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Comment by senttoschool | Hacker News Reader

More than 10 years later, it's still not good enough for business adoption? Wow. When it was first released, it was really neat. I'd imagine that we'd all be wearing AR glasses by now.

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Google Glass wasn't really AR, more like a smart watch taped to your face, so I can imagine there being little business adoption. HoloLens seems much more promising, but development still seems to be slow.

I'd love to see AR succeed but with the current price I doubt it'll gain popularity in the near future.

Microsoft has laid off entire HoloLens team. It's dead.

Sad to hear it, but not too surprising with how little advancements Microsoft seems to have made in the space since the first release of HoloLens.

I'm sure AR will be back eventually, maybe all the factors align next time.

Bummer, I visited a museum* using HoloLens to bring a command bunker to life, and even though it felt a bit gimmicky, it was really interesting and I could immediately see it being super useful in tons of other museums (e.g. seeing dinosaurs, explain physics/astrology concepts, show vehicles that no longer exist, etc. etc.)

* Musée de la Libération de Paris - musée du Général Leclerc - musée Jean Moulin - yes, that's actual full name

This isn't true...

https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/21/ms-layoffs-effect...

Announcement?

>I'd imagine that we'd all be wearing AR glasses by now.

Am I the asshole here for being happy that future never came to pass?

People are already zombies addicted to their phones, tracked and monetized to hell by advertisers, so I feel like gluing it to their eyes with cameras constantly scanning everything they look at, is some dystopian nightmare I never want to see.

I would be very surprised if this weren't the case within 5-10y tops.

Yeah this, for better or worse, seems inevitable as the computers in our pockets inch closer and closer to our brains where we can use them seamlessly and continually.

Yep, and I suppose it's even more likely now that GPT4 can take images as inputs.

What's worse, same as with most emails going through google and people tagging each other on photos, you can be as savvy as you want and your image will be on other people's video feed all the time.

I think that content producers are very interested in technology that closes the analog hole more and more. The first step were streaming services so that you would not be able to own content anymore. The second step is wide adoption of technology that gets closer and closer to your brain. First there were cinemas then TVs then smartphones then AR glasses and in the future there will be DRM enabled brain implants so that you are personally locked out if you don't pay these companies. And over time, people will get used to it more and more. Just like today you have to pay 6 different subscriptions to watch the movies you like. Or install spyware if you want to play a game you paid for.

It sure might be a dystopian hellhole. But at least some shareholders got rich.

There were some decent use cases I've heard off; supplier compliance got quite big during Covid and AFAIK stayed big. Instead of flying out a team to inspect a factory, just ask someone to walk around the factory wearing Glass. Zero notice, much less chance to cheat, waaaay cheaper. That and documentation lookup should have made for decent enterprise sales. Probably not big enough to satisfy the big G.

Why can't you just make the person wear a GoPro or some kind of live camera? I'm sure there are other solutions cheaper than Google Glasses for this.

It's not that it's "not good enough" it's that it doesn't solve any real problems. I used to work at an agency with vertical dedicated to immersive tech. We did a ton of experimentation, prototyping and building demo experiences for AR visors and lots of related devices. Companies paid us loads of money to build glitzy experiences and come up with clever uses for their tech. We made a lot of neat gimmicky things that were fun for a minute or two but nothing that anyone would ever want to deploy at scale. Phone-based AR is basically already deployed at massive scale and we haven't seen any followup to Pokemon Go in over 5 years. AR just isn't a useful idea. Maybe another order of magnitude improvement in the visual quality and battery life would breath new life, but otherwise it's just a dead end.

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