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0 pointsslver5y ago0 comments

Well, it's easy to get excited fantasizing about the future, but your predictions are about as likely to occur as the flying cars we're flying around right now.

In fact none of the major platforms we use today was just predicted and constructed. They've evolved and shown their benefits naturally and not entirely in expected ways. No one actually planned the web to be an application platform. It was a university paper exchange program. And the Internet before it was a military communication network.

Your predictions about the grand future of AR remind me of the excitement around VRML couple of decades ago.

"Looking at stale 2D web pages will be a funny anachronism of our time" we thought. Turns out making existing content more fancy in 3D wasn't that useful, it actually was more cumbersome both to create and to use, so 3D web pages died before they even had a true chance to live.

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gonehome5y ago· 3 in thread

You can see the direction things are heading.

The iPhone was a UI step change improvement over previous 'smart phones' and the app ecosystem came out of that.

The ground work being set in the OP's post is about getting things ready for hardware that can then take advantage of it.

It's possible to make predictions based on trends and the capability of hardware that becomes possible when it previously wasn't: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTdWQAKzESA (Also see: Douglas Englebart's the Mother of All Demos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos). Xerox PARC too - computing history is filled with examples of people pulling the future down because they recognized what was possible.

Just because 3D websites are a bad UI doesn't mean looking at little hand-held glass displays is the best one. Likely in AR we'd still pull up flat 2D websites a lot of the time, you just wouldn't need to pull out a little glass display to do it.

Michael Abrash used to have a blog post about the hardest AR problems when he was at Valve (he's at Oculus now): drawing black, and latency - the latter is mostly a hardware constraint - I'm not sure if anyone has solved the former (the magic leap sucked).

If the hardware is possible, the UI benefits seem big.

slverOP5y ago

I don't know if you remember Google Glass was a thing, and turned out that wearing glasses on your face 16 hours a day is far more annoying than those "little hand-held glass display" you're trying way too hard to be dismissive of.

Google Glass didn't die because it wasn't AR, it died because wearing glasses all the time wasn't practical.

Not practical technologically in terms of battery life, weight, and not practical in terms of simply that you don't need to interact with some digital UI every waking moment of your life.

Also while in our imagination we can conjure up virtual displays in AR and use them for complex UIs, actually waving your hands in empty air, aside from being super weird, is also super inconvenient, compared to handheld multitouch glass.

You're not making AR predictions based on "current trends". You think you are. Instead you're trying to draw a straight line from the present reality to your favorite sci-fi movies that have shaped your idea of what the future is going to be like, while also skipping over all the pesky details that can trip up that idea from concept to realization.

In other words, same reason why everyone was dead set flying cars are coming. And yeah, the generic "no one believed in XEROX PARX and no one believed in trains and car engines, no one believed in airplanes" argument was brought up about flying cars. Turns out that this argument is not an automatic win for believing whatever you wanna believe is coming.

Just because someone didn't believe in airplanes doesn't mean I can't roll my eyes at predictions that faster-than-light travel is just around the corner.

gonehome5y ago

Google Glass died because the hardware sucked, the UI and utility were not there. The general magic device was also a failure, but mobile computing is obviously not.

The timing has to be right and the hardware has to be possible - if you're too early it won't work.

Flying cars is a bad comparison - they mostly don't exist in widespread use because of reasons not related to computing. Risk, fuel, control, etc. - even then rich people do have helicopters (though that's mostly different).

Pointing out failed predictions does not imply that all predictions are similarly wrong. In computing - the examples I showed (and there are others) are more relevant.

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fnord775y ago

> wearing glasses on your face 16 hours a day

I do this every day of my life.

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