[walleeee]

AR/VR skepticism is an attempt to influence the tech landscape and imo the most compelling dismissals are not made on grounds of irrelevance or lack of application but principled judgements about how we want to interact with the world

is it particularly surprising that people who know what goes into the sausages might be skeptical about feeding them to everyone for every meal?

[bckr]

This, extremely this. I wish we were more excited about volumetric displays or programmable matter, instead.

[denkmoon]

Maybe I'm uninformed, but are those technologies not a long way off?

[jazzyjackson]

volumetric displays have a lot of room for improvement but "looking glass" has been shipping a pretty slick product for a couple years now, I hope they can keep innovating

https://lookingglassfactory.com/product/overview

I don't really know what programmable matter means, sounds like biology to me :)

[soared]

Tough to believe in a company that can’t even get their animated headers to size correctly on mobile. I’d love to see what the product looks like.. but on an iPhone 13/chrome I have no idea what the thing does.

[jazzyjackson]

fair critique, I just linked to that to show its a real thing you can buy

here's a quick sizzle reel that shows the product - it's a stack of transparent displays that produces a very convincing depth hologram, I've seen them in person, they're really cool

https://youtu.be/4pJxdNRA1CM

[bckr]

I love this thing! Very exciting!

[bckr]

What I care about is that people largely don't talk about them, even though they're at least as plausible as fully immerse VR, which looms large in the collective third eye.

The public imagination is bent toward the cyber-dystopian, whereas these two technologies represent other possible futures.

[jazzyjackson]

great point, I consider the zuckerverse a kind of target fixation, where we are doomed to hit the dystopia because we can't look away / imagine an alternative

[walleeee]

I really like this way of thinking about it- if we can't imagine different futures, we won't create them!

[walleeee]

agreed!

[filoleg]

>people who know what goes into the sausages

More like "people who know to a degree what goes into salads act like they know what goes into sausages."

More often than not, it is about as interesting and insightful as watching Steve Ballmer staging a mock funeral for iPhone in 2010[0].

0. https://macdailynews.com/2010/09/10/microsoft_windows_phone_...

[walleeee]

I suspect Steve Ballmer's motives to trash the iPhone in 2010 were rather unlike those leading some of us to doubt the desirability of Meta's VR ambitions in 2022