[stranded22]

I am way more interested in a digital world being overlaid on the real world - augmenting rather than escaping.

I’m not sure if I’d like to walk around the streets wearing them though - would be incredibly annoying to other people and a risk of being stolen.

[smoldesu]

Honestly, I've seen less compelling AR applications than I've seen VR ones. Between Windows Mixed Reality, Pokemon Go and the AR Lowe's app, there's not really a whole lot of compelling AR use-cases. VR at least has an entertainment niche, which gave us the likes of Beat Saber, Half Life: Alyx and an IMAX experience in the comfort of your sofa. Neither one seems poised to succeed IMO, but the push for AR adoption seems to be a top-down decision, not one driven by profound demand.

[verdverm]

AR has some very compelling use cases in medicine and manufacturing. There is also the idea of using AR instead of a physical monitor that may lead to drastic adoption. While the Hololens 2 is expensive, FOV limited, and clunky, the user experience is absolutely incredible. They are the only good smart-glasses like experience I know of right now. They show you what a world is like when the smartphone escapes the little box we carry around.

The hard part of AR is the shared experience part. It's close to creating a cross-platform MMO game.

[jnsie]

I'll keep saying this until it happens...the biggest AR use case, for me, is replacing the television. The fact that we all have giant boxes as the centerpiece of our main rooms is something unnatural that we take for granted. I'm not sure how far AR devices that allows for social viewing of television content are away, but I feel in my bones that it will happen and when it does children of that generation will be confused as to what a television was and why it was needed.

[smoldesu]

That's a fair point, but I struggle to see how we haven't already reached that point with smartphones. Most people today already have a portable screen they can comfortably stow on-person, it feels like a hard sell to get them to ditch their TV and smartphone for a situationally useful headset. Doubly so if every participant needs a discrete headset.

While I enjoyed watching movies in VR, it's just more comfortable to lay down on the couch and watch a movie without a headset on.

[Eisenstein]

You have to hold a smartphone. The great thing about TV is that it is on in the background and you can do other things while you (don't) watch it. Picture a cooking show while you cook or cspan while you work on your hobby or some TV show you kind of care enough about to talk over with your friends but don't care enough about to devote all of your attention to...

[smoldesu]

Right. Say I prop my iPhone up against my rolling pin and put on Orange is the New Black, though - is that not the same effect? I don't think people will pay boucoup bucks to project a picture-in-picture display over their face.

[superturkey650]

I'd want it if I could "pin" the the video to a physical space on demand, allowing me to move the video around a room and control its dimensions. Especially if it could stream the content of the videos from a beefy home pc. That would allow me to get rid of all the screens around my apartment with digital version while controlling all of them from the same source.

[jnsie]

VR is a different beast and much less comfortable than I envision the (medium to long term) future of AR to look like. I don't love watching movies/TV in VR right now, if only because I find the headset makes my head overheat.

[JKCalhoun]

I can't imagine that at all.

A TV is like a piece of furniture, or a decoration like a painting. As compelling as it is, you can choose to ignore it, make eye contact with and talk to someone else in the room wether the TV is on or not. It's casual.

I imagine too what an outrageously high pixel count a VR set would have to have to render a virtual TV with the same resolution as a real one.

And even aside from the above, I really can't see myself putting something on my face and dropping out of my environ for anything more than about 5 or 10 minutes. It's just weird.

[jnsie]

> I imagine too what an outrageously high pixel count a VR set would have to have to render a virtual TV with the same resolution as a real one.

Yup. It might take decades to get there, but I think we'll get there.

> And even aside from the above, I really can't see myself putting something on my face and dropping out of my environ for anything more than about 5 or 10 minutes. It's just weird.

I'm envisioning the equivalent of a pair of spectacles. People wear spectacles all day every day without _too_ much issue.

[JKCalhoun]

I don't think spectacles are equivalent. Spectacles don't block out my surroundings.

[flanbiscuit]

> I'll keep saying this until it happens...the biggest AR use case, for me, is replacing the television

Personally I think they'll be replacements for mobile phones. This will only happen if the devices start to become indistinguishable from a normal pair of glasses and allow for prescriptions as well.

Audio will either be through bone conduction or small speakers like how Bose's Audio Glasses [1] do it now (I have a pair of these actually, got them for free at a developer hackathon they hosted once a few years ago, never use them mainly because I don't wear contacts and need prescriptions)

Ideally it could even pick up subvocalization to be able to compose messages in quiet situations without rudely having to speak out loud, if you're the type that cares about that (I certainly do)

We might still need some small handheld device paired with it, maybe it has a simple keyboard on it or maybe just a number pad that also serves as 4-directional buttons for traversing menus and things in your view"

1. https://www.bose.com/en_us/products/frames.html

[IgorPartola]

Yeah I’m not putting VR googles on my children. That in and of itself makes it a non-starter.

What you describe sounds like a single person experience which is fine but watching a show or a movie can also be a social experience and very often is exactly this. Seeing other people’s reactions and sharing space is a huge part of it. You can’t do that in VR.

[jnsie]

AR, not VR. To clarify - and I should have said this in my original post - I'm envisioning the equivalent of a pair of spectacles, not a huge headset, with the knowledge that it's probably many years off...

[gernb]

I'm somewhat skeptical though I'm sure I'll be proven wrong.

In my mind, AR glasses will make the world as shitty as most clickbait webpages. Ads EEEEEEVVVVEEERRRYYYWWWWHHHEEERRRREEE. Notifications all the time. Virtual billboards trying to grab your attention.

I can't think of the obvious use cases, except for virtual monitors, that are all that compelling.

Map navigation? Ok, well, it's not that bad now in non-VR

Info on people in your view? Maybe, but if think protecting your privacy is bad now you'll need much less of it for that to actually work.

Virtual pets running around your room? Seems 15 minutes of wow and then done. Plus the hard part of designing them to interact with your environment vs a pre-designed environment.

Games? Same problem as above, they have to adapt to the actual world vs current games where designers can design and build levels and worlds. So 1 or 2 Pokemon Go type of games and then you'll go back to playing PS6 or VR.

Porn? Same problem. The 3D video won't match your sofa, chair, living room, bed.

Virtual UI? People are already complaining that screens in cars are not as good as knobs. do I really want to have to put on my glasses to adjust my knobless stove?

All that said, I'd probably have made similar arguments against smartphones and been just as wrong :P

[germinalphrase]

“The 3D video won't match your sofa, chair, living room, bed.”

If AR can’t solve this, then you won’t have to worry. It’s a fundamental function.

[gernb]

how would it?

example: in the video an actor is sitting in a chair, youre in a room with no chairs. What does it show?

example: theyre in an open 20x20 foot room, no furniture, your in a 10x10 foot room on your bed. When they walk across their room you'd seen them first walk througb your bed and then walk through your wall

etc...

[germinalphrase]

AR is all about location based augmentations.

If I’m in a room with no chairs, there would be no chairs unless one is added visually.

They wouldn’t walk through my bed because they aren’t in my room.

[gernb]

You have that backward

> If I’m in a room with no chairs, there would be no chairs unless one is added visually. > They wouldn’t walk through my bed because they aren’t in my room.

If you're sitting on your bed with your AR googles there is a bed in your room. If they are standing in their room they'll be standing or sitting through your bed. They have no concept of where your bed is because your bed doesn't exist in their room.

Tons of AR demos try to show this feature. Tons of companies are working on it. Most believe it's a mass market feature.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0

https://youtu.be/uVEALvpoiMQ?t=55

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PG3tQYlZ6JQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd2GK0qDtRg

But it's unlikely to work because each person's surroundings don't match every other persons. One's at a desk, One's at a cafe, One's in their bed, One's on their soft. They aren't each positioned in a way they can all appear in each others AR.

Maybe this will make it clearer. Imagine you're on your bed laying down. You want to AR video conference with your friend. They're in the bathroom. Where does their AR project your body? Your body is laying down. There's no place to project your body in the bathroom that fits you lying down.

[germinalphrase]

Right. I kind of think we are talking past each other.

The scenario you’re imagining won’t be an issue because I don’t think AR will allow my “AR presence” to go anywhere that my body is not. AR is about augmented my experience of the reality my body is experiencing, not experiencing ‘realities’ in other locations.

To whatever extent that intentional restriction breaks down, we will have to accept that non-bodily presences cannot fully understand and interact with the environment (and will likely engage with animations to do so).

For your specific bedroom/bathroom scenario, I would choose simple talking heads (floating in space) akin to current expectations for a video chat. There wouldn’t be an attempt to match the speakers to each others environment by default, but if you wanted to do so, yes - one of the speakers would probably need to match their body position such that it can match the environment on the receivers end (so the person laying down would need to stand).

Generically, I think AR will be restricted to the local environment of my body, and anything related to my digital presence traveling to a location different than where my body is found will operate under VR rules (which will be understood as a distinct set of rules/affordances/expectation than AR). We will avoid many problems by not mixing the paradigms.

[m463]

I think augmented reality is hard. Practically speaking VR only needs to create an image, while AR needs to create and register an image in space and time.

[Uehreka]

As someone whose built stuff for both, I agree. With VR I can test things out on my computer and be reasonably sure that, say, the things I see in the Unity Editor will be the things I’ll see later in my headset.

Current AR workflows have tons of moving parts, are harder to test, and have all kinds of unreliable points of failure that are difficult to overcome (like finding a flat plane to use as an anchor and then hoping your content doesn’t show up backwards or upside down). It’ll improve over time for sure, that’s clear, but the current tools are not as easy to use as they probably should be.

[Terretta]

Isn't that specifically what this is?

All photos appear to show AR overlaid on the world in front of the user, while the design of the headset is like a teleprompter mirror so you're looking at the world directly, with ghost of AR reflected at angle from phone above.

[jaChEWAg]

that's supposedly what Humane is developing atm and should announce sometime later this year.

[cmelbye]

I thought Humane was a wearable projector essentially that projects some UI onto your palm.