- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
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This AR obsession is utterly baffling to me. There are so few real applications and the hardware requirements are insane so it’s not something that will get widely adapted anyway. Sure in a decade or so it might have matured enough to have shed all these issues, but AR/VR feels like a really out of touch thing to prusue, especially if you look at the garbage ideas they have on how to use it - virtual meetings??
I get movies and games on these, possibly even some recording and porn, but these are not their B2B wet dreams anyway.
In theory, there’s a Million awesome business applications for it.
Let’s say you’re in construction and your glasses tell you exactly what to build where and how.
You’re a waiter and the glasses tell you which table ordered what, needs attention, etc.
You’re a network engineer and the glasses show you on every port which device is connected.
And don’t even get me started on the military applications.
Of course we’re not there yet. But that’s why they’re so obsessed with it. They want to be the first.
In the current US political climate, giving everyone glasses with always-on cameras run by big tech companies seems particularly dangerous.
I agree. But unfortunately, nobody gives a flying fuck.
I think for the most part society has gotten used to being on someone’s camera when in public at pretty much all times.
It’s something I used to think about, now I just, don’t.
Everyone has been looking for the next big hardware thing. It looked like it might be foldable phones for a little while but I reckon AR Glasses are the ultimate endgame until they start making bio implants.
They’ve gotten used to it in different political circumstances. But as people start to see how an authoritarian and vindictive fascist government works with surveillance tech to invade and endanger people’s lives, attitudes to things like always-on cameras may start to shift.
How does the construction app know what needs to be constructed and how?
How does the waiter app know which table ordered what, needs attention, etc?
How does the IT app know on which port every device is connected?
These things are all real hard to know. Having glasses that display the knowledge could be really nice but for all these magic future apps, having a display is only part of the need.
As somebody who wanted google glass back in the day and thinks AR glasses would be really really cool, this is ultimately where I end up on it, and with a lot of tech in general: the primary usefulness of any of this shit is in accurate and relevant information, and that’s the part of the equation that these big companies are definitely NOT in the business of producing. In fact, they seem to have discovered a while back that inaccurate and irrelevant information being blasted in your face is the real money maker. And now with AI/ML producing so much/filling in gaps, I just can’t imagine that it’s going to get any better.
That being said, I think the tech is so cool. I’d love to travel to a new city and be able to get directions around to different sightseeing spots and real time star ratings above all the restaurants instead of anxiously glancing at my phone the entire time. If we ever get to that level of goodness I’m in, but I have a lot of doubts that it’ll ever be more than another attention-seeking thing attached to your body.
If you have all that info you could probably remove the human from the equation and automate it.
As for the NPC-Waiter 🤢
We were already there 10 years ago with Google Glass. Despite its failure in the consumer market, it found significant success in enterprise settings in the exact scenarios you’ve listed.
Except, all of these are scenarios in blue collar work. Apple seems hell bent on making this succeed in white collar areas with its emphasis on meetings, which is extremely baffling.
How Is Google Glass Doing in Enterprise and Industrial Settings? - Engineering.com - https://www.engineering.com/how-is-google-glass-doing-in-enterprise-and-industrial-settings/
Imagine being anyone anywhere whipped like an Amazon worker. Will the waitress have to piss in bottles? Bad for tips I think.
Even lightweight glasses can be irritating and the extra weight from steel v plastic is noticeable. There will never be ar glasses or goggles that are comfortable to wear all the time.
The biggest issue is the software and tools are immature, and it’s been that way for a while.
Sounds like a robot would just steal your job if that was implemented well. (And that is a big IF) Meanwhile you would pay off your AR glasses by watching a constant stream of ads for months.
All of this can be done with AR on a mobile phone.
Only when you need to do this AND have both hands free do AR glasses become necessary. So surgery, bomb refusal or something niche like thar.
This might be the dumbest take I’ve heard today.
Everything your smartphone does your laptop can do, too. Therefore, smartphones are useless!!
Everything AR can do that your smartphone can do today will be a hundred times more convenient because you don’t have to carry a slab of glass with you all the time. You just have to wear glasses. Like I already do anyway.
The only reason for smartphones to still exist in a world where AR is compact will be if we can’t figure out a way to efficiently input data without annoying everyone around us. As soon as that problem’s solved, nobody will be using smartphones anymore.
I need a good reason to spend $2000 to do something I can already do with a $100 phone. Using 2 hands is very niche.
Laptops can’t do AR since they have no gyroscope.
This might be the dumbest take I’ve heard today.
You’re forgetting that AR headgear requires to WEAR THAT THING ON YOUR FACE AT ALL TIMES
No matter how compact (don’t even start talking about some techbro “all conteined in a lens” type of shit), there will absolutely, always be people who will refuse to wear it. (Ask any former glasses user who went for contact lenses)
A phone you glance at and is in your pocket only when you need it is a million times more convenient than something that goes over your eyes all of the time.
Your world where external compact computing devices (phone/tablet/smartwatch/a slab of glass) are no longer needed is mostly constructed out of flatulence of the technology brotherhood.
you’re a network engineer and the glasses show you on every port which device is connected
Unifi equipment already can sorta do this! The little dot pattern on the screen is an AR code and you can use the app to see this. It’s pretty cool actually. I’ve never actually used it for real work though, I just look at the dashboard on my laptop and find the port that way.
It would be really really cool to be able to just touch the physical port and be able to change the settings in real space with AR glasses though.
Yep, that’s why I was thinking of that example 😄
I’d really just like some glasses that simulate multiple monitors without needing special software. That’s all I want
Yep, and that seems to be the route Apple was going. Screens you can place anywhere in your visual field.
Gotta need some insane resolution for that right? And 1000hz refresh to make things good I guess.
I mean for text editing, coding etc.
Yep I’ve played with virtual monitors in VR space and I don’t even like watching movies on them, the loss in resolution and the way the dynamic aspect of it (using a moving screen to simulate a static screen) makes it a shitty solution. Eventually it’ll be good enough to watch TV in but I can’t imagine doing serious work in it.
I did have fun with the novelty of moving multiple screens around like Minority Report but it really is just a novelty at this point
Quest 3 lens and displays actually are nice to look at, I coded for 5 hours in it the other day, and the only glaring flaw was the weight. My forehead hurt afterwards from the pressure, and I wasn’t even using stock strap. The stock strap on quest headsets is known to be terrible. Tbf I only have a 1080p monitor for comparison bur its nice.
If you tried on anything lower than a Quest 3 with Virtual Desktop, you were right.
Quest 3 was the first VR headset to make virtual screens worth it. The clarity of pancake lenses cannot be overstated. The Quest pro technically had them too, but it wasn’t quite good enough in some of the other aspects.
A Quest 3 with Virtual Desktop has replaced my TV and monitor because it was an upgrade to both. Even if all I did was placed those screens statically exactly where they used to be in real life. But of course, they can be anywhere, any size. The screens are 4k 120hz, good enough for pretty much anything. Once you get to about 80 degrees field of view, every pixel of a 4k 60hz signal can be temporally represented. Your head micromoves enough that you aren’t missing any detail between each frame of the reference taking up two of the headsets frames. And when playing a game in actual 120 fps, you won’t notice that you aren’t seeing every single pixel directly physically represented every single frame, it looks good. Worth doing. 4k still looks much nicer than 1440p, which can be fully properly represented at that size and framerate.
Using anything other than Virtual Desktop, there is no need to set a monitor any higher than 1080p since they can’t even draw that well enough to be properly represented. Virtual desktop is the only one that uses timewarp layers. If you were around for Carmack, you’ll know that was always his first advice to every piece of VR software he reviewed, “please use timewarp layers for anything you want to look clear face-on” it’s a huge difference.
Interesting. Ok, I will give it another go at some point. I had an Oculus Rift and there was a ton of promise but the tech was just not ready.
Oh yeah, for sure. The rift was great for it’s time, but it is straight up comparitively garbage compared to what is out now. Wireless is now even more stable than the rift was at tracking, and the screens are so high res and they can decode at such speed that a wireless feed is almost as low latency and is much higher fidelity than what the Rift could do. There are still wired headsets that would be more clear nowadays, but with Virtual Desktop, the downsides to streaming wirelessly are pretty minimal.
Definitely get a demo of a Quest 3 if you can, or better. Though keep in mind the 3s isn’t better, despite being newer, it is “s” in the same sense that smart phones tend to use it, it’s a newer generation, but a cheaper lower end headset. A really good value. But it doesn’t have pancake lenses, the most important part of the Quest 3, and clearly most expensive part, lol.
Wireless headsets can just be used anywhere, especially when you are in AR mode or playing something mixed reality. But they are still at their best when using your computer through them. Although, you don’t have to. Their standalone games are basically xbox 360/PS3 level graphics, not amazing, but not really a problem. Most of what graphics have advanced by since then is just less “faking” stuff to look almost exactly right anyway and more rendering it in insanely computationally demanding ways to make it look 10% more right.
With Virtual Desktop, my computer is now in every room of my house, including the ones where I get to lay back in a recliner. And my computer is also at all my friends and family’s houses. And with cell-phone tethering, it can be on a bus, or a hotel room where I don’t want to use their wi-fi. Sometimes the cell connection is bad enough that I have to lower the resolution or framerate, but often times 4k 120hz is still viable on cell. Just has a bit more latency, so some game types are contraindicated. A 4k 120hz stream only needs about 25mbit to be clear enough to be worth using over a lower resolution or framerate. And cell latency can be as low as 5ms nowadays. 4g could only go as low as 200ms, 5g can theoretically go as low as 1ms, but obviously in practice that is almost impossible.
I want a GTA style HUD at all times 🤪
Current wanted level by the police would be quite handy
Health bar, bank account balance, number of steps in the day, calories burned, my next calendar event
Arguably just gps instructions and step tracking superimposed on reality would be a great use of AR
That is literally special software lmao
overlaying ads on literally everything could be the end goal.
Apple is not that strong in the overlaying ads over everything department though.
It was in the movies they liked when they were kids. Or at least in the movies they think users want to see brought to reality.
As in an answer to the question “what’s cool and futuristic”. Solving medieval barbarism and wars is futuristic, but turns out to not be achievable. Same with floating/underwater oceanic cities, blooming deserts, Mars colonies and 20 minutes on train from Moscow to New Delhi. At the same time the audience has been promised by advertising over years that future will be delivered to them. So - AR. For Apple this is the most important part, I think.
Also to augment something you have to analyze it, and if you have to analyze it, you are permitted to scan and analyze it. That’s a general point of attraction, I think. They are just extrapolating what led them to current success.
Also in some sense popular things were toys or promises of future for businesses and individuals alike, in the last 10-15 years. The audience is getting tired of toys and promises, while these companies don’t know how to make something else.
So let Tim Apple care about anything from AR in front of him to apples in his augmented rear, he surely knows what he wants. As another commenter says, a source of instructions and hints for a human walking drone is one, with visualization. I’m not sure that’s good, because if you can get that information for the machine, having a human there seems unnecessary. And if that information is not reliable enough, then it may not improve human’s productivity and error rate.
And the most important part is that humans learn by things being hard to do, it’s like working out in an exoskeleton, what’s the purpose? And if training and work are separated here, then it seems more effort is spent in total. Not sure.
What should they be pursuing now? They have state of the art chips, tablets, phones, laptops and even all in one desktops, the only thing they don’t have are TV’s, at this point why not try to conquer the next frontier. even if it takes a decade?
A Quest 3 isn’t “insane.” It does AR just fine for a few hundred bucks. There ARE real world applications and more coming all the time. The education and medical fields in particular can benefit greatly from such tech.
This AR obsession is utterly baffling to me.
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It’s a mobile phone you don’t need to hold.
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It’s a mobile phone that never goes in your pocket.
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It’s a mobile phone that is always on and has access to everything you see and hear.
Sounds like a fucking nightmare, but a wet dream to Big Tech.
That’s pill. They just have to sugar coat it enough for everyone to swallow it (like we did with phones).
It’s a bummer than those sound like bad things simply because corporate abuse is always a forgone conclusion. If your data was truly private and always entirely under your control and ONLY your control, those would be really attractive features.
Some implementations also have the problem of constantly pointing cameras at non-consenting passers-by.
Totally. I’d also love to train a LLM on my own personal data and preferences, but there is no way I’m trusting a corporation that information.
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It’s been over a decade since the oculus rift came out and there hasn’t been much improvement.
Agree on all that. In addition, headsets would become so very unhealthy if they took off. Just imagine the addictiveness of phones combined with the sedentary qualities of TV, with both dialed up to 11. People’s vision would get all fucked up, and they would start dying on their couches plugged in. It’s simply not a vision for the future that has any legs.
More often than not, I’m burning calories in VR.
Oh do you mean you’re using it for exercise somehow? Or are you making a masturbation joke?
It’s for real time facial recognition for LEO so they can easily identify and round up immigrants and dissidents. They want the government contracts
Being able to keep a screen in front of the user at all times is the goal. This is one step closer to replacing the eyes Cyberpunk style.
This is why Siri and Apple Intelligence is so important to Apple, getting away an actual keyboard will make this more addicting. They can decide what to show you before you even start thinking about it!
Corporations would love being able to not only know where you are at all times, but now they have the tech to see exactly what you see!
it’s not that complicated, the goal is to create another hit product that everyone wants like the ipod and iphone.
They already did this with Google glass and failed spectacularly. There is no market for this. Nobody is wishing they had computer glasses. It is something being forced onto consumers for the benefit of apple and it will not work.
You’d think with the massive failure of their apple vision they’d have learned this lesson already.
I’m not even a huge proponent of AR glasses, but i think that’s a pretty shortsighted view. AR/VR tech was still in its infancy when google decided to drop it (as they do with many beloved products btw), and Apple has a history of repackaging/refining products in a way that allows them to catch on. Apple Vision is by all accounts a cool product, just still way too expensive for mainstream use. The tech is still maturing. I’m not saying Apple will for sure succeed, but it’s just silly to outright claim “there is no market for this”.
also “forced onto consumers”? no one is being forced to buy anything, what a ridiculous take.
You are complaining about me pointing out that there is zero DEMAND for this product. Nobody is asking for “Augmented reality” or whatever. It is not innovative or moving technology forward it’s literally an excuse to harvest a million more data points per minute for no benefit to the end user.
You seriously can’t comprehend how these companies use, manipulate, and coerce you to create a false demand for this slop? There is plenty of great literature on the subject, and if you’d like I can direct you to people with expertise to explain the concepts. Just stop mindlessly accepting and defending this behavior and stand up for yourself as a consumer.
I think Lemmy is a bit of a chamber of white, technology-oriented men. People here think that most people are OK with wearing technology on their face.
Ironically, we’re also very Privacy-oriented, but everyone’s kind of forgetting all the cameras and microphones required to make all this AR tech work.
Someone put it nicely - if I see you with your Google Glass in a public toilet, you’re leaving with a bloody nose.
how does race or gender have anything to do with this?
what makes you think most people wouldn’t be ok with wearing tech on their face?
maybe you are the one forgetting that cameras and microphones are already in all the products that most people already have. how is AR any different?
Lack of diversity = lack of diversity of opinion. We are in a tech echo chamber, like it or not.
And your following two questions are a great illustration of just that.
firstly, just because you say so doesn’t mean there is ZERO market for it.
secondly, of course there isn’t significant demand for it yet it’s a completely new technology and the use case is still being explored. people can’t demand what doesn’t exist.
Thirdly, show me exactly where companies are “coercing” us to create demand for AR. of course i realize there are extreme marketing campaigns that try unecessarily hard to push products like AI, but that is obviously not happening with AR.
Just stop mindlessly accepting and defending this behavior and stand up for yourself as a consumer.
finally, if you seriously can’t comprehend any way at all that AR could be helpful then you are just as mindless as you are accusing me of being. stop being an arrogant asshole and consider that people can disagree with you without being “mindless”.
show me exactly where companies are coercing us
Im not entertaining this conversation anymore
you never did entertain a conversation, you’re just insulting anyone who disagrees with you. when you are actually challenged on your bullshit you bail.
If only Siri could understand what I say
I have turned off any assistant app in any of my devices. It would be easier and a lot of times faster just typing out what I need.
There’s a gag in Futurama about ads being displayed in your dreams. If that were possible they’d be doing that, but right now they’re settling for just the waking hours.
That’s ok, I’ll just disagree with their Terms of Service!
Next courageous Apple creation:
Such a prescient episode.
What is this
It’s a still frame from Star Trek The Next Generation, episode The Game
The plot is a wearable device that is an AR “glasses” game that as you play the game it “makes you feel good” gets used to take over the Enterprise so terrorists can hijack it.
At the time I imagine it was intended to be part of anti-drug campaigns with the AR and companies curating what you see to distract from reality angle/sentiment being more relevant today
I think the fundamental problem with the AR glasses is something that can’t be overcome.
I think its easy to see the utility to owning a pair of glasses that look good and provide real time information as desired for what you are looking at or hearing.
HOWEVER, I think very few people will want the product these co.panies will make. This will be a method to throw ads literally in front of your eyeballs. Enshitification is too big of a thing now and so any new product is tainted by the expectation it will rapidly turn to garbage at a high price to you.
Also, while we may think we can be trusted, we dont trust anyone else having all that info, I dont like the obvious privacy implications that these can present. Filming with them is also terrifying.
So, just to be clear, that ‘something that can’t be overcome’ is… checks notes capitalism?
It does ruin most things doesn’t it? 😮💨
You might be giving people too much credit here because the same things could be said about a lot of products and services that have come out over the last 10 years
😆 And here I was think I wasn’t giving anyone any credit. I just proclaimed none of us could be trusted!
Yeah my best guess is that at most these will at best lead to homebrew and specialist uses. For example I have to wear glasses my astigmatism is rather severe so contacts don’t work, so if I could attach a small projector to my glasses and put my phones display onto it I would have so many uses.
And I care zero about ever purchasing those things.
Good, I wanna see Apple flop just like Meta’s VR nonsense did.
Why do you people hate VR?
I think it’s less that people hate VR and moreso that tech companies obsession with it as a next step in tech and not as a piece of specialized hardware.
Bcz it sucks.
So isn’t it a good thing these companies are trying to make it not suck?
The problem is they’re making it suck more, by piling their usual proprietary shitware on top of it.
How is Quest a flop? Or are you talking about something else?
Bot quest and ray band products are huge success dominating their respective markets.
I really wish people were more serious about these markets so it can be done well from the get got rather than starting to be fixed and regulated 2 decades later.
Having borrowed a quest 3 last week I’ve almost pulled trigger on buying one.
The only thing holding me back is… it’s Meta.
There’s a big piracy scene on Quest so if you really put in the effort you’re not giving these evil assholes much but generally I agree. There’s so much entertainment and things to do that I can really wait a bit longer as VR is not going away.
I believe its still the rookie group doing it, its automated well too and I even got it to work on linux.
Rookie group?
Thats the name of the group/software used to download and install apks to a quest headset.
https://wiki.vrpirates.club/en/general_information/getting-started
If you get one, buy Walkabout Mini Golf. I’ve spent so long playing that and hanging out in its worlds.
I’d be interested to hear from the youngest generation (15-20 YO) to hear if they care about this at all.
I’m approaching 50 years old and had been an early adopter most of my adult life. Growing up from the 1980s through 2000s, there was a near-mainstream narrative that we were living in a unique era of emerging technologies. It was exciting and we were anxious for anything new.
It seems to me that nothing is really new and there is nothing exciting, if not interesting, about technology today.
I’ve actually been stripping down the technology from my life as it’s become too distracting to get things done and has prevented personal growth and the formation of memories. For one example, I recently subscribed to a print magazine because I prefer a tangible object that I can associate with in and of itself (and choose to own and collect).
Looking at analog trends like vinyl records and film photography and cassette tapes, it seems like people are at least trying to incorporate tangible objects into a modern lifestyle. Then you have the trend of the dumb phones which indicate people are becoming more aware of the detriments caused by an always connected lifestyle. Thankfully, some car manufacturers are returning buttons to their cars in response to owner feedback about everything being a touch screen.
I mean, I’m not a multi-trillion dollar organization with different departments studying the feasibility of future products but I do wonder if something like AR glasses are already more of our past than our future.
I think there’s a more than reasonable desire for a device to help you through your day - especially in foreign countries. But do you think you want that to be glasses or something else?
Lastly, this reminds me of the prediction from Michio Kaku in Physics of the Future about augmented reality contact lenses. Should we at least accept AR glasses as first step towards contact lenses? Do you think society would accept these 20-40 years in the future?
i am somewhere around it, and i think the best part about AR glasses is we don’t have to buy monitors,
when i used to be 15 couple of years ago i also fantacized about the asthetics of 80’s after watching many 80’s animation films, there was just something about them ,although i wasn’t alive during that period.
i am personally more excited about fdvr, i hope we have it in 25 years, but i don’t think we will
I’m in that age range and while I enjoy VR (VRchat is one of my most played games), I think at a certain point AR is “going too far”. The current AR technology in the quest 3 is nice, good enough I don’t need more. Being able to watch vids on a big screen anywhere in my house is enough.
Apple and meta though I think they want an all encompassing device that you wear all the time that replaces the phone, and thats a step too far. People already spend enough time on there phones when uts a single tiny screen, I don’t think it would be good for attention spans to be able to spawn in infinite floating windows at any time.
You can kinda already have 6 floating windows on the quest 3 which is too much stimulation for a single person and I don’t think its good for society to have this. I think if it can get a form factor similar to glasses (which I doubt is possible), people will buy it and get addicted.
Current day vr is like the polar opposite of the future AR that they want anyways. VR games force you to only focus on the current thing, because you are in the game, can’t alt tab or look at your phone while in loading screens or watch youtube while gaming. This kinda forces you to do it in moderation.
It seems to me that nothing is really new and there is nothing exciting, if not interesting, about technology today.
There is the massive infiltration of personal privacy to surveil everyone for whatever reason that is currently deemed acceptable, so there is that - smh
Yeah welcome to the club 😅, it feels we maxxed out the usage of computers, so what now?
Real life comeback maybe?
It’s the smartwatch bullshit all over again.
1 in 10 have one
9 in 10 don’t care and never did
Wdym lol smartwatches are everywhere now.
1 in 10 is still a lot of people. That’s like every redhead you know territory.
Google already made AR glasses and they failed. Not because the product was bad, but because AR is stupid and has such a niche case that it’s practically worthless.
Luigi :)
Classic Tim Apple.
There are a lot of things at Apple that I, as the paying customer, would rather Cook care more about than AR/VR boondoggles.
This is just another attempt to capture even more control over our attention - advertising everywhere. Of course Apple wants it
But think of the constant, total surveillance opportunity for Apple, and how this could help them win favor and contracts from the fascist US government!
Apple doesn’t do that though. That’s Google, Amazon, and Meta’s MO.
You’re right. Tim Cook only gave Trump $1m for fun, right?
You’re being intentionally obtuse to make a political point. I don’t agree with corporations making large political donations, but stick to the actual topic. Name one military contract that Apple holds that involves tracking users. If Apple was about that, it wouldn’t need to wait for smart glasses to arrive, it already could try. But, it doesn’t. Why?
Lmao you make this too easy while trying to play fanboy way too hard
I’m not playing fanboy, I’m just not jumping to conclusions and making shit up to serve my political views. Your article is still just speculation. And, rather than being about mass surveillance, it’s about flying aircraft with VR headsets.
What do you think the airforce is tracking from up there dumdumb, stars?
…to play breakout.
Arcanooooid!!!
He’s f*** detached
Not on Reddit. You might hurt someone’s feeling and be accused of threatening violence.
But we are on Lemmy where you can threaten to confiscate people’s organs and only get your comment removed sometimes.
Now which do you like more your kidneys or your skin?
You can?
S**t!
Shirt
Fork
I mean, AR is pretty awesome to be fair.
Never from big stock market corpos. Fuck their “vision”.
