But despite every big company throwing a couple billions at the problem for the last few years (Facebook's $2 billion acquisition of oculus, Google's $500 million investment into Magic Leap, Apple's acquisition of Metaio/ARkit, Microsoft Hololens), all we have are literal toys!
So now you can't talk about AR as a serious subject anymore. People all dismiss it, saying we are still too early. I imagine it's like that for every "toy to big thing" transition.
Alternatively taking a long view, how many times do you think the dominant form factor of personal computers (in the general sense, including smart phones) will change? Another 3 times, another 5? Every 20 years forever?
The only exception I can think of is a direct neural link, but that’s generations away and even then I’m not entirely convinced. Maybe in the very long term.
What about contact lenses?
Voice is much too slow, as is listening - might as well use the current devices at those speeds.
Computers started with bookkeeping and mass production control. It took quite some time for them to penetrate office market or to (partially) replace the previously used communication tools.
Altair was a toy. Atari 2600 was a toy. TRS-80, Sinclair Spectrum, Apple II — all toys. Amiga was almost not a toy, and Aople Macintosh and IBM PC were mostly not toys anymore.
From there on, businesses started to use massive amounts of PCs, thanks to killer apps like word processors and spreadsheets.
Prices fell, home users took note, and a real explosion began.
It took mere 20 years, say, from 1980 to 2000.
On that note, who knows what would AR require in order to take off. It probably needs to be something you can get 80% of the killer features without wearing glasses. It also needs to support whatever frames glass wearers want to wear. It might require actual visual implants as I don’t think there’s a way to turn a contact lens into a display.
It of course had a large external induction coil to power it, and very low resolution.
But there are still more technical problems to solve before the killer application and corresponding headset will be cheap, useful, and lightweight enough for mass adoption.
Big entrenched players are unable to see the next big thing, because they see the world through the glasses of their successful business. Microsoft for example almost missed the internet, and suddenly realized it in 1995. I believe Bill Gates was quoted as saying it was just a fad. The funny thing is that more than a decade earlier (about 1980) I heard the same thing about "personal computers" or "microcomputers". Just a fad. A toy. Never will compete with IBM's "real" computers, etc.
Similarly, these new fangled "automobile" thingies will never become popular. They are noisy. Smelly. Unreliable. Difficult to start. You can even break your arm if it kicks back while you are cranking it. And worst of all (gasp!) they frighten the horses! That's why these automobile thingies are just rich kid's toys. A fad.
I guess they couldn't see that all of those imperfections I listed could be fixed.
Back in the 1990s I saw this interesting tv program. Sorry, can't remember. It was about personal computers. The person being interviewed said the entrenched players NEVER see the next big thing coming. So they hire someone smart who will see it coming, and then tell them when its coming. And then when they are told this is the NEXT BIG THING! They never believe it.
Speaking of Microsoft almost missing the internet, they did entirely miss the new generation of smartphones starting with the iPhone. Ballmer laughed at the iPhone. They woke up to the new reality after it was too late. Sorry iPhone and Android already dominated. Smart phones sold in unit volumes that dwarfed PC unit volumes. Win Phone 7, followed by an incompatible Win Phone 8 didn't stand a chance -- even with nice Nokia hardware.
It would be kind of easy to make a stand against the microsoft fanboys against NT 4, but it was much more difficult to make a good case of Linux against Solaris back then. (Remember Linux starting to be taken seriously by 2.2 and 2.4 period)
Also i got the same dismissive snarks, when installing and programing in PHP back then to make dinamic websites, in a world then taken by ASP and Cold Fusion. (And the other alternative in Unix were only Perl, for which i thank PHP for avoiding me the trouble).
It's a reminder for me, that the most common trend in IT sector is of folks with a "colonized" sort of mentality, that will fail to recognize the things that will turn into real things in the future.
It's sad when you think that its even worse than that, giving most people just show off and wait for their next paycheck. They dont even bother thinking in those things.
So the psychological profile of who are saying what is kind a very big deal, not just what they are saying.
They almost succeeded, but Google would've canned their game eventually. Believe it or not, "free stuff" is popular.
Popcorn sold in unit volumes even higher than that, but so what? These aren't comparable things.
1. They do the same things. Both are general purpose computers. For some use cases, they both work fine.
2. They're about the same cost: ~$800 or so. But that's comparing flagship smartphone costs with entry-level desktop PC costs.
I suppose from hte perspective of a large company, a smartphone sale seems like it might be more or less valuable than a desktop PC sale depending on a variety of factors. So I think it's safe to say they are similarly comparable in that sense.
Lego represents the construction of objects from catalogs of standard components. That’s in comparison to carving unique, one off toys from raw wood.
Professional fabrication has followed in the footsteps of LEGO (and Lincoln Logs, Erector Set). If you use SketchUp to design a building you’ll notice it’s encouraged to use standard building components that can be picked from a library. Lots of those components can then be picked up at Home Depot. Ikea furniture kits are also similar to Lego (or at least the broader category of toy).
LEGO’s Mindstorms GUI programming model is very forward looking. LabVIEW and Simulink are picking up on those concepts & professional engineers are definitely using them.
of course, these hypothetical legos would need plumbing and electrical infrastructure and maybe a few other things ;)
I guess there are two and a half possible mistakes here, which I'll address separately.
1. The Network is a toy. No. At least as far back as the Treaty of Bern (in 1874) the importance of the global Network is so obvious that national governments give up a little sovereignty to have it work better. Communication makes the difference almost everywhere almost all the time. Bern of course is about written letters, but the Telephone follows the exact same course, and so if you accept the Internet as a natural successor all the same things apply.
2. Maybe the Internet is not the Network? This argument looks completely reasonable in 1986 when IP networks are mostly an American phenomenon and there is a lot of X.25 out in the rest of the world. Maybe the Network will be X.25. By 1996 that's a distant memory, everything is IP. It's a done deal, the Internet is the Network.
2.5. Mistaking the Web for the Internet. The Web initially looks like a toy. HTTP/0.9 era Web has lots of toy-like qualities. Academics have been designing powerful hypermedia technology for many years by 1990, surely this half-arsed tech demo from a CERN guy who isn't even a Computer Scientist is a flash in the pan? You can make a better argument that the Web is still a toy in 1996 than the Internet, I don't think it's a good argument but it can be made -- however the Web is just an application. A competitor hypermedia solution that crushes Tim's Web but uses IP is still the Internet.
I wonder how big the fax machine's impact on the economy actually was; I feel like it probably was quite large. Not nearly as large as the internet, of course.
I wonder if you went back to the very earliest days of the WWW, did everyone see it as a toy? Or were there already people (those developing it, perhaps) who saw that it had awesome non-toy potential?
I suspect people brand new tech as "toys" when they're not, and I bet there's also developers that take their toys and call them products :)
Maybe the solution is to completely discard the "toy" / "non-toy" dichotomy. It seems like it just muddies the discussion when the important thing is to evaluate the actual merits of the product/technology in question.
The WWW that was created to share scientific papers? Or you mean the GP's Internet that was created to organize the US troops on the event of a nuclear strike?
I guess so, there was plenty of people aware they were not toys. Most of those people did use them as toys most of the times, like everybody else at the time, but the toy classification was mostly from uninformed people and trolls.
While working at RAND on a scheme for U.S. telecommunications infrastructure to survive a “first strike,” Paul Baran conceived of the Internet and digital packet switching, the Internet's underlying data communications technology. His concepts are still employed today; just the terms are different. His seminal work first appeared in a series of RAND studies published between 1960 and 1962 and then finally in the tome “On Distributed Communications,” published in 1964.
https://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html
Baran's original packet (block) switched networks development papers, and in fact his entire catalogue, are available at RAND:
"On Distributed Communications I. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks"
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420.html
(This and the others are listed at the first link.)
Most of the citizens of the western world (even those with a degree) definitely pidgeon-hole expensive university projects as "toys", because they don't have one and don't see a need for one.
Academia is a weird place and is often underestimated.
Compuserve, AOL and newsgroups were already big when I discovered the www - Compuserve and newsgroups seemed vastly superior to me at the time.
Netscape Navigator seemed so basic, and how would anyone know which URLs to use (discoverability)? I chuckled, wrote it off, and stuck with what I knew.
Well, I was just a little bit wrong :)
A wonderful 1 minute snippet of David Bowie explaining how huge of a deal it’s going to be to a skeptical interviewer in the 90s
There was a definite split in opinion with some writing it off as a toy and some smart and informed people thinking it the next big thing (eg Gates https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-memo/)
The Internet was being widely written off as a toy that many couldn't ever imagine having practical applications.
Case in point, this widely-cited piece from 1998:
> The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's law"--which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants--becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.
http://web.archive.org/web/19980610100009/www.redherring.com...
Here are some fun things about this concept of toys turning into big things:
1. toys start out looking like toys, too
2. it's extremely difficult to distinguish the toys that will remain toys forever from those that will become "the next big thing."
A useful approach to the problem posed by (2) is to look at things that appear to be toys but refuse to die despite every indication that they should have done so long ago.
Toys that remain toys often have a trendiness and inelasticity to them that gives them naturally short lives. If you see a toy lingering long beyond the time it should have given up the ghost, you may be looking at the next big thing.
The next problem is that it can take a very long time for a toy to turn into the next big thing.