The Economist published a decent look into the tech of augmented reality a couple weeks ago. They asserted two main ideas, both of which I agree with. AR will:
1. Not achieve a form factor acceptable to the general consumer for a while.
2. Be more immediately useful to companies looking to improve worker productivity (like on assembly lines), where form factor is a lesser concern.
As a consequence of (1), we will probably start seeing more robust applications of AR tech using the smart phone and camera (like Pokemon GO and Snapchat filters) before we see any reasonable hardware device.
I completely agree with point 2, and see it validated in what CTO/CIO types are paying attention to. I will further that by saying that there are tangible benefits in commercial cases that are better than the ones in the consumer space. Consumers have TVs, consoles, and computers. Businesses are looking now for transformative tech to replace systems that are much older and more outdated.
For the enterprise case, AR capabilities on the phone are a great and cheap place to start in order to get a HUD view around them. Kludgy solutions like reading QR codes also work fine for their expected use cases - i.e. reading machine states, maintenance records, etc. These solutions solve a mobile interface problem that helps align information retrieval with the context of being out the field looking at a physical object.
My personal favorite AR application would be drone operation, though. AR goggle can do two things. They can assist the Remote pilot in command in maintaining a computer aided visual line of sight to the drone. (circling it in red, in your field of view, for example). It also can provide a HUD of the drone's status (battery, altitude, attitude, settings, perceived wind speed, etc.), and finally it can allow you to view an overlay of FPV from the drone to aid in your both maintaining direct LOS to meet Part 107 requirements, and also to ensure that the pilot can be inspecting, aiming, orienting and piloting the drone successfully by relying of FPV input.
Those capabilities don't quite exist yet, but I wouldn't doubt that it will be my first AR use case.
I have consulted two of the (I guess) "big names" in AR here in Germany and I can basically confirm point 2. AR agencies struggle to get any hold in any market. While they (legitimately) try (and technically succeed) to innovate and automate, AR is far from being a thing accepted by the average consumer. People don't use QR codes anymore, they certainly won't load yet another app and scan your marker.
(Intermission: Unless "they" is Chinese. While pitching the tech in front of a Chinese delegation, the audience went quite literally wild. The enthusiasm about gimmick-y tech radiated by Chinese business (wo)men is the exact opposite of the stone-cold non-interest of Germans)
Where ARA shine however is, as you predicted, industrial tech. The implementations I witnessed were used by Airbus, Siemens, Bosch, Audi et al. for exactly two purposes:
1. Assembly line education or
2. Massive scale marketing (in a physical sense) like projecting actual buildings for architects
Microsoft's HoloLens has an acceptable form factor. They crammed an incredible amount of electronics into a reasonably lightweight self-contained headset. Cordless, even. It's nowhere near as clunky as the HTC Vibe, Oculus Rift, or the 1990s stuff. The field of view is too narrow, but maybe that can be fixed.
There's still no killer app for AR, but that may be a price point problem. If the HoloLens was cheap enough for Pokemon Go, it would sell quite well.
I think a similar thing is applicable to self driving cars regarding 2) - we will likely see self driving commercial trucks on dedicated lanes much before we reach the "self driving cars available to anyone at anytime" future so many (including myself) dream of.
It also made the point that in addition to specific issues around form factor (i.e. size/weight/looks), AR in glasses brings with it the whole social acceptance factor. This can be ameliorated to some degree with decreased size and less obtrusive design but there will still be the potential for a "Glasshole" factor in a consumer environment until/unless societal expectations change.
Someone taking pictures of you and having data displayed in real-time is just not something most people would be comfortable with today.
The article was also more generally bullish on AR than VR. Which seems right. Even given another generation or two of development, VR seems like a niche for hard-core gamers and maybe a few other uses.
(2) seems to be also true for VR. Business people when introduced to the current VR hardware often react enthusiastically and easily figure out compelling applications of VR technology to their businesses.
This generation of AR is going to be like the last generation of VR -- a cool gimmick with great promise of things to come, but not really advanced enough to deliver on that promise. Even the virtualboy was pretty cool at the time, but it took 20 years to get to occulus. If someone can make these things work like they do in the movies then everybody will get one, but the technology doesn't seem to be there yet. I don't understand most of the words in this article, but it sounds like even if the computation equipment is powerful enough to render these images that the hardware to transmit them to the viewer has a lot of limitations.
I used the HoloLens at a demo and it was amazing, but after 3 demos of 5 minutes each over the course of 30 minutes, my eyes felt tired for the next hour. And the limited field of view did detract from the experience.
I've been wanting a heads up display in my glasses for years ever since the first "wearable computing" wave. Eventually it will happen, but all the hardware breakthroughs are so much slower than software.
The Virtualboy was objectively, empirically utterly uncool the second it came out. There are multiple peer-reviewed papers on this. The µVb was a widely used unit for uncoolness for a while at the time.
Is that even fair though (that your eyes were tired)? I mean non-techies get eye strain after looking at a screen for a couple of hours. I've been looking at screens for 10 hour days since my childhood and never have an issue. Isn't it just adjusting to the new experience? Not to mention you are probably processing a lot of new information in an AR scenario causing brain fatigue.
I was one of the people dooped into believing this was going to happen because I assumed a huge investment from Google meant something and they were so secretive because it was that good, like Steve Jobs was so secretive. At least we can look at tangible VR at this point but those sales are lagging as well. Overall, I'm bummed out but I still hold onto the hope we'll have 3d holograms coming out of phones or contact lenses that overlay huge arrows on the road for driving directions.
VR sales aren't just lagging, they're bad enough that no company will give official numbers for sales. The current estimates for sales are roughly an order of magnitude less than the previous expectations (admittedly dictated by analysts and media), and there is a lot of obfuscation from companies to make it seem better. They will tout the Samsung Galaxy Gear numbers, but what they won't tell you is how many of those were given away (probably the vast majority) vs how many were sold - and that's at a $100 price point.
I really, really want VR to improve and become a commodity in the near future, but most people I talk to think it's dumb even after they try it. I think VR is at least 4 years away from being a serious part of gaming (and that assumes a lot of things go right), and I honestly don't know how many years before it finds other consumer applications.
You have to squint pretty hard to see VR today as any sort of success. It's mostly the province of a gamer niche that's willing to overlook shortcomings, some of which will be inherently hard to overcome, and general lack of content.
The article references a weird quote from Fortune:
"Abovitz says that Magic Leap's "light-field" technology essentially mimics the brain's visual-perception mechanisms to create objects and even people who look and behave just the way they would in the real world, and interact with that world seamlessly."
If Magic Leap's use of the term light-field is anything like its meaning in the literature, and it does sound like it, from one other source that I googled, then it is very much not to do with "the brain's [...] mechanisms", it's a totally geometric/optical concept that any optically equipped device/creature could enjoy. It could be tailored for the typically horizontal human eye arrangement, like some previous autostereo displays have been. That is an anatomical/geometrical shortcut, though. If there's real neuroscience-style brain science here I'd be interested to hear more about it.
I really don't understand a lot of the terms in the article, but one thing that I always found very attractive about magic leap is the amount of people they have staffed that are "story tellers" - professional movie types. I can imagine that magic leap will be the next Pixar. They would combine technology that they develop in house with content also made in house. No one knows why google gave them so much money. Maybe this half of the equation, which you can't really ascertain from patents and technical sources, is what is missing for people to crack the code.
Google (and others) gave them so much money because ML is aiming to build a platform that is not only the thing after smartphones, it's the thing after the Web: spatialized information seamlessly interleaved with reality, everywhere.
At that time (>2 years ago), Magic Leap seemed to have achieved the holy grail of Mixed Reality: optics that selectively block out light in real-time. Combined with demos, mockups, and sketches of real-world applications, this tech provided compelling evidence that ML was going to unlock true Mixed Reality real soon.
As erikpukinskis commented, even if Magic Leap fails to deliver, it will likely end up with an extremely valuable IP in an emerging space. Magic Leap did not invent Mixed Reality, but they filed patents on many first-order applications of the tech (there are countless others).
The microsoft hololens is a great piece of tech. Works great, no cords. Its development only though. It's cool that I can tinker with it, but at the end of the day I cannot sell a product with it.
[+] [-] SirensOfTitan|9 years ago|reply
1. Not achieve a form factor acceptable to the general consumer for a while.
2. Be more immediately useful to companies looking to improve worker productivity (like on assembly lines), where form factor is a lesser concern.
As a consequence of (1), we will probably start seeing more robust applications of AR tech using the smart phone and camera (like Pokemon GO and Snapchat filters) before we see any reasonable hardware device.
[+] [-] abakker|9 years ago|reply
For the enterprise case, AR capabilities on the phone are a great and cheap place to start in order to get a HUD view around them. Kludgy solutions like reading QR codes also work fine for their expected use cases - i.e. reading machine states, maintenance records, etc. These solutions solve a mobile interface problem that helps align information retrieval with the context of being out the field looking at a physical object.
My personal favorite AR application would be drone operation, though. AR goggle can do two things. They can assist the Remote pilot in command in maintaining a computer aided visual line of sight to the drone. (circling it in red, in your field of view, for example). It also can provide a HUD of the drone's status (battery, altitude, attitude, settings, perceived wind speed, etc.), and finally it can allow you to view an overlay of FPV from the drone to aid in your both maintaining direct LOS to meet Part 107 requirements, and also to ensure that the pilot can be inspecting, aiming, orienting and piloting the drone successfully by relying of FPV input.
Those capabilities don't quite exist yet, but I wouldn't doubt that it will be my first AR use case.
[+] [-] minxomat|9 years ago|reply
(Intermission: Unless "they" is Chinese. While pitching the tech in front of a Chinese delegation, the audience went quite literally wild. The enthusiasm about gimmick-y tech radiated by Chinese business (wo)men is the exact opposite of the stone-cold non-interest of Germans)
Where ARA shine however is, as you predicted, industrial tech. The implementations I witnessed were used by Airbus, Siemens, Bosch, Audi et al. for exactly two purposes:
1. Assembly line education or 2. Massive scale marketing (in a physical sense) like projecting actual buildings for architects
At least this is my experience.
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
There's still no killer app for AR, but that may be a price point problem. If the HoloLens was cheap enough for Pokemon Go, it would sell quite well.
VR may be stuck in the FPS game niche forever.
[+] [-] GuiA|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|9 years ago|reply
It also made the point that in addition to specific issues around form factor (i.e. size/weight/looks), AR in glasses brings with it the whole social acceptance factor. This can be ameliorated to some degree with decreased size and less obtrusive design but there will still be the potential for a "Glasshole" factor in a consumer environment until/unless societal expectations change.
Someone taking pictures of you and having data displayed in real-time is just not something most people would be comfortable with today.
The article was also more generally bullish on AR than VR. Which seems right. Even given another generation or two of development, VR seems like a niche for hard-core gamers and maybe a few other uses.
[+] [-] michaelmior|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixedbit|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nissimk|9 years ago|reply
I used the HoloLens at a demo and it was amazing, but after 3 demos of 5 minutes each over the course of 30 minutes, my eyes felt tired for the next hour. And the limited field of view did detract from the experience.
I've been wanting a heads up display in my glasses for years ever since the first "wearable computing" wave. Eventually it will happen, but all the hardware breakthroughs are so much slower than software.
[+] [-] pvg|9 years ago|reply
The Virtualboy was objectively, empirically utterly uncool the second it came out. There are multiple peer-reviewed papers on this. The µVb was a widely used unit for uncoolness for a while at the time.
[+] [-] nightski|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] serg_chernata|9 years ago|reply
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oh3mPHO...
[+] [-] asymmetric|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grmarcil|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AstralStorm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebringj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MegaButts|9 years ago|reply
I really, really want VR to improve and become a commodity in the near future, but most people I talk to think it's dumb even after they try it. I think VR is at least 4 years away from being a serious part of gaming (and that assumes a lot of things go right), and I honestly don't know how many years before it finds other consumer applications.
[+] [-] ghaff|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebringj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maverick_iceman|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edblarney|9 years ago|reply
But one 'killer app' could change it all.
VR needs it's 'Halo' :)
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dangeranger|9 years ago|reply
Here is an alternative cached view:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
[+] [-] coldcode|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theoh|9 years ago|reply
"Abovitz says that Magic Leap's "light-field" technology essentially mimics the brain's visual-perception mechanisms to create objects and even people who look and behave just the way they would in the real world, and interact with that world seamlessly."
If Magic Leap's use of the term light-field is anything like its meaning in the literature, and it does sound like it, from one other source that I googled, then it is very much not to do with "the brain's [...] mechanisms", it's a totally geometric/optical concept that any optically equipped device/creature could enjoy. It could be tailored for the typically horizontal human eye arrangement, like some previous autostereo displays have been. That is an anatomical/geometrical shortcut, though. If there's real neuroscience-style brain science here I'd be interested to hear more about it.
[+] [-] adam12|9 years ago|reply
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oh3mPHO...
[+] [-] kguttag|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobsil1|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asimpletune|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devons|9 years ago|reply
At that time (>2 years ago), Magic Leap seemed to have achieved the holy grail of Mixed Reality: optics that selectively block out light in real-time. Combined with demos, mockups, and sketches of real-world applications, this tech provided compelling evidence that ML was going to unlock true Mixed Reality real soon.
As erikpukinskis commented, even if Magic Leap fails to deliver, it will likely end up with an extremely valuable IP in an emerging space. Magic Leap did not invent Mixed Reality, but they filed patents on many first-order applications of the tech (there are countless others).
[+] [-] mhermher|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] man5quid|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rm_dash_rf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aroman|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsgo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josephpmay|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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