>Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder, predicted that in future cities would be designed around the device, while Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, also backed the project publicly and financially.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/dec/04/engineering.hi...
>John Doerr speculated that it would be more important than the Internet[...] Steve Jobs was quoted as saying that it was "as big a deal as the PC"[...]
It is not a useful analogy in any case, for a variety of reasons. The question you need to be asking is if video games will be able to break into reality once a certain level of capability and UX is met. You may be too old: AR may be a young person’s reality.
My point is that the Segway does seem like a silly device in retrospect, but it was actually profoundly impactful.
AR isn't going to get big unless Facebook recruits other firms to make investments in content.
Those investments are going to happen until a decent AR dev kit exists, but for now very expensive $2500 headsets are not good enough in terms of
* image quality
* brightness
* size
* drop a pair on anybody right now for a demo
points out the problems are difficult; industry badly wants full color, but a green-only design helps on all of those fronts.
AR for the military is a real thing. The U.S. spends over $1 million to train an infantry soldier, it can afford to equip one with a $2500 headset.
Consumers will be sick and tired of metaverse promises long before Facebook can deliver.
I feel pretty strongly we'll see a good Passthrough AR device from Apple in 2022.
AR will be a niche product constrained primarily to industrial applications.
There, we've both made our blind predictions, now we get to see who's right!
I'm sure there was pockets of people who thought 3D TV was the greatest thing ever, and look how far that technology has come. Alexa and Siri were once upon a time going to be the greatest things ever, until everyone realized how very meh the experience was in practice. Smart watches were similarly going to change the world and have since largely pivoted to being niche products for health nuts.
BTW, I'm not saying you're absolutely wrong! I just don't think there's any reason to believe you're right, either, and a lot of reasons you might not be, including sky-high costs, practical technology limitations, the lack of killer applications, social barriers to adoption (see: Google Glass), etc.
Man, that family must be doing very well for themselves to afford at least two full VR rigs.
Look, if VR kit becomes reasonably priced for average consumers (which also means GPU prices have to come down), maybe I could buy into your touching vision, here.
But we've got a long way to go before this kind of gear is remotely affordable enough to result in the kind of mass adoption required to realize these purported benefits.
As for Zuck, if he sees opportunity here, all the more reason for me to hope it never succeeds...
This already exists and works very well, in the form of the SteamVR and Oculus VR play area guardian systems:
https://support.oculus.com/guardian/
>If I am walking down the sidewalk with a friend, we may be experiencing a quiet forest path, with other strangers we pass in the real world appearing as elves or animals to cue us of their presence
How will the system cue used hypodermic needles?
For many, not being seen via an avatar will be akin to feeling unclothed. It will be strange and unlikely to be fully accepted by people who are above a certain age.
the implicit premise is that the category (AR/VR/XR) remains the same but the technology improves until its better for pretty much all usecases we currently use 2d screens.