Maybe, maybe not. I'm still waiting on the Segway to revolutionize cities' transportation infrastructure.
>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.
>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"[...]
The Segway in some ways succeeded, but it came in the form of electric scooters and EUCs. The thesis was right - personal electric vehicles - but you can’t rebuild cities.
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.
That's not really a revolutionary thesis? At least, not to the point where I would hold it up as a prior for AR. Bicycles started appearing in the early 1800s, adding an electric motor was an obvious step once the technology was small enough.
Not to derail the topic at hand, but it was the Segway that proved the concept of dynamic stabilization, which in turn led to drones, bipedal robots, SpaceX’s reentry boosters, and much much more.
My point is that the Segway does seem like a silly device in retrospect, but it was actually profoundly impactful.
No, it was the cheap, good-enough inertial sensors that made that impact. Segway didn't invent them. Segway was beyond all hope when Weird Al made "White and Nerdy"
that’s exactly the the advancement that the segway represents, but while the sensors, actuators, and engineering were notable, it was mainly the advancement of computing power that enabled dynamic stabilization. before the segway, the computations couldn’t be done in real-time without (relatively) very expensive computers.
>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"[...]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segway#History