I had an inside view of things, but all of the work being done is actually a long term roadmap towards building AR devices that don't suck. There many complicated issues to deal with, including batter life, processing power, input and control, heat management, placement of self and objects in a virtual world, safety, and on and on. That's all on top of figuring out what content is interesting and compelling.
Devices being made by these companies all embody elements of solutions to these challenges, but they all recognize it's a long road, and there's a lot of learning still to be done.
This reads to me very sincere and good, and I hope the collaborations go well. At the end of the day building an AR hardware product is extremely risky, and takes a very long time, and it's definitely exciting - it's a great contribution to computing.
From my recent past experience working on AR at one of the companies named in this thread, I can say that battery, display, processing power, heat, and user input are all among the biggest problems being worked on.
It's getting closer. The display component is obviously the hardest part hardware-wise, but the battery, mic, camera, speaker, and compute components are all there now, and in a form factor that I actually could see myself wearing all day if the benefits were sufficiently compelling.
Also gives some insight into what future early consumer-targeted AR devices might look like. Up until now I've been picturing something like a slimmer version of Hololens; highly capable but a bit bulky, with a focus on slimming things down in future revisions. Now that I think about it though, a more successful consumer-oriented approach might be from the opposite direction; comfort and aesthetics at the expense of capability in the short term, with a focus on improving capability in future revisions.
Something like these glasses, with a simple low-res monochromatic display that only turns on when needed. Touch to wake and display contextual information relevant to whatever you're currently looking at. All heavy processing done on your phone, with an extreme focus on maintaining all-day battery life on the glasses themselves. I think something like that could succeed, given sufficiently compelling software.
The difficulties you sight are all at the low level of platform development. The company that can create a viable AR platform will likely not have the expertise to create content, so I expect to see the platform to be open to indie creators early on in its lifetime.
In fact, I can imagine a future where this company decides that any consumer facing product is not their cup of tea, and sells/licenses chips/lenses/software/patents/etc to consumer facing companies that put the final product together.
My humble opinion is that it's about the AR endgame, and building out the technical capability to get there (via VR mixed reality, wearable devices, etc) AND owning the platform.
This just sounds like its written in a manic flurry of excitement for AR. AR is so amazing! There are so many use cases that content will be easy and cheap to make!
The reality is not so simple.
If we're talking about apples to apples entertainment type content, its probably easier to make an indie VR game that runs on all platforms than an AR game or experience.
If we're talking about the computer vision aspects of AR like object tracking, those problems are hard enough that a creative novice has little hope of making progress at the moment. That said, this space is probably dominated by a bunch of tech heavy startups.
And then of course the hardware is dominated by a few players but with some steam's cross platform SDK it was more than I thought it would be in 2016.
Agreed. I'm not 100% sure about the winner-take-all aspect, but to make a serious AR product you essentially have to do all the work required to make a serious VR product, then add a whole lot of inherently fragile complexity on top of that.
Setting aside technicals issues as a huge caveat, the promise of AR is massive. I'm actually somewhat surprised that we're not seeing more AR focused media to prime people to the possibilities (but maybe we're just too early).
Always love a new Karl Guttag article, and I'm pleased to see people doing all this fundamental engineering and science work.
The more of them I read the more I tend to think that in ten years the best solution is going to be VR with video passthrough. That seems (as a layperson) to have a very clear (at least comparatively) engineering path to delivering a high quality experience.
So many (seemingly unsolveable) issues with AR displays.
This doesn't even touch the software side which seems to need AGI to actually deliver the AR that people actually expect in the end. The trivial things for AR are better served by smartphones and watches for the medium and longterm still.
As the founder of a startup creating an AR headset, I think it’s true but the AR market is not as mature as VR.
In every tech product, first comes the hardware and then the software adds the magic at every update. In the AR world, we are still at the hardware stage. No one has the answer today for a compelling device and experience for B2C. There is no Moore law in optics and the compute power needed for SLAM, computer vision and stereo rendering is crazy if you want an untethered device (like hololens). You need more than the traditional CPU/GPU config, you need DSPs, ASICs and perhaps FPGA. Combined with the optics your NRE is high.
We are far from a market that has the same ROI as VR now, even on the entreprise the adoption is slow.
This game is hard but it will be worth it, and it’s the most exciting venture I’ve been a part of.
My take-away was that for all the work on the hardware and experience, it will be the people that solve the interactive tooling challenge that will open the flood-gates to mass-market MR/VR/AR.
I've barely cracked the surface of this and it's already one of the best analytical breakdowns of new tech I've seen. Thank you, kguttag!
This is obviously a very hot market. Where do you see AR vs VR in 2 years? Five years? Do you think these companies will have supply chain issues? Do you think AR will face adoption issues? It seems like the lack of light, "glowing eyes", eye tracking cutouts, and other issues will be big hurdles for all companies in this space.
I'll come back with more technical questions after I finish reading. This is great.
I think what people need to keep in mind is that AR is not just going to be a Moores Law type thing. AR has to not only improve with regards to size, but also find ways to deal with etendue while reducing that size, and dealing with thermal issues. It’s easy to assume AR just needs a few more years because everything else in tech has been like that, but the improvements in the space that are likely needed for people to feel comfortable publicly using AR might take a lot longer than what is usual.
Not everyone can work on projects that change the course of humanity. Some work is done for just shit and giggles. And who knows what kind of possibilities these humble beginnings can lead to?
There's a lot of potential in AR and I think this is a good way to introduce consumers and developers to it.
I've read this twice and can't quite understand....why is this Oculus blog post primarily about how great AR is and the challenges of it? I can see the paragraphs about their research but is AR on Oculus' product roadmap?
I've been very bearish on AR and especially headset AR for years. Building useful UX in front of someone's face is incredibly hard and doing it with such poor visual precision is impossible. I worked at a digital design shop a few years ago and they were throwing devices at us and asking us to come up with just some compelling demos and I don't think we really succeeded. We need multiple optics breakthroughs before we can even think about what these could be good for.
Magic Leap pivoted to enterprise and the US military just paused the Hololens project. The market is not clamoring for this stuff and industry has not convinced anyone in 10+ years of trying.
Phone-based AR is both more vivid and more accessible and still hasn't really caught on at all. Word Lens and Pokemon Go were so long ago at this point and there's been no major followup.
Okay that's a perspective I can understand a little better. Making AR more accessible by using cheaper VR technology to implement it seems like a good reason to be interested.
I'm still not seeing the excitement as a consumer because the apps aren't there yet. From a development perspective it also just feels… iterative.
Devices being made by these companies all embody elements of solutions to these challenges, but they all recognize it's a long road, and there's a lot of learning still to be done.
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