AR has been in the consumer space a lot longer than VR. In fact I’m more surprised that AR had never taken off in a big way than I was about VR. Sure we’ve seen some games like Pokemon Go take advantage of it. But AR should have been a game changer.
VR turned out to be the easier of the two to turn into a viable consumer product - mainly because you can get away with a big bulky headset for gaming around the house, but you can't wear it outside for a walk.
The hardware that you could wear outside for a walk (e.g. google glass) hasn't actually been AR, and has just been like a tiny heads-up display in the corner of your eye.
I disagree. AR mobile games have been around for a few years and VR first hit the market 2 decades before AR. If anything, VR has been a harder technology to break through. Which, in my personal opinion, is because it’s more likely to make people feel sick plus is less of a social tech.
It depends what you mean by AR - As this term is used to describe showing an overlay on video on a phone, a heads up display in the corner of your eye in a pair of glasses, or technology like hololens where you can make objects appear to float or overlay the real world.
These things have all been referred to as AR, and are all very different, but I’m specifically talking about the latter personally (which is the one the article is talking about).
It’s kind of the same with VR by the way - you used to be able to watch 360 videos on your phone and the viewport would change as you moved it, but it’s obviously very primitive compared to something like the VR oculus offers. These two things obviously are very different technologies, which is the same as in-phone AR and the AR described in the article.
All of the AR examples are legitimately AR. It’s a massive field.
VR, on the other hand, isn’t such a broad field. Take your 360 videos for example, there’s no interaction with the content.
Even 90s era VR was very specifically referring to interactive worlds. Whereas Augmented Reality has always just meant having our real world senses enhanced with digital technology. That means phone apps are legitimate examples. Google Glass is a legitimate example. The barrier for entry is much lower yet the possible utilities for AR are much higher than with VR. Which is why I’m surprised it hasn’t taken off in a much bigger way with all the hype that VR has.
The technology stack to support Google Glass is almost entirely distinct from the technology stack which supports in-phone AR. Maybe both are AR, but then all that means is it's not a particularly useful term, because it can mean things that are entirely different from both a technology and user perspective.
So I think we need to define terms - Otherwise if we are comparing overlaying a tape-measure on the camera on your mobile phone to being able to plug on a headset and playing beat-saber, it's not a particularly useful comparison and I'm not surprised that VR has bigger hype!
(But moving about a bit of furniture through the camera view on your mobile phone is very different to something like magic leap, or oculus passthrough).
> The technology stack to support Google Glass is almost entirely distinct from the technology stack which supports in-phone AR. Maybe both are AR, but then all that means is it's not a particularly useful term, because it can mean things that are entirely different from both a technology and user perspective.
Bullshit. The technology cinemas use for their stereoscopic 3D is totally different to the technology used for Samsung’s 3D TVs, and different again from the Nintendo VirtualBoy which is also different from Google Cardboard. Yet all of the aforementioned are stereoscopic 3D.
Not every technical term depends on a technical implementation.
> So I think we need to define terms
It is a defined term. You just seem intent on moving the goal posts for some reason.
> (But moving about a bit of furniture through the camera view on your mobile phone is very different to something like magic leap, or oculus passthrough).
I agree. But 30 years after the first time I tried VR and the whole industry is still basically a novelty. Whereas AR is already providing practical value to millions (eg Google Translate) simply because it is more accessible and has more scope for useful utilities.
Which brings us full back circle to the very point I opened with. ;)
AR will become a game changer once the hardware is there, i.e. glasses than can be worn comfortably and anywhere. Everything before that is just practice for the software and UI.
I agree with the idea but not that we need comfortable glasses that we can wear anywhere. AR will be a game changer on my bicycle if my helmet can integrate it. AR will be a game changer when I'm bombing down a mountain on my snowboard, if my helmet can accommodate it. My belief is that we will get deep market adoption in these verticals before any practical general purpose AR is possible
Well, it doesn't help that nobody actively releasing apps seems to understand that AR is a lot more than just drawing things on top of a camera feed.
Almost every social video platform has some firm of AR filters. Snap probably has the most pervasive use of AR, with tools available to develop new filters (Lens Studio).
As of right now, these are the only examples of apps that do something with the tech that can't be done without the tech, and probably done better.
You can see why in the games market and Pokémon Go is a good example of why. The AR camera feature distracts, not adds, to the gameplay. Everyone I knew playing the game turned the camera feature off because it drained battery fast and limited play time.
Now, I would still call Pokémon Go an AR game, even without the camera feed, because I count the map overlay tracking your real work location a form of AR. It is a feature that augments your reality. And that feature adds to the gameplay. People enjoy traveling to play the game.
I think AR games will never be a big thing because AR design is fundamentally at odds with game design. With AR, you have to design an app the works in a context that the user brings in. In contrast, with VR, you're designing an app that provides a context to the user. Game design--especially as done by most game studios--is usually focused on providing a wholly contained experience for the user.
And that AR design challenge is just fundamentally more challenging. First of all, we can't get a lot of the interesting information about a user's personal context. The most we can get right now is geographic location, rough estimations of surfaces in their area, and maybe some very rough object classification. We don't know things like whether or not the user has a TV, or where that TV is located. Even if we did, we'll probably never be able to know what brand of TV they have, so now you have a problem of none of the stakeholders caring to ever fund a "TV classifying" project, because they'd never be able to sell the branding tie-in.
And I think that's the real problem with both the AR and VR industries. There's little incentive to create a product that users will care about, outside of games, which work better in VR. Any funding your going to find for any use case outside of games will want it 100% married to their brand, but brands have all gotten so indistinguishable from one another that there's nothing to really do.
