"Standing at a subway stop, watching a Mr. Beast video... it's a pretty special experience." is it tho "The idea that I could have my whole digital world out in the world? That seems bigger than AR or VR." you stood in the middle of the stairs and pawed at the sky to answer a text "It's impossible for me to imagine... that you can't see what I can see." This might have something to do with everyone staring at you like you're hearing voices (holds up donut for imaginary butterfly to land on while three girls watch slack-jawed) schizophrenia metaphor intensifies "After a couple hours of running around New York my brain just clicked and took what it saw as reality" buddy you watched Youtube and texted from a stairway "This isn't the future of AR or VR... this is the future of computing" quite I reject that categorically. I reject it with prejudice, I reject it with contempt, I reject it with vehemence. I've got crazy-good earbuds. Like, beyond. Shure SE846s with custom filters and earmolds. I can absolutely isolate myself from the world. Except you know what? They've got mics on them. I can flip them fucking bionic, too. And riding subways in LA, the people around us negotiate our presence two ways: (1) "you can hear me" (2) "you cannot hear me." Mix those two up? Like, respond to someone talking about me when I have the earbuds in? creeps them the fuck out. This is what boned Google Glass, incidentally - the idea that there you are, interacting with the world, but with an added layer of one-way malfeasance that the rest of us can't interact with. When in doubt, you're filming me for your fucking Youtube channel (these douchebags aren't helping). This is something Joanna Stern pointed out: Coworkers streamed by her office gawking and staring and snapping pictures, and she saw it all. People are more comfortable imagining you are fully in your own world than partly in theirs. "Are you here or not" is such a fundamentally human question about interaction that no amount of wizardry has ever made it go away. The phrase "give me some privacy" demonstrates its heart - privacy is something granted by other people as part of our social interactions. Yes, we can take it - but taking it unwillingly is a major slight in every culture you care to mention. I can choose not to look over your shoulder and in polite company, I will. Put a lenticular filter on your screen and I'll have a much harder time violating your privacy - but it also says "my computer is none of your goddamn business ever" and it also increases the amount of "don't fuck with me" you're putting out. Your use case for AR goggles puts a one-way mirror all the way around you and nobody likes one-way glass. They never have, they never will. We mediate our relationships with fellow humans through eyelines and the minute you eliminate those eyelines, you change the mediation. Think about sunglasses as a semiotic device - what do they mean? What do they signal? How do we change our interactions with people when we're all wearing sunglasses? My experience is we all smile more. How do we change our interactions when one person is wearing sunglasses? My experience is we take them off. I've been through five or six of these reviews by now and the "thing no one will say" is the thing everybody is saying: "this shit's the future." As in, this shit isn't the present but I have seen enough to know it reminds me of Minority Report. Which is just a polite way of saying "I don't want this, I want Minority Report." We want the effortless, contrived, third-person-perfect experience we've been promised since Fritz Lang's metropolis and a whole bunch of people who don't spend much time in AR/VR are now going "I can see a potential use-case for this at some point in the future." Except there isn't any. There just isn't. There's nothing that requires it, there's nothing for which it would be nice to have. There is no killer app for the technology, there is no problem that AR/VR solves. We're rolling up on 30 years of 'if we build it they will come' and they just haven't, man. That whole "you can watch videos in privacy" thing? Glass had that. "Video glasses" is a whole segment of bullshit nobody has bought for 20 years now. Some of them aren't even wretched yet neither you, nor anyone else, has ever even bothered to look for this shit except as some red-herring reason for Apple's $3500 nerd helmet to exist someday. Look. Here's how much this shit matters. This is about the fifth patent Apple has been granted since 2008 dealing with hiding cameras under screens. Apple is going on fifteen years of attempting to shoot through the screen - where your eyes are pointed - in order to make video conferencing less disconcerting. The basic problem with Zoom - believe it or not - is we're all looking at people's faces, and when those faces see us, they're all looking at our chins. Next time you're on a Zoom try this - keep your eyes on the camera, not everyone else. See if maybe people respond to you better. Yeah, you can't see their expressions, it's a problem. But the way we interact is so fucking dependent on eyelines that Apple has piled billions into moving their fucking cameras down an inch. Now try and tell me they're serious with that Uncanny Valley avatar bullshit. The basic problem is human interaction involves faces, and AR/VR involves covering up faces. No amount of technology is going to solve that. The basic problem is human interaction involves shared experience, and AR/VR involves individual experience. No amount of technology is going to solve that. Here, think back to every sci fi movie ever fucking made: - volumetric display we all stare at: utopia - individualized VR display unique to one character: dystopia I get it. This is deeper than anyone who says "Mr Beast" six times in ten minutes has gone on it, and deeper than any tech reviewer will go. I'm weird - I've been involved in information display at a professional level for 25 years. But it's just not a technology problem. And every eight years or so, the tech journalists all line up to say "I have seen the future and it is not yet."The real use I see is for entertainment, specifically in public places. The ability to turn on a TV show or movie anywhere, anytime, while no one can see what you're watching is a significant thing. In the right circumstances, that point alone will sell millions.
I tend to agree. I don’t see things like this or glass or that stupid Apple holodeck thing ever coming into common civilian use. They have too many negatives and are too expensive to replace the nearly ubiquitous phones already in use for home entertainment. I could see industrial use, for example using a device like that to give engineers the ability to see heat signatures, metal fatigue, or other signs of wear and tear. I could see this having a military use where, much like video games, a heads up map display is extremely valuable. Even engineering where you might want to have a virtual tour of the design in ways that let you touch controls or parts in VR without needing a prototype built. One thing that absolutely floors me about tech-bros and their approach to technology is that they still, 3-4 generations into the use of technology don’t understand a simple concept that’s always been obvious to me: if the technology doesn’t significantly improve on what’s already out there at a similar price point, nobody will buy it. People didn’t buy cell phones because they were cool, they bought them because cell phones untethered them from landline phones that were connected to the wall. iPads became popular because they’re smaller, lighter and easier to use than laptops. Google Glass solves no actual problems. There’s nothing that the technology does that couldn’t be done with the cellphone. If you want augmented reality, it’s going to do much better as an app that you download to the phone and point at an object you need more information on than as a device you buy and wear and struggle to use.
Google Glass solves some corner-case problems for bicycle and motorcycle riders and it would have been a great application for that. But you're right - that's not where it was marketed. It was marketed as "if we build it they will come" and "motorcycle riders willing to ride around looking like Tetsuo the Iron Man" is not a big enough market segment to support Glass.
It's the idea behind the Errol Morris Interrotron. Obviously not a practical solution for Zoom, but it gets to the idea that we can't really feel what someone is saying if we can't look them in the eye. When looking someone in the eye becomes impossible, then communication breaks entirely, as evidenced by every single internet flame war in history.keep your eyes on the camera, not everyone else. See if maybe people respond to you better. Yeah, you can't see their expressions, it's a problem. But the way we interact is so fucking dependent on eyelines that Apple has piled billions into moving their fucking cameras down an inch.