Tim Cook: Not Too Long from Now, You'll Wonder How You Led Your Life Without AR
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
> Cook has in the past expressed his personal excitement for augmented reality and has hinted that Apple is working on AR/VR products. The company's first AR/VR product, a high-end headset rumored to be called "Reality Pro," is expected to be announced as soon as January.
Besides Apple is already known to be working on a VR headset project for 2+ years now...
We somehow lived in the 70s and 80s and mid-90s without mobile phones (and even until 2007 and the iPhone for most people without smartphones) and did just fine...
- Getting lost on the city due to a wrong turn or similar and having to figure it out by yourself. You could ask at some gas station, with varied results
- Very poor public transport info
- No food delivery services, you could order pizza and that was it
- No convenient messaging of other people independent from wires. You had pay phones and that's it. And maybe you could leave a message
So, no, thanks, but I prefer the world of today for the most part
I mean "- Getting lost on the city due to a wrong turn or similar", and amazingly billions still managed to get to their home, work, activity place just fine, even as tourists!
>- No convenient messaging of other people independent from wires. You had pay phones and that's it. And maybe you could leave a message
It was trully a marvellous time then!
Yeah, I'll take the downsides, thanks (and you can always set "do not disturb")
This is my hill to die on. You can't set your friends' phones to DND. Camping with friends means that somebody is still tethered to the internet, blathering about the news that I'm generally trying to get away from. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook are ever-present even if you don't personally use them. You can't log out, even if you never logged in. AR will bring that to a whole new level. Fuck this future.
We had this miraculous invention called a "map." Local ones were usually free. I did a lot of cross-country driving and got turned around once before making the habit of picking up a map on arrival to a new place. After I started that habit, I was never lost.
> Very poor public transport info
Similar to maps, when I was using transit, cities provided paper copies of bus and train schedules. Help lines were staffed by actual humans who would help with complex route-finding. Librarians were great for that too.
> No food delivery services, you could order pizza and that was it
Not true! I had vietnamese, chinese and thai favorites that all delivered in the late 90s. And that's not even a thing. Even today, you can still use a desktop for food delivery, no phone required.
> No convenient messaging of other people independent from wires. You had pay phones and that's it. And maybe you could leave a message
Yeah, we had this thing called "peace and quiet." It was amazing. People got bored, and found creative outlets. And yeah, get-togethers required more planning, but we didn't have this "social freeze" bullshit where nobody commits to anything.
Now try using a map while driving. And remembering the turns you need to take to get to a place you know or want to go. Oh but your map is slightly out of date and now that way goes a different way (this can happen with GPS as well, sure, but you can then drive in the general direction you want and have it pick up at a later position once away from the change)
I did that. All the time. It was fine. I never experienced a map so out of date that I couldn't get to my destination. Sometimes I'd need to find an alternate route. A minor inconvenience.
A common strategy for route planning was to exerpt the route onto another sheet of paper. Draw just the streets you'll need, and their names, and maybe the names of some of the cross streets leading up to a turn. I kept a little notebook in my car for these "mini-maps" which made for really easy at-a-glance route finding. I find automated route-planners to be quite annoying because they're making micro-optimizations that might shave seconds off a route at the cost of another dozen turns. By picking simple, straightforward routes, I quickly learned the layouts of cities to the point that I didn't even need my notebook. I self-navigate to this day, but the maps are built into my car, which is a bit more convenient than handling paper. Not a life-changer though.
Smartphones are enabling laziness and stupidity. You can do without. It just takes thinking, planning, and effort.
These maps had only road information, no POI data or road closure information. No public transit info either. Having Google Maps and Uber/Lyft on the go basically entirely removes the need to plan where you'll go and how you'll get there or return.
I had the original iPhone on an internship in 2008 and being able to explore a new city without worrying about getting lost was liberating.
> Yeah, we had this thing called "peace and quiet." It was amazing
Sitcoms in the 90s had entire episodes that depended on people not being able to reach each other. In the era of ubiquitous cell connectivity, this just isn't a problem anymore.
This is another example where the need to plan in advance is basically gone, you can figure things out as you go. Just recently meeting up with friends we had a miscommunication and one of us ended up in the wrong place. With cell phones, we all knew exactly what was happening and could fix it easily. Without? A giant mess.
That said my phone is almost always on vibrate, so if I'm not actively looking at it I'm generally not going to notice a message immediately. And nobody actually calls anymore.
In transit? Sure. But we knew the numbers of friends, relatives, offices.
The benefits have been talked to death so let's talk about some downsides:
• Right now it is possible to opt out of location tracking in cities by simply leaving your phone at home or turning it off temporarily. If 10% of people start using AR, that will no longer be possible due to facial recognition.
• Right now, you can mostly tell when someone is recording you in such a way that the video could be used against your interests (aiming a personal cell phone at you or, if and only if you intend to commit a crime, stores' security cameras (which don't record audio)). Also, right now, when you make a small mistake, you can presume that you were not recorded because people will not have had time to get their phone out and start recording. You apologize and life goes on. With 10% of people using AR, you must presume to be recorded at all times by people who can and will upload the video for everyone to see in exchange for minuscule social media engagement.
• Right now, it is already relatively socially unacceptable to tell a friend or peer to stop using their phone in a social environment, like during dinner. I have experienced that it's a sure-fire way to ruin a dinner date. I see no reason why it would be different with ubiquitous AR. This will cause problems and I have a feeling that society's eventual solution will tend toward "let people do what they individually want" rather than the "we agree to stop using AR during this event".
• The number of people who, just like the article says, cannot live without AR is going to be shockingly high. It will not be possible to get to know young people as people because their thinking process and personality will be so intertwined with AR that they shut down without it.
When I bought my first smartphone I was going on holiday and was tired of taking a laptop and finding WiFi just to check my mail to see if my website had crashed. I also knew it would do satnav and be valuable for web browsing on the go. That's the kind of answers I am looking for.