AR... maybe. My personal opinion is the needed electronics (and especially the battery tech) aren't small enough yet, if we're talking AR glasses.
If we're talking AR on phones, where's the killer app? Pokemon go?
Off the top of my head, some very big ideas that are being worked on: * Clothing fit without actually going to a store and trying things on. * Construction assistance (being able to know where things are in walls, being able to measure things accurately in 3 dimensions, check out the leica RTC360) * Furniture arrangements or additions in a home. e.g. use the ikea app to plop down a SÖDERHAMN to see how it would work and look in your space. * See what a room would look like with different paint. I've actually tried this with an app on my iPad recently, and it is still a little glitchy, but was really freaking cool vs using paint swatches or buying test pints of paint. * Troubleshooting and repair. I tried out this really cool app last year called inspectAR (https://www.inspectar.com/). The desktop app was mindblowing and at my last job when I did lots of circuit board repair/manufacturing adjustments this would have been insanely useful! I can only imagine how nice this would be to have on a trip to Shenzhen for troubleshooting production issues.
Beyond this, yes, games are a huge potential for AR. Brush it aside as something unimportant since it isn't "useful" or whatever, but games are a huge part of people's lives at this point. I've been waiting for a company called TiltFive which basically spun out of valve to launch their AR hardware, it looks and sounds really impressive.
The list goes well past this, but AR has some serious potential.
My prediction is that Pokemon Go will prove to be by far the biggest splash to have been made in the phone AR space, and in the larger scheme of gaming it so far hasn't been more than a long-since-passed fad.
I'm pretty doubtful that even glasses-mounted AR will catch on among consumers in day-to-day life -- but there could be significant specific use cases e.g. education, certain professions, etc. On-the-job type stuff.
Having experienced VR as an owner of a Quest 2 linked to a VR capable PC -- I'm very bullish on VR in the home entertainment space -- not just games but also pre-recorded or live video content, etc. Not sure about social but I'm sure Facebook will try.
I think "nice conveniences" might move slower and get less attention, but in aggregate I suspect they're actually more important for a major long-lasting general-purpose computing platform than "killer apps." We always think of "killer apps" for smaller, narrower, shorter-lived platforms, like a particular gaming console when it launches, but less so for bigger, broader, older platforms like the Internet, personal computers, or smartphones. These huge platforms all had some things which were called "killer apps" (mostly early in their history), but I think we should attribute their longevity and ubiquity more to a massive aggregation of what could be called "nice conveniences." And my impression is that Facebook's bet is that AR/VR will be one of these huge, broad, ubiquitous, long-lasting platforms.
Agreed. A killer app is something you use daily.
That said, I can't wait for the furniture testing app. That would be very useful.
I imagine similar things were send about planes in the early 1900s. "It's not natural!"
But in all seriousness I think they'll solve this (motion sickness) one way or another.
Maybe I sound more sceptical than I am. The second they put out a VR system that doesn't make me sick (and isn't linked to Facebook) I'll be queueing for one. I'm just not sure when that will happen.
At that point, the "killer app" becomes the ability to augment your own senses and memory with, for instance, facial recognition that reminds you of who this person is, useful facts you know about them, etc. Or walking or driving directions that are overlaid directly on your view of the actual paths/streets/etc. Or even virtual tours of places—either places you're physically in, or places you're nowhere near, but have a space of comparable size you can walk around in!
The danger, as we saw with Google Glass, is twofold: on the one hand, allowing an unregulated tech titan like Google or Facebook to have access to cameras attached to people's faces; and on the other hand, the fear of allowing anyone to walk around with an always-on (or potentially always-on) camera, whether its recordings ever left the device or not.
Charlie Stross's Accelerando has a chapter where the main character is basically crippled because ... he lost his AR glasses and can't function without the info in them.
Last one is available online:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...
To think they won't solve motion sickness (or N other teething issues), like it's general AI vs. a problem of incremental improvement is a little short sighted.
What do you think it's a matter of then? I guess I would add latency to the list, but those 3 metrics seem to capture the difference in visual perception between vr and the real world?
There is also focal length, which is fixed (generally at 2 meters) in VR and creates discomfort, especially when reading. Facebook has eye tracking and motorized varifocal lenses to deal with this, but they're too big and loud and they haven't been able to put them in commercial headsets.
However, I've noticed that with time my brain seems to have learned that VR is a different mode. I no longer get dizzy from it, but I feel a strange numb feeling in the back of my head. It's like my mind knows not to trust my eyes anymore for balance when in VR.
It's too bad, because I would really like to be able to do virtual walking tours of places while on the treadmill, but as soon as the camera moves anywhere but where I'm looking at the time, I want to vomit.
Maybe also a latency problem (a big part of why it's in the list above).
Remember when FPS games would never take off because they gave people motion sickness?
Maybe Occulus does it better, I'll never know though.
