AR right now is stuck because the display technologies aren't up to the task. The "Waveguide" approach has always fallen short - nobody's ever been able to make the viewing angle wide enough to be worthwhile, and the "passthrough" approach isn't really viable for walking down the street.
This is why I'm skeptical about Apple's AR moves - unless they've either got a totally new display technology or they've managed to do something incredibly clever with the waveguide approach, I just don't see consumer goggles working.
The only people I've seen doing something unique in this space is Tilt Five: https://www.tiltfive.com/ - they've basically done what you're suggesting: constrain the use case until you can actually build something for it.
Perhaps enough time has passed for those sorts of problems to be resolved and Apple will do something similar to Apple Watch but for Glasses.
I don’t understand fashion at all, so I wouldn’t have predicted it in advance, but it was unfashionable.
The startup cost is enormous, it is really hard to create good content and there is close to zero revenue since there are few users. And the users that does exist is the techie crowd that doesn't like to pay for anything.
There are tons of ways to implement AR. They chose 'general AR', the kind of thing you see on Westworld or Black Mirror. That was a bad choice, because the tech isn't there and won't be for a long time, and it only follows that the implementation was going to be bad.
There are alternative ways to find a good v1 for AR. Take a look at this tweet storm for more of my thoughts on what that could be: https://twitter.com/nickpunt/status/1253087195159654400
As far as VR goes, it's further along. Quest is a quality stand-alone product, but VR is young and content is still lacking. Its also completely sold out, even before coronavirus. They aren't producing them in Sony/MS console numbers but its not a failure, just a stepping stone to success. Unlike the Rift or Vive, with cords hanging out of them and an appeal only to hardcore gamers, Quest is definitely on the path to mainstream, or mainstream-adjacent success.
I'd call it great choice. They wouldn't have been able to make nearly as much money on a purposeful, targeted device, because nobody's put in that much money for a narrow market. Worse, it would have been much easier for investors to figure that the more modest product would fail. Much better to sell moonbeams, to sell the glorious possibility of AR just like they saw on Westworld and Black Mirror.
I mean sure, the wheels had to come off eventually. After a while, you run out of fools. But most startups fail eventually, and you have to admit that 9 years is a great run for something that never worked, and probably never could have worked.
What's the point of crappy half dim see-through display when you can just pipe the camera output to a normal VR screen?
For different definitions of "very far away". We're only talking about 15 years since we started getting proper video recording in phones, and only about 4 since the big players started focusing on software enhancements.
If there was even 1 amazing game, they'd be ok. Think halo->xbox, sonic->sega, mario->nintendo+gameboy, ... .
But apparently not. Nothing people want to buy.
What were they showing investors and writers under NDA that caused billions of dollars and thousands of words of praise to flow?
I wonder if the NDAs still in effect? I'd love for Kevin Kelly to talk more openly about what he saw and heard.
I think VR is starting the mainstream (at least for gaming), and Coronavirus is encouraging this (as it’s making virtually all gaming platforms a boost).
Your statement was true for early VR seated games that used smooth locomotion or flight-sim-like games.
Roomscale VR games don't have motion sickness because of different locomotion methods (teleport, for instance... or they take place entirely within the room volume you have available). In fact, less motion sickness than you'd experience with a large monitor and something like a dynamic flight-based combat game. Unlike a monitor, your in-game view motion is mapped perfectly to physical head motion.
I've tried out about a dozen games, and the only time I had motion sickness at all was when I changed locomotion method from teleport to smooth in Rec Room.
Bingo. If the product works as advertised I could justify the cost just in replacing existing screens, I could have a dozen virtual terminals floating around, I could replace my large TV, etc. All with zero new content required.
The problem is it doesn't seem to work as advertised.
- VR headsets generally are similar to focusing on something further away due to the setup of the lenses. It's not literally focusing on a screen 1cm from your face.
- One direction for current VR work is dynamic focus via lens arrays.
People pay for a good experience.
Yes you can use the link, but then you need an NVidia 1650 RTX or better which means you're a high end gamer already and so were not this supposed "mass market"
PSVR is still top selling VR and while cable and setup wise it's arguably the worst it at least has quality content.
PCVR is an evolutionary dead end, few adults want giant PC towers in their homes anymore. Even when I demoed PCVR with amazing experiences like Lone Echo people lost interest when I told them no, it wont run on your macbook, you need a tower PC.
Yet I demoed them Beatsaber on the quest and a guy ordered one within a minute of taking the headset off, he demoed it at a family BBQ and two of his relatives bought it after.
It is, but it compensates by offering good enough experience while being untethered, self-contained and quick to start up. It may not matter for teenagers with expensive gaming rigs, but it matters for working adults with families, who otherwise don't have time and space to justify a VR gaming PC build.
Meanwhile, I've been playing the Echo VR alpha on my Quest (not Link) and it's fucking great.
Technies will pay for hardware like the iPhone, that gets you laid. Not AR/VR, which makes you look like a dork and makes you seasick.
FTFY.
Like, the Apple Watch example seems easy, but what happened to FitBit? FitBit went all in on your idea. Picked a single use case with a market, delivered on it. Yet Apple swooped in, took the market from them. Why is that?
This is an open question, I don't claim to have the answer. It just seems that in this case, Apple was promising, as opposed to FitBit, that it would bring much more use cases to the user, a smartwatch on your wrist really, that seems like it was the messaging at least.
> "a lack of leverage is one reason why category-defining products are rarely created by brand new startups."
This idea of course is distressing to product creators. You can create great products (focused, well-executed, nails the need) that don't succeed. Business can be pretty unfair like that.
FitBit was a good product, but Apple had more experience and resources available when they decided to enter the space.
Even so, I have no doubt there were other factors at play as well.
If one of the properties you want your product to have is being fashionable and communicate something about you, you have to both invest effort in making a product that reflects that need (through the design decisions of form & function), and gets people to understanding it through that lens (framing it through product marketing). It's a push and pull to create something fashion-forward, the product adapts to the market's needs, and the market shifts what's fashionable to include the product.
https://qz.com/857412/pebble-went-from-kickstarter-to-being-...
If you don't, and play cautiously, your competition will eat your market and starve you. You still eat the dust.
I just don't get it.
Nobody likes to admit it, but luck is 99% of success.
Of curse getting that skill and determination in the first place is largely luck based so there is that as well.
Google failed because they’re google; they don’t understand UX.
I was confused when reading this and googled market share - you're right, apparently Apple has a much larger chunk of that market than FitBit does. Either I live in an odd bubble, or the market is a lot different in New Zealand because I probably know 5 or so people with FitBits, and zero with Apple watches.
This is easy to assume but a far more common reason companies go broad is that it makes it much easier to sell big vision and big dreams.
Most investors in magicleap probably wouldn’t have invested if the pitch was “right now we are focused 100% on a product that serves $INDUSTRY_X well before moving to $INDUSTRY_Y”
In fact, many investors wouldn’t even have taken the pitch, let alone writing a check
This "pivot" seems like a play they should have been running in parallel regardless, considering they've had actual hardware on the go for a few years so far.
If you're interested I do cover this among other things in the linked essay.
Fast Forward so many years and what got delivered in ML1 ? A consumer format device not capable of delivering on that original vision experience.
Your comment suggests MLeap should have early on baked in expectations for a substandard visual experience in a first mass market consumer product. I disagree. Instead, they should have planned on miniaturization problems and baked in expectations for first delivery of a ground breaking visual experience product not available in a mass market consumer device footprint or price point.
MLeap's killer app should have been their visual experience. That was the day one focus and it got lost along the way, as you say 'pulled in a ton of different directions'.
I tell people I would have bought a $10,000 Motorcycle helmet with a backpack from MLeap if that was able to produce just a good part of original Dynamic Light Field AR experience. Is that a fast moving mass market consumer device ? No, but obviously the ML1 was not either.
I am reminded of Theranos and their maniacal insistence on using 'one drop of blood' and how it defined the format of every component, when it is possible they would have succeeded with just a little more flexibility on that design principle.
As with Theranos setting back the IoT medical space, I fear that the MLeap experience will set back spatial computing in the short to mid term, however I think both these fields are at very early stages of transforming our living environments over the long term.
On their website you have a video that displays several use cases that don't make sense if you really think about them.
Just to dissect the first example where doctors look at a low resolution brain over a surgery table. I don't know why there is a woman without a device who thinks: "why are those three people looking over me here?". But I think the association is some kind of neurosurgery.
* Neurosurgeons know how a brain looks like inside, that's anatomy.
* If this depicts the CT or MRT of the woman, those are evaluated on high resolutions displays by radiologists.
* It's difficult to keep those devices sterile in a hospital environment.
Let's extend this into surgery. "Hey cool you can look inside the brain in real time". Why would a display not be enough in any other case?
* Doctors don't wear a heavy device with a limited field of view during a 5h surgery.
* There are devices with a high resolution display, that can show you in real time where you are inside the brain. I tried this device once with a melon, I could make the mental transition within a minute. Now imagine a neurosurgeon with all his skill.
* What if there is a problem with the image. Right now the doctor can look from the display inside the real brain and check if something is off. You can't take the unobstructed view from a doctor here.
The other two examples in the video are not much more convincing. The second one is solved by a warehouse navigation device. Maybe the last one, but a car showroom usually has a real car you can drive.... Even without it a VR Headset would solve the same issue. Why do they have to see their surroundings?
After so many years and that much money, that's the best they came up with?
I used the one from Microsoft in a museum, that could in theory be interesting. Make it more interactive. You had to stand at an exact position, it couldn't interact with its surroundings and my nose hurt because it was so heavy. I think the battery was empty after 15 minutes.
Just the complexity building a fully interactive museum, all the 3D artists and programmers that would take. What else you could improve with those resources to enhance the experience?
If it were the scifi-like AR glasses of the future, perhaps that would sell itself due to all the dreamed up ideas in movies and tv, but that's pretty far afield of what's possible today.
I also would like to play board games with my friends who no longer live close. Also if I was playing a game and they could be virtually sitting next to me so that we could communicate better that would also be great.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tiltfive/holographic-ta...
So yes, I do agree that such specific purpose apps definitely validates and advances a new technology like AR.
Did someone at Magic Leap seriously think, people will buy an expensive AR device and wear it just to see virtual album covers placed on their table?
Couldn't you have said the same of the Apple II or IBM PC?
Sometimes, for some products, you have to build.
https://medium.com/@gfodor/the-secret-mozilla-hubs-master-pl...
tl;dr, avatar based communication will require basic voice/body language, mixed media, globally addressable spaces on the web. no fancy scripting, crypto, etc etc.
When you're building a product without a focused use case, you are pulled in a ton of different directions. In AR, this means focusing on fidelity, embodied in high resolution, wide field of view visuals, powerful processing, and compelling input methods.
The real question in AR is what use cases can you hit without great fidelity? What sort of value can you unlock with a low-res postage stamp overlay and slow processor instead of full FOV? That's where the go-to market effort needs to be placed.
A similar example of this overreach was in multifunction pen devices of the 90s (General Magic, Newton, EO Personal communicator). A great counter example is Apple Watch, which didn't chase the 'smartphone on your wrist' everything device, and instead picked a few key use cases, established a beachhead, and slowly added capabilities as the technology allowed.
When a category-defining product has yet to emerge on the market, there are going to be a lot of people making predictable mistakes like this - mistiming ideas, scoping the wrong set of features, getting too excited about the wrong technologies, not leveraging their assets.
If you're a product person interested in understanding more about these factors, I wrote an essay on the subject recently: https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/