devices to gain a structural understanding of your surrounding physical environment. They canned it.
Google was among the first to ship accessible, affordable VR devices via Daydream. They canned that, too.
Google's SLAM implementation was best-in-class for a while, and has basically failed to turn that into anything while FB caught up.
The company as a whole seems to have no concept of long-term strategy. Every endeavor is dipped into with the most tepid of toes, and abandoned at the first sign of difficulty (see: Stadia, Allo, oh boy I can continue). A ton of fantastic research and work goes into products that the company should continue investing losses in for long-term strategic advantage, but the company ends up pursuing the worst of both worlds: paying for the R&D and then changing strategies on a whim.
I know the messaging thing is a dead horse but it deserves to be beaten some more: Google should be fielding an iMessage competitor by now, if only to complete the platform narrative, even if it will always lose to WhatsApp. But instead it has no iMessage competitor and has rebooted its messaging strategy 10x for no discernible results. The minimum of what they needed to do was just to field a competent, stable messaging app that serves as a usable baseline for Android users... and they failed even that.
And having been inside the sausage factory myself there's one huge lever that can be pulled here: Google upper management needs to get way more obsessive about products and long-term roadmaps.
The reason why these projects die so easily is because they tend to be owned by mid-level managers and junior execs, a tier of the company where there is intense turnover. Projects die when their patrons leave the company, get promoted, move orgs, or just generally lose interest. There is frequently no champion for the project besides whichever manager/junior exec owns it. If the company hopes to invest in a field long enough for it to actually bear fruit, the commitments need to come directly from the top.
A lot of this is the hangover of Google+, whose shadow every project (even non-social media ones) lives under. The company seems desperately afraid of making multi-year commitments to things unless they are bearing immediate fruit, out of fear that they'll pull another G+, where failing ideas continued to get disproportionate investment via dictat. I don't know what the right solution to that is, but it certainly isn't what they're doing right now.
Not just AR/V like Glass. Web and mobile software, hardware, and platforms.
We've seen so many projects launch with incredible hype and die on the vine a few years later or wither to insignificance from lack of customer support, developer resources, or a workable strategy. Nexus. Blogger. Stadia. Music. Plus. Wave.
The lesson is clear: Google can't be trusted.
But that actually requires management with a vision.
ARKit (iOS) works. It works well. They’ve built the groundwork by pushing out LiDAR. They’ve continued to advance the SDK. Key capabilities, like map-based geolocation are SDK-level features, rather than being reserved as Google Maps exclusives. They’ve made sure their phones and tablets have high quality cameras, compasses, and GNSS receivers, so the experience works better. They’ve made sure their devices have the horsepower to run AR experiences at 60fps, even with overhead from recording and streaming and multitasking. Edit: how did I forget about spatial audio? Spatial audio is a key capability of the iOS ecosystem (AirPods) that Google probably doesn’t have the imagination or coordination to execute on.
Google. Google has:
- made a list of the devices supporting ARCore, because they can’t manage their device ecosystem
- kills key APIs and SDKs (SceneForm) after heavily promoting them. Doesn’t update its doc and deprecates API with not guidance on replacements. “Just copy and paste hundreds of lines of OpenGL code from the samples” they say. ffs
- they still continue to push out devices that can’t keep up. Is it Qualcomm‘a fault? Maybe. Somehow Apple doesn’t have that problem. Mysterious. Maybe a large near-monopolist like Google could get their shit together and use their market dominance for good. But no, Android users get shitty overheating phones that can barely run AR at 30fps, if the apps run at all because all the underlying tech is no longer maintained.
- they keep key innovations to themselves. They beat Apple to AR navigation, but fuck developers who want that.
Oh, and btw, for people who want to do cross-platform work, Google massively fucking up AR has held everyone back. iOS is ready for top-notch AR years ago, but it’s a tough pill for people to swallow when you have to drop support for all android. Google is holding the industry back.
I hope Google gets fucked as bad as they’ve been fucking their users and developer partners.
For example, the Metal frameworks versus copying Vulkan samples from a random Google GitHub repo.
The last migration guide from Renderscript into Vulkan compute is a sour joke.
I'm convinced the LiDAR on phones is apple's big beta test of lidar on AR Glasses - to potentially avoid adding a camera and the related controversy associated with it.
I'm always baffled how bad is Google at playing long term games. Their biggest mistake with Glass was trying to productize it too fast and stopping when they saw it didn't have good consumer fit.
They could have instead go more incremental by releasing developer hardware and learning from that. They could have kept that program small and nimble, but instead they pivoted into some bizarre enterprise program that has always gave me the impression of a "save face" move. Weird company.
1 - Remove Java layer from AOSP
2 - Add C++ frameworks as replacement
3 - Call it Brillo and show it at Linux Plummers
4 - Bring Android layer back with restrictions, call it Android Things
5 - Add back the capability to write drivers with NDK (lost in Brillo - Things transition).
6 - Let it stagnate for around one year
7 - Kill the project.
They killed it almost instantly? This was before Slack, discord, etc.
Google considers us a stretch goal and will deprioritize and defund if developer revenue metrics aren't reached. Google developed Go (mixed feelings) and Dart (meh). GCP was once considered expendable. At the heart of it, they're still an ads company.
Microsoft gets it. Google doesn't.
They seem to have gotten infected with Google style management as new blood took the reigns of product development.
They suck at innovation though.
I was having a conversation with someone connected to the upper execs there one time who explained this to me. They said that Google could generate the same amount of profit with a small fraction of the staff it currently has. The thing is though, the stock price would not be nearly as high and they have to keep the buzz going, by pushing out a lot of bets to pump up the stock. All that they need is enough perception of innovation to make wall street happy. So that is what they have done, and as a bonus a large part of salaries are paid with stock which allows them to keep the ponzi (my term not, theirs) scheme going.
Up until a few years ago most developers loved Google, but they have systematically done a lot of things to piss off a large number of them and you don't see nearly as much Google love these days. The big question is will that negative sentiment eventually affect the stock price? I know that I would personally like to see more competition in the search space (which is their bread and butter) and have less Google lobbyists in Washington DC. Also, great companies eventually do falter. The question is, will Google's fall be as fast as it's rise? Time will tell.
Recently here on HN someone launched a search editor for small, niche, seo-free, old, content/text-heavy websites. It's useful because it serves a specific purpose, and can give you very different but useful results due to how it presents its results.
Storage is getting cheap, scaling is a solved-ish problem, ML and AI make simple to empjoy intelligent search easier than ever.
Of course, the solution is not to come up with a slightly tweaked google clone (like bing, duckduckgo, ...) but something that's more in the realm of reimagining what search means and does. I don't think it's wise to fight Google at its own game.
1. It seems like efforts so far towards creating the metaverse are heavily focused on reproducing the inequalities and status heirarchies we have in this reality. What's the point of escaping into a virtual world if it's just another place to get on a status treadmill?
2. Is there any chance that this is going to be an open, standards-based system like the current internet? It seems like this will almost certainly be a walled garden, or a set of walled gardens tightly controlled by a few powerful corporations. Will the open web be "legacy" which is gradually fazed out?
Even Niel Stephenson's metaverse in Snow Crash was not this dystopian.
Within one year after the Apple launch, Google has copied and launched their own version. It won't run as smoothly, but it's cheaper. So, anyone who can't afford to buy the Apple product will buy the Google product.
And this is how the duopoly will live forever..
How can this be company like Google ?
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-154/marketing-strate...
Your ability to not click to avoid future advertising will no longer be effective. They will learn exactly what distracts the most of your (visual) attention to ads and will target you with the most effective ads for your attention model. Then they will sell that model to their advertisers to develop more effective ads for your cohort based on value. Your visual saccades (the order, time, return rate) are not really consciously controllable, while they provide huge insight into both your past exposure and future interest images and ideas.
IMO racing to the bottom on price when the products still have FOV issues and low frame rates is a huge misstep. It doesn't matter how compelling Facebook's metaverse platform is if the hardware sucks.
Don't forget, the low end always eats the high end.
But it can still work with a host PC and it has a higher res screen so whats wrong with it?
Everybody else can do as they please, but I'm fine without it.
In this case, I'd probably settle for even a single real-world example.
You can't use hypothetical systems here because the implied power structures created will be utilized by actual humans.
Maybe those are iterations for them
Both Ars and Google seem a little behind the eight ball here (or a lot?). Do they realise that there are completely functional AR apps today on the Meta Quest store? Real apps where you can interact with virtual 3d objects in your own living room. I set up my own dojo with japanese decorations on all my office walls so that when I'm fighting my virtual opponent it has the right vibe. This is real, on a device in the low hundreds of dollars and owned already by millions.
I really think the media bought it's own hype 5 years ago when it went in hard on the "VR is dead" meme. All the while Facebook was changing the fundamentals of the game with a low cost portable device that all the enthusiasts snobbishly dismissed but regular consumers love.
While I'm not hopeful for it being a community OS, I'm nonetheless interested in seeing the direction it moves in putting pressure on libre operating systems.
Oh wait no, that was just me remembering the last five times they failed at something like this.
The best reason I can think of is that a lot of people were genuinely excited at Google glass or daydream when it was still budding, and want to see cool/impressive tech exist but are jaded by the previous emotional investments that didn't pay off.
I bet something like this happens again, so I don't think it will be facebook, google, or apple. Ok maybe apple. But I would rather bet a good working device will come unexpected and will make a huge impact - like the iphone did.
I've always seen it as just a different ecosystem with different ideas. I look forward to reading what you have to say!!
I had some weird Google loyalty from the good old days. I can’t believe i suffered on their second rate platform for so long. I’m currently still suffering on Voice and Gmail and should probably completely move on. I should probably go ahead and buy one of these M1 MacBooks people have been talking about too.
Basically the way they screwed Java developers with their pseudo compatible implementation, an horrible NDK experience, even after 10 years the best you can do to interop between userspace and NDK is via JNI code that you have to write yourself.
Given that they created their own pseudo Java, they could have also created something else other than JNI for Dalvik/ART, but no they didn't.
While Apple provides a full stack development experience, on Android you usually have to go fetch Java, C and C++ libraries to gain productivity back on top of the bare bone APIs that Google provides.
The whole Jetpack libraries effort only started after several years of complaints, it took them until 2020 to finally release a game developers SDK (which is a joke versus something like Sprite/SceneKit).
If iOS and Android were Linux desktops, with iOS you get XFCE/GNOME/KDE dev experience, while Android you are looking forward to something like fvwm instead.
How will we have any privacy at all in a future where anyone could be recording you and uploding that data to some cloud? All it takes is one person with them at a party, or restaurant, or busy city street.
I see tremendous use cases for these glasses in all sorts of workplaces from surgery, dermatology, hair stylists, factory assembly, horticulturists to potentially nefarious uses cases like the police and military.
Welcome to the brave new meta world.
I wouldn’t too much about the big American advertisement companies getting a lead on it, considering how little they are trusted outside the US in anything related to enterprise.
Those glasses I mentioned are actually Google glass if I recall correctly, but with some completely different software because naturally you can’t use Google software to document patient data in the EU.
Given how much Apple is leaning on healthcare, they might actually be able to break into this market if they ever release their own glasses.
I’m sure we could simulate experience through detailed hallucinations, methods that leave behind the neural structures, reinforcing belief through social story telling. That’s how religion worked.
Everyone is obsessed with making experience happen through technology as if it’s more real to our memory down the road, when it never happened for anyone who wasn’t there.