15 years from now everyone will say "remember when we didn't have these computers literally strapped to our face all the time?"
It is the obvious extension of existing trends in technology.
I remember when I tried the first iPhone in 2007. Sure, it wasn't super fast, the screen was small and pixelated by today's standards, but I remember going "Holy shit, this is amazing." It was easy to see its utility on the first use of it.
Contrast that with a VR headset. I think "This is a cool game to play for 20 mins or so", but I have absolutely no desire at all to spend any portion of my time in "the metaverse". This is fundamentally solving a problem that people don't have, and it's a solution they don't want. I have yet to see anyone (who isn't somehow paid to shill it) be genuinely excited about the potential of "the metaverse".
What about when you tried the first touchscreen smartphone, which was probably resistive and came with a stylus?
Seems unfair to compare an emerging tech with the iPhone (which took an emerging tech to the next level) off the bat. It's almost an argument in bad faith.
And, to clarify, I think the current crop of VR headsets are quite cool. But again, I see them cool in small units of time. I also think many, many people have come to the realization that there is too much ever-present technology in their lives, and the last thing they want is to become the humans from Wall-E.
When it comes to crypto, given how antiquated our current financial settlement systems are, I can see its utility as a backend settlement layer, but 95% of what I see peddled in the crypto space is just some other get-rich-quick scheme.
The earliest smartphones did not even have touchscreens, I just used an example that would be easier to digest.
Probably helped that the latency of the device back then was completely unnoticeable, in contrast with today's smart devices that can't keep up with my typing on their touchscreens.
For the dumpster fire that it was (mostly imo due to hardware decisions / public perception), I had that same reaction with Google Glass.
It was super nice being able to see messages as they came in doing various tasks. Being able to ask random questions and get visual responses, rather than an assistant reading you a random snippet from the result that it thinks is appropriate. Or being able to almost-instantly snap a pic or record a quick video.
All of it felt like a game changer due to me not having to take my hands away from whatever I was doing or try to crane my neck and wrist to get my watch to display.
I think that in the coming years Apple/Google will come out with another similar device. I don't think phones as we know them now will go away overnight in favor of these devices though. But instead they will be essentially a different smartwatch form factor for a while.
iPhone already had a massive amount of apps for it as you could visit any existing website on it.
You don't have that with VR. It has to be built. Which is what Facebook is focused on. Building tools and AI to help creators build "worlds" that can be used in VR.
Imagine you favorite band is playing live, they don't visit your town. You can put on a VR headset join in on the event and experience it like you are there. You friends can come along without any of you guys being in the same country.
Your a primer league fan in the US, you can still experience the game like you are there.
All these experience will come as tech to build them gets better, but these are WAY harder problems then what the iPhone needed to solve when it first was released.
That just sounds so contrived. You’d be paying money for that too… and it wouldn’t be much cheaper than going to see them live.
Contrived and just dystopian, really.
I don’t know…
None of the mass market metaverse things people talk about are actual problems people have. Anything that is an actual problem (remote VR surgery) isn’t mass market.
We do a bad job of extrapolating where the future will be from current trends. The frequent breakthroughs in physics and industrial, precision manufacturing of heavy machinery around the mid 20th century eventually slowed down. The remaining problems got too hard to make major leaps and bounds improvements on at the same pace, and the desire/value to keep pushing on it slowly faded. It' still there, but a computing revolution happened instead.
There's no reason to think the future revolving around improvements in networked computing is going to go on forever, we just don't know what the next "thing" is going to be. I'd argue most of the benefits of having the internet readily available at all times in all places are basically already realized by smartphones and anything else is mostly just going to be a refinement or intensification of stuff we already know. It will not be transformational in the way smartphones were. It's on a similar arc where the leaps-and-bounds improvements are harder to come by and it's not clear what we'd do with them when they happen. Gone are the days when anyone would notice a performance improvement in their day-to-day computing tasks from having a cutting edge CPU or GPU. Advancements are increasingly only useful for more niche use cases that refine and improve what we already have rather than dramatically altering the way we work. Faster mobile data is cool, but it doesn't change the way you use your phone and neither will a more immersive computing interface markedly change how you do the tasks you use a networked computer to do.
I don't know what the next field that undergoes such revolutionary change will be. If I were a betting man I'd put my money on major breakthroughs in biomechanics and life sciences, but who can say for sure?
I'm not so sure, but perhaps... although there's some really big problems that need to get solved to get there, and some of them aren't technological problems.
1. The technology isn't there yet. To their credit, it might be getting close though. A not insignificant number of people still get sick from VR goggles. The resolutions just aren't at present sufficient. Available portable computing power might not be enough at present. IMO, the cartoonized VR environments we can currently produce on the fly aren't going to be of as much interest as more realistic environments and avatars. The spatial resolution of sensors and lack of tactile feedback aren't gonna cut it for even the most basic tasks.
2. People wearing VR goggles look dorky AF. In fact, they ARE dorky AF.
I don't think Facebook's upper management fully appreciates this issue. Social stigma is a hell of a thing to try and fight. It's not impossible to do, but it will be way more challenging than I believe they think it is.
3. No one wants to wear a blindfold in public. VR goggles are basically that and worse. AR might be able to address that, but for whatever reasons, having a screen in your hand doesn't trigger the same vulnerability response people would have to VR goggles. (It should, because it steal our attention like nothing else, but it doesn't.) People don't feel comfortable if they can't read the social cues of people around them and see danger approaching.
I think one of their strategies is the most promising: Turn AR/VR into a common workspace standard. Monitors are big, clunky, hard to move, inflexible, etc. If you could use VR to create a really clean functional workspace to replace the monitor, that might be a real winner and help drive up comfort and adoption issues.
This is still a really hard domain to solve though. In video calls, we still have a lot of people who call in on their phone. This technology is compatible with lots of devices. One person wearing a VR isn't going to be compatible with everyone else though. If I'm meeting you, in general and especially for anything with higher stakes, I don't want to talk to a fucking cartoon, I want to see your face.
Agreed, but they have form in this area. I remember when FB came out, and it was considered completely insane to use your real name on the Internet.
I'd easily take the other side of that bet.
More fundamentally, though, I take issue that "the HN crowd is myopic about new technologies". I'll just speak for myself, but I was easily excited about smartphones, the potential of SaaS businesses, I remember taking my first Uber thinking "I'm glad I'm not a taxi driver", etc. etc.
The fact that many on HN look at hucksterism and bullshit with a critical eye is something I think we should collectively be proud of.
You see yourself as a non myopic but if you look at it historically, technology always panned out differently and in unexpected ways. Why do you presume you’re going to not make the same mistakes?
Wanna put money down on that?
It's a bit like with climate change. We're not going to like what we need to do to stop it, but we must do it.
There's no sharp line dividing the two. You already have "VR + passthrough" which is pseudo-AR. And AR turns into VR as soon as you cover up enough of the real world.
There's some experiences/applications that suit AR more than VR and vice-versa. Most devices will offer a mix of the two.
Since the benefits will be pretty subtle QoL things, the form factor has to be very ergonomic to make it worth it, so widespread use could be decades away.