I saw a 3D overlay AR experience that some people were doing at the Minoan palace of Knossos in Greece. It’s a large multi-level outdoor space. They were walking around with tablets with huge sunshades because of the incredibly bright Cretan sun. I don’t know what they thought of it but they did use it quite a bit. I think you’re better off seeing the ruins, and then seeing a recreated physical 3D model (which they did have at the accompanying museum), or a short film exploring the space. I could imagine that if we squeezed all the AR stuff into the size of regular glasses, this sort of experience might have more take. But maybe it’s just better to see ruins as ruins first and let your imagination do the rest?
I could imagine things like turn by turn directions being useful in a nice AR product but that’s just one thing…
As I keep saying in my HN comments, I just don’t think people want the AR/VR form factor.
Then I imagine all of the corporations vying to build AR/VR headsets and remind myself that they will never be able to build a product that I want to buy. It will be ad-riddle junk, running on a closed software ecosystem, using proprietary hardware, that treats its users as a product to be controlled and monetized.
Someone please prove me wrong.
Google is only pursuing what advertisers want. Most product changes to Youtube, Google search etc are for the benefit of advertisers and copyright holders, not end-users.
AR at Google will be just another canvas they'll try to optimize for ad delivery.
Assuming that AR/VR is a viable market, then this strategy seems short-sighted. The ios platform is smaller than android and typically more profitable because of it's target market. Sure Google has search, but this is just another area in which it's ceding ground because it can't compete even though it has massive resources and was ahead of the competition.
Google is also primarily a software company. Even when they made the Pixel, I'm fairly sure it exists more so that there's a baseline other Android manufacturers need to keep up with (to keep Android competitive) rather than to make a profit in its own right.
I work in warehousing software and write software for scanners, 100% of which run Android. There is no Apple scanner and I doubt there ever will be.
edit: ah no, this is killing something before announcing, instead of immediately after shipping. More Novel.
