Seems pretty simple. If you could have UI overlayed on the world around you, it would be huge, and would change how people use computers, like the smartphone did.

The current stumbling block is that the tech sucks and the headsets are enormous. If someone got it into a lightweight pair of glasses or contact lenses, the use case is obvious, and it would be a big of a shift as the smartphone.

Denying this is like being the guy in 1993 saying “why would I want a computer in my pocket? Am I going to work on spreadsheets on a tiny screen in the bathrooom? And where would I plug it in?”

> If you could have UI overlayed on the world around you, it would be huge, and would change how people use computers, like the smartphone did.

Is this really a game-changer? Technology adoption is all about tradeoffs. We already have location-based services and applications that are granular enough for most purposes. AR applications add sensory awareness and localized interaction at the cost of distraction and intrusiveness.

History is littered with inventions that were supposed to be the next telephone, computer, smartphone, etc., but most of them never materialize because they don't meet people's practical needs. And if AR/VR isn't the quintessential solution in search of a problem, I don't know what is.

It's absolutely a game-changer. Imagine having driving or walking directions laid out on the street in front of you. Imagine using AI to help you identify things like engine parts in your car, plants, birds, other people (never forget a name again). Looking at a package and scanning the barcode to get price comparisons. Recipe directions on the counter in front of you, even labeling the next ingredient and how much of it to measure. Walk into a museum and see highlighted details of every painting or information about a particular element in a sculpture. First aid details right in front of you, keeping both hands free to offer assistance in a roadside accident. Live AR-driven instructions for changing a tire or locating an oilpan plug.

Currently any time you need information you have to pull yourself away from your present moment to dive into your phone. AR will make it so the information you need is just integrated into the world around you.

Whether or not we're way off-base or not, it's certainly possible to envision a HUD in a fairly ordinary looking pair of glasses. It's certainly SF today but it's possible to imagine. There are of course various creepy aspects as well but, honestly, if the technology can be made to work well, most people will just get over that.

There's plenty of neat ideas for what AR could do - but how often are you changing tires or having to find an oilpan plug on an unfamiliar car? Some great professional use cases, potentially, but for a consumer? A lot of this sounds like an open-world video game with no design restraint, where your map gets littered with dozens and dozens of points of interest all at once and it just makes it that much harder to focus on what you actually wanted to be doing in the first place.

And with people's resistance to paying for software services, you'll have exactly the same problem with looking at something on your phone of half the crap being ads intentionally trying to sidetrack you.

I think there's certainly a risk of information overload, but I'd say that's a risk of our modern lives in general, whether we have AR glasses or not. Well-designed AR would, in my opinion, be vastly less intrusive than having to stare into a handheld device for hours a day. I would trust Apple to make a well-designed UI for the thing if and when they manage to release them. 3rd party apps not so much (although certainly there will be a handful of great ones). That's more on users making informed choices about the apps they download than a downside of AR, though.

I hear your killer features and don't care for them at all in any way to put on glasses for them.

I only need real navigation on holiday and I'm pretty sure not taking some expensive glasses on travel. Neither when hiking nor in a foreign country.

And all the other Infos? I don't even use my smartphone for them. Why would I wear an expensive headset to compare a 3€ product?

I hear your killer features and don't care for them at all in any way to carry a tiny computer for them.

I only need real navigation on holiday and I'm pretty sure not taking some expensive pocket computer on travel. Neither when hiking nor in a foreign country. I just print out the directions from MapQuest. K.I.S.S.

And all the other Infos? I don't even use my desktop PC for them. Why would I carry an expensive handheld computer to compare a 3€ product?

And where would I even plug it in?

What, you expect me to wear those gaudy glasses for my HUD? Can't you just send me the Neuralink version instead?

>I only need real navigation on holiday and I'm pretty sure not taking some expensive pocket computer on travel. Neither when hiking nor in a foreign country. I just print out the directions from MapQuest. K.I.S.S.

This is actually what happened historically. Various pocket devices existed for navigation (e.g. by Garmin), but they never got too popular until the smartphone became popular for entirely different reasons. Only after the smartphone become really common, then it was reused for existing applications where the benefit existed but was not that big compared to alternatives. AR/VR will need a killer application first, only then it might be reused for navigation.

You compare a small pocket device with a headset?

You don't see the difference? Especially when hiking?

You are then a non sweaty asian?

What you've described would be a game changer because of incredible AI, not so much because of a UI overlay. It would be just about as good to leave one of my headphones in and just ask an ultra-AI assistant my questions. Maybe have a set of glasses (not capable of UI overlay) but just having a camera so the AI assistant can see what I see.

Sounds great, but I feel we'll be wading through ads and product placement

You're already wading through ads and product placement. They're just physical signs.

To add on, having a phone being your heavy computing device is a little silly if you think about it. It's essentially the smallest portable form factor people can conveniently carry around, connect to the internet, consume and send information.

A pair of glasses or monocle/power reader, wrist device with holo display or some other format makes much more sense as a way to interact with a portable computing device conveniently. The main bottleneck is hardware.

Don't forget the fingerprints!

But yeah, so many things are obnoxious and clunky about smartphones. Glancing down is never a good look, let alone glancing down and then walking into a wall. The moment that minimum viable AR tech happens, people will suddenly remember how many compromises we have to make for smartphones.

I’m not sure that focusing on something no one else can see when you appear to be looking elsewhere is a good look either. At least other people can tell you are distracted when you’re looking down at your phone.

With Apple Silicone, I think Apple is in the perfect place to take advantage of the AI craze to sell hardware with something like "Neural Engine V2". If they can figure out how to run AI workloads at fraction of the cost of what is costs on current hardware, I can see there being a huge market for their Mac's and they could even bring back XServe and become the predominant player in the "Server Hardware for AI" space.

> If they can figure out how to run AI workloads at fraction of the cost of what is costs on current hardware

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

It's discussed quite a bit on this site, but I wouldn't expect Apple to pull ahead in the GPU department. They really lit a fire under Intel and AMD's ass with the M1's IPC, but Nvidia laughed their way to the bank with every M1 upgrade. Even the 5nm M1 Ultra struggled to keep up with Nvidia's 10nm, bog-cheap 30-series cards. In the datacenter it's even more of a blowout, Apple would have to invest in something competitive with CUDA to turn heads. That's no small feat, and I don't think it's possible with an overnight API launch. It takes time and integration into the industry, something Apple wasn't patient enough for (see: Xserve).

What about in terms of performance per watt, rather than pure performance?

It's still not favorable, even compared to last-gen (30XX series) hardware. Here's the OpenCL scores for multiple different GPUs, including the Ultra: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks

The M1 Ultra is a 200w chip, fabricated with 5nm silicon. It's being outclassed by the RTX 3060, a cheap 10nm card that draws ~170w max. In Nvidia's 40-series cards (on 4nm), the M1 Ultra's performance profile is most comparable to a laptop-class RTX 4060 that draws less than 115 watts.

There's a story in the total package draw to be made here, and it does weigh slightly in Apple's favor. Overall though, even with last-gen cards it's clear that there's a massive performance-per-watt lead in Nvidia's favor right now. Which is impressive, considering how they've been stuck with second-class silicon when the M1 Ultra debuted.

> All local and not in the cloud

Apple execs: "why not both?"

VR and AR are a solution looking for a problem. It's admittedly a cool tech demo. I enjoyed my time playing Half Life: Alyx and The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners on my Valve Index before I decided to sell it out of disuse.

The article says that Apple has a glasses product and a VR/AR product that sounds similar to a Quest Pro.

So if we look at the glasses product it immediately runs into a lot of issues. Do I want to be wearing glasses? Do I already own glasses? Do I like how glasses look on my face? Wearable tech is very personal especially when it's sitting on your face. At best this is a product for industrial environments.

Then the Quest Pro-like VR/AR product...separate battery pack in your pocket, need I say more? Now compare that experience to an Oculus Quest for $300. It doesn't really matter that the Quest is a less capable product, it's at the right price point and form factor and its strong sales show it.

Agreed. The technologies will have their uses, like entertainment, training, education, and therapy, but it will never meet mass adoption for practical reasons like price, safety, and power consumption. I'd be curious to know why so many people think otherwise.

I don't think it's a solution looking for a problem. I'd be willing to put them on at work and see which pins on a piece of hardware do what instead of looking back and forth between a datasheet. Lots of examples exactly like that, especially if the glasses are fed sensor data so the temperature/pressure appears right beside the area it is measuring.

Like I said, industrial environments. A small niche group of people and businesses who could use some information in front of their face as they do hands-on work.

Estimates of the size of this market were in the single digit billions of dollars for Google, who bailed out of Google Glass recently: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/18/google-glass-enterprise-mark...

For comparison, the iPhone makes $200 billion in revenue every year. Apple Services (Music, TV+, etc) make something like $20 billion every quarter.

Apple does not enter many businesses that only have the potential to make $1-2 billion.

How is this feasible at all? Not only all the tech for the AR device to be light and have decent battery life, but the software you describe would need optical recognition of what you're looking at, then match that to the manual of the object to tell you what the pins do. All on a device with significant size and heat constraints.

For early generations I'd imagine you'd have to plug them in via usb (which would still be fine for my use case I was describing). Processing done on a different device, get some type of AI to summarize datasheets and match it to pins. All of which probably doesn't sound good to you but I'd still prefer it over turning my neck and scrolling back and forth.

But like the parent poster pointed out, I'm now talking about niche industrial uses, not widescale adoption.

> I'm utterly unconvinced that AR/VR is a large market

Gorilla Tag, an indie VR game where you're an ape and run around with your hands and tag people (seriously, that's the whole thing) has made $26 million selling virtual hats and has peaks of 90,000 concurrent users.

Wow, I had no idea it made that much money. My kids love it.

I think what makes it stick is that it's more than just a game. It's a social space where my kids jump in to sometimes just to chat with their friends from school. Reminds me of hanging out in Team Fortress 2 game servers and just chatting while casually screwing around in the game.

Here's the interview where those stats came from for those curious.

https://venturebeat.com/games/how-gorilla-tag-made-it-big-on...