[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...