> AR is where the future is. VR is a major stepping stone.
I think this is totally wrong. VR is going to be where almost everyone spends almost all their time, and it's not even that many years away.
There was a time when humans lived in the wild, and nobody knew any different, and any talk about living in cities would have been met with derision.
Right now humans live in "reality", but in the not-too-distant future (maybe a couple of generations), people will primarily live in totally virtual worlds. There are many advantages:
- you can have as much land as you like, and you don't have to pay for it
- you can get whatever furniture or whatever home decoration you like, and you don't have to pay for it (at least the physical materials - you would probably have to pay a talented artist if you wanted to motivate them to create something bespoke; but you could probably settle for Stable Diffusion anyway)
- you can travel to visit friends instantly, no matter where they are in the world, and you don't have to deal with passports, visas, airport security, etc.
A really good VR world solves basically every pain point of the physical world.
I think people push back on this idea because they think I'm talking about VR as it appears today. I'm not. I'm talking about a version of VR where it literally feels real. Where there is no tangible difference in experience between the many versions of "reality" you can experience inside (for sake of argument...) your headset, and the singular "reality" that you experience outside your front door.
There's also the point that although HN readers may have nice large houses and comfortable lives, the average person in the world doesn't have as much space as they'd like, doesn't have as nice furniture as they'd like, has more noise from neighbours than they'd like, and so on. A really good VR solves all of these problems, and saves money at the same time. People would be crazy not to adopt it.
We'll still rely on the physical world for nutrition, of course. The same way we still rely on nature to provide our food even though we live in cities and work in offices instead of living in the wild and foraging for berries. But the proportion of human activity that will be focused on "reality" will drop from near 100% today to maybe 1% not too far in the future, the same way the proportion of activity that was focused on "nature" has dropped from near 100% 10,000 years ago to maybe 1% now.
> VR is going to be where almost everyone spends almost all their time
I believe that (current, conventional) VR will always be a niche that only sees widespread use when conventional AR headsets can deliver VR experiences
>There was a time when humans lived in the wild, and nobody knew any different, and any talk about living in cities would have been met with derision.
Cities have been an integral part of the human experience pretty much immediately after a society got farming down, and switched away from the hunter gatherer model.
>it's not even that many years away.
> I'm talking about a version of VR where it literally feels real.
This is transhumanism. We are so incredibly far away from being able to do high-precision prosthetic limbs, a fundamental baseline for understanding human/animal i/o signals. The state of the art for ocular nerves is something like 32x32 4bit grayscale - and that's not even being shipped as a product! Evenfollowing a pace of technological development that exceeds conventional televisions (a much simpler technology, that doesn't require surgery to install), you can expect to have full color and high dpi visual prosthetics in the 2040s - at the very earliest.
The timeframe for delivering this a transhumanistic experience is, in my opinion, so far down the line that talking about it in anything but the abstract doesn't contribute at all to the current discussion about AR vs VR.
> A really good VR world solves basically every pain point of the physical world.
This is not a really good VR world. This is a transhumanistic future that requires decades more research. I actually personally believe we'll get there as a species, and I'll be lucky if it's towards the end of my lifetime.
What you're describing is not "virtual reality" in the conventionally agreed upon sense, but rather something called "transhumanism".
So of course he's not going to trash talk it.
> But I thought they weren't interested in the whole thing because of the 'Meta is dying' narrative? [0]
I am happy to listen to a smart person who is very clever talk about things I'm interested in, even if I disagree with them on key points.