I'd argue AR via a phone in your hand is entirely useless and a gimmick. The phone has a much smaller viewing area than even hololens and walking around staring through it is not just annoying it's dangerous.
That is not to say that on your face AR is any good yet, only that phone AR is mostly pointless IMO.
I did get to use a Magic Leap at GDC this year to shoot aliens coming out of portals in a physical living room stage. The graphics were PS2 level but the attachment to the real world in that contrived setup was rock solid as was the virtual gun projected in my hand. As I ran about the living room the portals with aliens coming through mapped to the walls of the living room worked well. It at least shows a step toward real AR.
That is why I am excited about TiltFive - AR TableTop. Restricting the environment to a table (31" by 31") makes the experience more aligned with the existing hardware. Still teathered to a laptop/desktop but you get 110° fov with 720p each eye. Once developers and users get a sense for mixed reality better/more novel applications will get more development. AR productivity software feels revolutionary.
Yeah. Maybe if you didn't need to move around as much and you were looking at a fixed point in space I could see how it could feel more immersive. It's interesting to note that AR feels more natural the less you move around.
Re:The State of Augmented Reality
by yummypaint on Sunday October 06, 2019 @10:59AM
(#21172448)
While there has certainly been progress with AR, the VR experience has seen vastly more significant improvements since 2012. Automated photogrametry also keeps getting better and better, making it faster and easier to fully reconstruct real world locations in VR. I think this has already become more compelling than AR for the use case presented in the article (seeing how stuff looks in your house).
In fact AR is especially bad compared to VR where the experience is fully immersive. With AR you get a confused blurry reality where you can literally see the seams and this messes with your brain that something isn’t right.