Imagine a car mechanic remotely helping you to do what's needed to be done. This use case is showcased in one of the videos and it is probably not as complicated as building an AI engine to help a user repair his car.
This thing is really crazy!!
This thing is really crazy!!
Now, a mechanic using this to "see" things that are actually in control of a remote robot? Pretty cool. Showing you the thing that is right in front of you? Cute, but ultimately silly.
How exactly does this work?
You still need to pay for an expert's time -- in fact, you probably need to pay more for it, because the expert is probably faster to do a thing than to explain the thing to you and then you do it. Also, the expert now needs to be someone with these additional skills of coaching someone through an operation.
Tools are still needed -- is there actually a big market for the kind of repairs you can do with the tools that everyone has lying around at home but which is complicated enough to need hand-coaching by an expert?
I mean, maybe! Especially if you can locate the expert in some place where labor prices are much lower (so: India). But then you also need the person to buy the AR goggles. And how often does this use case come up? Is this like 3D printers where people try to sell me on the concept that I could pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for something that can make me things that cost less than $20 and which I need three of every year?
Online training though - a whole other thing. Imagine math and physics with interactive 3D visualisations.
Or for kids, a virtual version of one of those 30-in-1 electronics teaching kits.
And so on.
If this works it could be a game changer, and it could also create a whole new app industry.
I just hope the technology is non-crappy, and it doesn't get managementised into uselessness.
An electronics teaching kit might not work on a tablet (but would in VR), and note that any kind of really fluid manipulation of a virtual environment is going to involve a whole additional technology that gives precise locations of your hands (at least). The HoloLens allows a few simple gestures, not the ability to handle virtual objects in many degrees of freedom.
But:
> Tools are still needed -- is there actually a big market for the kind of repairs you can do with the tools that everyone has lying around at home but which is complicated enough to need hand-coaching by an expert?
Almost all repairs on appliances, cars, houses, and so on can be done with tools you have laying around the house; they don't require anything more than a hammer, drill, screwdrivers, wrench sets, etc. The only thing you're typically not going to have on hand is replacement parts, which are usually not too difficult to get your hands on and which you would have to pay for anyway.
When people do this, it's not going to be an "expert", it's going to be something along the lines of "hey dad, look at this real quick."
> But then you also need the person to buy the AR goggles.
The Ars reporting showed someone using a Surface to view and annotate the HoloLens-user's view, not another set of HoloLens. So the barrier is much lower, any Windows 10 PC should be godo enough.
Also, apologies for my brusqueness.
So I think the interesting market is in building the infrastructure/app that makes it easy for vendors to create the content and ship it as a (free) addon for their products.
And that's like riding a bike: you cannot really tell someone how to do it..
It can still be very interesting in many ways!
Now I'm really excited about this.