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Personally, I don't see VR/AR/Holograms as an automatic improvement over 2D screens when it comes to UIs, those techs primary contribution is making things convincingly 3D and pretty, non-gaming UIs don't (primarily) exist to be 3D and pretty, they exist to present to you the actions you can do to a system and display the effects of said actions and the overall current state of the system. When you put it like that, it's much less clear why making things 3D is necessarily an improvement. Exceptions are many. I remember seeing Iron Man and being mind blown by the sheer ergonomicity of Stark's hologram interfaces. That's because design and engineering of the kind that Stark does are inherently tactile, he grabs hologramic models of gadgets in his hand and rotates them as if they are really there. That's insanely powerful. Any kind of design, exploratory work, or education where tactile, haptic and even thermo-pressure interfaces are superior to traditional interfaces would vastly benefit from AR and the associated technologies. Another thing is practical crafts where looking back and forth to a screen is impossible or infeasible, but imagine building a circuit while wearing glasses/contact lens showing a HUD where an annotated schematic of the circuit is displayed, or repairing a car following a graphical step-by-step tutorial (the kind shown in games) overlaid on top of the car, relevant parts of the car glow to get your attention and text appears at exactly the right time to remind you of steps. This is a whole new way of encoding knowledge, YouTube is already a small revolution in the instruction of practical crafts and cooking, imagine how much more of procedural muscle-memory knowledge we can encode with this. The 2 examples above are just to point out that I'm immensely excited for cheap and ubiquitous VR and AR and I have no shortage of fantasies about them. I'm also not saying that making boring UIs with VR and AR wouldn't make them more entertaining, maybe making tweets float around you would really make Twitter users more amused and engaged (a bad thing), although it adds no real functional value. All I'm saying is that last claim, most current UIs wouldn't benefit substantially from VR and AR except for entertainment value. They wouldn't make it any easier or more efficient on the user. What's Excel with 3D tables? a slightly more confusing Excel. The real general revolution in UI and interfaces is Neural Interfaces. Even the most basic and primitive neural interface that is basically just a vim-like system for composing a few basic mental gestures into re-bindable commands would be a massive productivity boost, every time you move the mouse or press the keyboard your thoughts start and end before your hands have done anything, imagine the raw speed if your thoughts alone are driving the computer. Forget graphical tutorials, neural interfaces would conceivably allow us to download mental models and physical skills, Matrix-style. I don't think it would be easy and I'm not even sure it's possible, but boy oh boy, is that a fun thought to imagine. It would obsolete VR and AR entirely because you can just reach into people's brain and plant images, audios, haptic sensations and emotions at will, bypassing the senses and the body completely, and possibly inventing new senses. (e.g. Zap your brain with a certain pattern of electricity representing the earth's magnetic field or the stock market dynamics, after a while it will fade into unconscious and you will have a constant gut feelings for the system that the patterns represent.) Low level access to neurons will be a gateway to wonders and horrors beyond our imagination. |