Any idea where a guy can score The Librarian these days? Wikipedia is cool and all, but it's lacking a certain... finesse.

On a more serious note, I think these are different metaverses. Ours is pretty much locked in VR as far as I can tell, and Apple is building an overlay on zeroth-order reality, aka AR. Arguably harder and more powerful if done properly. Which I'm sure it won't be.

:P

> Arguably harder and more powerful if done properly. Which I'm sure it won't be.

My response is kind of stuck between "that's overly cynical, isn't it" and "statistically speaking, that's pretty likely".

(I was actually working at an early AR project at Nokia a bit over a decade ago, at the time called Point & Find, later called CityLens. It gave me a feeling that good AR may be one of those things that remains "just a couple years away" for decades.)

Define "good AR"? Pokemon Go is nearing its 5th birthday. A VRchat overlay you can use on the street? If you get the Epson AR glasses, combine it with the Quest 2's Snapdragon XR2, and mess around in Unity for a bit, that could be done by the end of the year. Create an app that's killer enough to make up for the bulkiness/inconvenience/price of a version 1 streetwear AR headset and we'll be getting somewhere.

That's fair -- with the caveat that your last sentence is asking for a lot. :) I think Pokemon Go did a great job of being an AR game, although I couldn't help but notice that literally everyone I knew playing it turned off the camera functionality after a few weeks and gave up on the AR overlay part.

I don't know what the "killer app" for AR is really going to be. CityLens and comparable apps like Yelp Monocle on smartphones clearly haven't cut it. (Show of hands: how many people remembered Yelp had an augmented reality mode? I don't think it's there anymore.) I think the big challenge now is thinking of applications that aren't games where using goggles/glasses give you more than incremental improvements over putting the UI on your wrist or in your ear(s).

>I don't know what the "killer app" for AR is really going to be.

I wonder if it really is a navigation HUD. For example, i’d love this, with some auditory interface, for things like cycling and motorcycling and also probably normal driving too. Safely presenting salient information in the same depth of focus as the road, and giving me tools to interact with it with voice, would be good AR in those situations, and i’m in them pretty frequently.

Is that a big enough market? Will it inevitably descend into the inverse of They Live?

we’ve given the hardware a shot at least a few times now and wearable glasses tech has not yet been useful. But i can’t think of anything else.

They can also just project the image onto your retina directly, but this requires some serious tracking I don't understand or know if it really exists.

people have been playing with it since the 80s, but it has yet to become more than alpha/research stage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_retinal_display

- High resolution

- Low latency, ideally imperceptibly low

- "Delta-zero", meaning the overlaid virtual reality should never drift from reality itself. This is probably theoretically impossible, so let's just be imperceptible here too.

This should boil down to a completely continuous interface over the sensory domains of all humans (other animals?)

For now I assume we are only talking about the visual and audio senses.

All eyes and ears.

This has been the case in PC VR for years. The Valve Index has a combined 4.6 MP at up to 144hz, with reprojection and motion smoothing so that the image still updates with head movement even if the application hitches. Or now you can get the Vive Pro 2 with 12 MP at 120hz. Or wireless oculus quest 2 with 7 MP at 120hz. The novelty would be a clear screen, or forward facing cameras, and a useful AR overlay.

You rmemeber Blaxxun from the '90s ? Man, that was a Metaverse.

That's where my mind immediately goes when I hear 'metaverse' too