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Comment by fergie | Hacker News Reader

AR (augmented reality).

Considering how good AR is _right now_, we have very few practical applications for it. It has been quite good for at least a couple of decades (I studied AR in the 90s and we had some pretty amazing demos even back then).

Snapchat is doing some amazing, if silly, AR stuff, and hardware capabilities around graphics are improving all the time (especially with the use of graphic cards for crypto mining), in fact graphics are getting to the stage where its genuinely difficult to see at a glance what is real and what isn't.

Basically this is what Facebook is going for with the Metaverse, but history tells us that it will probably not be an incumbent that develops the best products.

There will be some cool/scary stuff coming.

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> There will be some cool/scary stuff coming.

Yes.

For AR to work properly, it requires precise location. Apple, Lyft, FB et al are all using visual mapping. Where pictures are processed, rebuilt in 3d and key points extracted.

Those key points can be compared to key points found in a sample image, using some trigonometry you can position that image in 3d (lat, lon, height and angle, so left right relative to north, plus up down and rotation) This mapping is accurate to about 20cm now (in real time)

This means that (future) AR headsets know exactly where you are at all times. Combined with the tech to find where you left your keys (object recognition on steroids) you can find out who owns what pretty quickly, through the use of a dodgy app.

Then there it the stalking. Facial recognition might be built in, so you can remember peoples names better (I suspect there will be at least a cursory attempt at permissions) but if a third party app has access to both position and the raw camera, you know the position of 80% of people within range of the glasses.

AR glasses means that open source will have to confront ethics properly for the first time. You can have an open platform, but it will be the cause of oppression(because some prick will make a woman stalking app, its almost a certainty now.).

> will probably not be an incumbent that develops the best products.

Unfortunately I think an incumbent will buy the company that develops the best products

Yeah I mean the story is already 'Facebook is the leader in augmented reality' not Facebook bought oculus and several leaders in augmented reality. So odd to me how companies, CEOs get credit/reverence from people for things they had no hand in.

I am personally waiting for the first viable consumer device by a major player like Apple/Samsung, with hand gesture support (without additional peripherals like gloves). To me, that is the missing component for the entire sector to do a double-take, with of course at least a few hours of battery life.

Have you seen the gesture-tracking in the Oculus Quest 2? It's incredibly impressive, and it's in a $300 consumer device [^1] that can almost do AR via passthrough video, and easily has hours of battery life. But it does run into a fundamental problem of gesture tracking without gloves, which is that the camera needs to be able to see all of your fingers (unless you get to the point of inferring finger position by looking at the hand muscles, which I don't think we're quite at yet). Often you need the fingers to be away from yourself for operations like twiddling buttons or pointing at things, so if the camera is attached to you you've got an issue.

[^1] Granted, economics of video game consoles aren't quite the same as things that might be industrial tools, mostly because they can be sold at a loss with the expectation of making it up in software licenses.

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