Not really the worst strategy. You can totally see where he was coming from. He just vastly overestimated how far VR could go in even 10 years of heavy investment, if ever. No amount of heavy investment, even for 10+ years, is going to make AR or VR as ubiquitous as mobile.
You would need a headset so small and light it's not too far off from a pair of sunglasses. It needs a battery that runs all day. It needs to not get hot and burn someone's face. It needs to be fast and responsive in terms of both local processing and network data transmission. It needs to be inexpensive enough that everyone on Earth who currently has a smartphone can afford one. And, he is correct, it needs to have apps so compelling that people find hard to participate in society without one.
It's not even a guaranteed thing that such a device is even possible. Even if it is, no way would it be ready for 2025, maybe not even 2035.
Another requirement that seems to get ignored is that you need to have the overwhelming majority of the public not feel sick when you use it. I recently had a friend bring a VR headset to a party for people to try out. About 15% of the people who tried it felt dizzy or nauseous after using it. (I did not try it because I know from experience I'll have a headache and be dizzy for hours afterward.)
Interestingly, similar to seasickness, the women who tried it seemed waaaaay more likely to be negatively impacted. Which opens up an entire other can of worms, such as: could an office get away with mandating the use of VR tech for meetings, when it has disproportionately negative impacts on women? (As a woman, I certainly hope they would not even try this!)
And as far as voluntary public adoption, having ~15% of your friend group unable to use a product is a fantastic way to kill network efforts. I doubt TikTok would be popular if 15% of the population got horrible headaches and nausea after watching a video on the platform.
Shockingly, no one seems to be talking about this aspect of VR. Which seems to be a really big red flag.
Most of the VR software I've tried have anti-nausea features like teleportation and unmoving frames of reference, so I'm not sure it's fair to say that no one's talking about it.
I think the hope was that some combination of hardware and software would solve the problem.
My understanding of what causes the nausea is the render latency. The brain thinks its been poisoned due to our vision and the vestibular system misaligned, and so it triggers nausea to expel the poison.
I am skeptical we can get hardware fast enough such that these systems don't trigger a false positive for all people.
I haven't suffered from this but anecdotally proper calibration as well as better tracking and frame rate do have a significant effect on whether people suffer such side effects. The Quest series (which if it was bought to a party is my guess on what was used) are great value for money and are competent VR devices (and leading in some ways) but they make compromises to achieve this and I wouldn't rule out the ability to comfortably use VR based on a bad experience with such a device.
Having said that I'd agree network effects for personal uptake are killed by "Just spend 3x as much on the headset and peripherals and have a computer that cost 4x as much and you can use it in a dedicated room you've set up your tracking lighthouses in".
I agree. I get motion sickness from playing FPS games. The symptoms improve, but it takes a while to adjust. Some people have no problem with it, whereas for some it is completely impossible to overcome. It's hard for me to see broad adoption of VR with the current technology.
Nausea is definitely in the spotlight for John Carmack who’s the progenitor of a shockingly large percentage of all 3D game engines, starting with Doom. He’s a performance tuning genius and nausea has been one of the biggest engineering issues he and his team have tackled. A brilliant CTO cannot make a hard problem go away, but he and his team have been able to move it to a far better place than where it was back when I tried the DK1.
You raise excellent points and it’s plain to see that John’s work has put him at the fore of violent masculine tropes as entertainment. The whole idea of endless slaughter of “evil” humanoids feels a bit more wrong than it used to, and certainly wouldn’t be the mark I want to leave in the world. I’m not calling him an infamous misogynist, but he’s no infamous feminist either. I hope that people keep holding people to account, and I hope for their sakes they don’t intend on leaving behind 15%+ of their market simply due to malicious or incidental ignorance. I hope a lot of things for them though lol.
I did some brief fact checking for this and came across an ancient 4chan screenshot. I debated sharing it but I think it’s good evidence that these discussion has been in the public conscience for a long time:
If some make decision maker forced an organization to adopt VR and it’s women found it unusable, I would think that ADA would be a route through which there should be grounds for protections and accomplishments.
Frankly, it’s not fully fixed, and it might not be fixable. Our bodies are far more clever than the gods of gaming have presumed. We do proprioception with our toes and ears and sense our surroundings with the tiny hairs on our arms. As long as VR creates dissonance for processing info from the nervous system the more the cerebellum starts to get cranky, and tipsy.
> for John Carmack who’s the progenitor of a shockingly large percentage of all 3D game engines, starting with Doom.
First of all, Wolfenstein 3D, which used Carmack's engine, predated Doom by a year, but even Wolf3D wasn't the first 3D game or 3D engine. Activision's 1991 Hunter and Mindscapes's 1988 Colony both had very similar graphics and play as Wolf3D. 3D gaming and FPS goes back at least to Atari's 1980 BattleZone, but most place FPS origin with Maze in 1973.[1]
Second of all, by my count, Carmack developed (or also worked on) six distinct 3D game engines. There are an awful lot of 3D game engines now, well over 100 listed here.[3] I think by "shockingly large percentage," you must have instead meant, "small percentage." Maybe Carmack holds the world record for most 3D engines developed by one individual, but it could never be a "shockingly large percentage of all 3D game engines," even with id's OSS releases and subsequent variants.
I should have been far more specific: FPS, and not quite _3D_ at the outset...
You're quite right, especially relative to what I had stated. Its just that the impact of John's decision to GPL Doom and Quake engines gave rise to a tremendous ecosystem that many people don't realize. For instance, GoldSrc which forked Quake is the foundation for the Source and Source 2 engines which power at least 60% of all hours played on Valve in the last 30 days. https://steamcharts.com/top
His patterns have been wildly studied and reused. The word I did use carefully is progenitor. Id engine's direct impact is relatively small, but its legacy is vast.
Quest/Quest 2 specifically? Rift S? Rift CV1? Or the original Rift? I ask because the software and hardware has improved drastically. I'd be pretty surprised if you get sick from a Quest.
Additionally, as someone with very small pupillary distance, none of the existing headsets on the market are applicable to me. At this point I've written off VR entirely as I don't think any company will ever design for someone like me.
We had a VR excitement 'bubble' in the 90s. Loads of headsets came out, games supporting them, etc. It all died out within a few years. I guess people like Mark thought the reason for the die out was that the tech wasn't there yet. But the reality is that VR is not the future, people just don't want it. Nobody wants to live their entire waking / working life in a VR headset. But that seems to be what Mark is working towards. He's thinking people will choose to work together via VR rather than just plain old video conferencing.
> But the reality is that VR is not the future, people just don't want it. Nobody wants to live their entire waking / working life in a VR headset.
I think you're wrong.
From this[1] great essay about mainframes:
> Ultimately, there are only two natural kinds of computers: embedded systems and mainframes.
And this is so true. People have moved from personal computers to laptops and are in the process of moving to phones[2]. Smart watches seem to be a promising device; we'll see if people can put enough functionality into them to obviate the need for a phone.
Of course, not all tasks are suitable to be done on a phone or a watch. But one way to think of VR is a desk setup with huge monitors that happens to be extremely portable. Of course the promise of VR is much greater than that, but that is a pretty important use case - a use case that would obviate the need for laptops and desktops for many if not most tasks.
2. This isn't to say that the shift has been complete at all. Many people, including me, continue to use a desktop setup. And laptop use is still quite strong. But the derivative is ultimately what matters.
It's been 20 years and NOBODY is doing business in VR even though the tech is amazing right now. What's missing? At what point do you think normal people will prefer VR over just using video conferencing for work meetings? I don't see it and I'm willing to bet money that we won't have amazing Meta VR with 100 million users in the next 5 years.
Have you ever tried to work in VR? It's not amazing at all, my Quest 2 (which has reasonably high resolution per modern headset standard) just can't render clearly enough for me to use VSCode. I tried it and it was just not there yet. Double the pixel density and you would have something I would consider using.
I'm not necessarily convinced that we'll do all of our meetings in VR ever, but it's reasonable to say that tech still has a way to go before I'd call it as "VR is the issue".
I think Meta would disagree would disagree with the assertion "the tech is amazing right now." The two easiest problems to point to are a) resolution on most consumer headsets is far too low to read text effectively, and b) the ergonomics just aren't there in terms of weight and size.
Pretty big problems - I don't really have any argument either way on how solvable they are in 5-10 years, but I really think the implication that people dislike the concept of working in VR itself is misguided.
Size and weight has been going up over time: https://i.imgur.com/2fOAFqI.png
There's no evidence we will reach the mythical lightweight glasses any time soon. I believe that is needed for VR to be accepted on a scale similar to cellphones.
The tech is amazing for us VR enthusiasts, but I don't think it's really at the point where it can impress the average person beyond a short whale demo or beatsaber game. You're either tethered to a wire, or a 3 hour battery life (Which degrades pretty quickly). Resolution still isn't good enough for reading text at a reasonable scale. Narrow field of view. Hot to wear. The fact that they are fixed-focus creates some weird depth perception issues in many people for up to 48 hours after use until you get your "vr legs".
The tech is super early stage, having worked in VR for 6 hours a day for a month I can tell you it's very barebones. This tech is nascent, hell the oculus quest only came out in 2019.
With reference to the 90s VR boom, the grandparent was calling out this very comment as demonstrably false, well before you had even posted it. What magic is that?!
For sale to consumer VR headsets have been available commercially for about 35 years. Is it really reasonable to call a consumer tech product category that's been around for 35 years "early" or "nascent"? Look at something like the EyePhone (yes, that was its name). How is that not the very same product category as a modern VR HMD? Of course a modern HMD is better, but not fundamentally a new category of device. This shit is ancient by tech standards. It's had almost 4 decades to evolve since its consumer debut.
I mean we had smartphones in the late 90's and early 2000's and they didn't take off until 2010 so yes. That's where I'd put this, now we're waiting for VR's iPhone moment.
>And this is so true. People have moved from personal computers to laptops and are in the process of moving to phones[2]. Smart watches seem to be a promising device; we'll see if people can put enough functionality into them to obviate the need for a phone.
One of these shifts is not like the other. The laptop can, in principle, do everything the desktop can. The speakers and mousepad are kind of limited, but peripherals erase this barrier too. A phone simply doesn't have the text input rate of a keyboard, which I'm feeling intimately right now as I tap out this comment with my right thumb. Strap a keyboard to the phone, now the screen is too far away. It might as well be a laptop.
You can run a business on laptops. Currently, businesses still use desktops mostly because they're still significantly cheaper at equivalent performance (and maybe harder to steal). But on phones? That's nowhere near practical. The keyboard has yet to be disrupted; voice input is antisocial unless you have your own office.
> But the reality is that VR is not the future, people just don't want it. Nobody wants to live their entire waking / working life in a VR headset.
This keeps getting repeated but aside from "it's not the status quo", I see little evidence for it. I'm sure nobody wanted to spend their entire waking and working life sitting in front of a computer screen back when PCs came out and yet here we are...
In the off chance that VR does work out, Meta's going to be a huge benefactor.
Besides the fact that only 50 people are in the Metaverse right now? Literally nobody is using VR for meetings and work and stuff. Nobody likes being cut off from all real human interactions. At least with a video call I can see your face and you can see mine. VR? it's just voice chat with a stupid headset.
Absolutely. After covid, people are craving physical contact and outdoor activities. Travel and tourism is trending up. This idea that people want to put on a headset and stay indoors, netflix and chill or whatever is not happening. Maybe the niche hackernews/reddit crowd might prefer to avoid social contact and put on a VR headset, but I'm not seeing that in the local restaurants, bars, shopping malls, concerts, and theatres. They are crowded.
A few 10s of billions of dollars along with a bunch of super smart people haven't made much of a dent, so I don't think vague assurances are going to cut it. Nobody can predict what technology will be like in a few decades, but I don't see any reason to be particularly bullish on VR. At this rate, even if it does happen at some point, Meta likely won't be around to see it.
The goal is for VR to become a dominant platform and their progress has been far from massive. Some technical advancements along the way are nice, but won't matter without large numbers of users.
How many people visit the metaverse multiple times per day?
What percent of the population spends hours per day in a VR headset?
The answer to those questions needs to be much better than "miniscule" for this project to be any sort of success.
The goal is not to replace human interaction, it is to replace phone calls and video chat. To make the experience better than those things is not an insurmountable task.
That would be great if Meta was a VC fund placing hundreds of bets in the hopes of a moonshot paying off. But a (formerly) trillion dollar company placing such a big bet on such a small market is very surprising.
Using a Quest we're clearly not there yet but we're also clearly far closer than a VirtualBoy.
Saying we'll "never" get there, or that we couldn't get this into sunglasses-weight, does seem unrealistic. If joining a meeting was as easy as dropping on a pair of glasses, and I could "focus" on (virtually) further-away objects instead of just a computer screen in front of me, it would be pretty powerfully appealing.
Joining a meeting right now is as easy as clicking on 'join' on your phone or laptop. I can then see everyone in the meeting and they can see my facial expressions etc. VR doesn't add anything useful and removes a lot of social cues visible on video (or in person). I don't see why I'd accept employees joining a meeting using an avatar instead of showing up 'in person' (on video).
You're arguing about the experience today, not what it could be. I definitely don't want avatars.
I want this meeting to have higher immersion representations of the rest of the people in the meeting than boxes on a screen. I want to be able to shift my view to focus more on individuals. I want to be able to have a meeting with 40 people where I could still focus on a single person and see them with high-fidelity, instead of just having 20 of the boxes at low-res in front of me, with the rest off-screen. I want less eyestrain because I'm not just staring at a flat wall but my eyes are moving and shifting and re-focusing more. I want to have depth to things. I want the ability to have a quiet side convo off to the side. I want the ability to write on a whiteboard off to the side that people can look at when they want instead of taking-over the entire viewport for everybody. All things I could do in the real world, but would be very hard to make seamless without a real-world interaction model.
Again, we clearly aren't there yet. But it's easy to imagine something better than what we have today.
How are you going to wear a headset without compromising face to face video? I can't even imagine a theoretical solution and not a single company is working on this problem. Am I wrong? Obviously on a very long timeline you can solve this problem but the next 5 years? No way.
>I want the ability to have a quiet side convo off to the side. I want the ability to write on a whiteboard off to the side that people can look at when they want instead of taking-over the entire viewport for everybody.
None of this requires VR and is available in, for example, Jitsi video chats.
My standard for the future (10+ years out) is "if i have to hit the keyboard or click the mouse it's failed." In that case I'll definitely still want to go back to in-person collaboration.
> How are you going to wear a headset without compromising face to face video? I can't even imagine a theoretical solution and not a single company is working on this problem. Am I wrong? Obviously on a very long timeline you can solve this problem but the next 5 years? No way.
My best guess of what this would look like would be much closer to glasses than a full headset (no "sticking" to the face) with very good ultra-wide cameras + image processing to capture your face and upper body language at the same time. Maybe toss in a desktop-mounted webcam too. Not 100% immersed/blackout, but quite possibly good enough to be better than a flat monitor with also isn't 100% of your FOV.
Video chats drop body language, natural speaking cues, reduces the quality of group conversations and more. VR even with some of the tech today restores a bit of that and gives the feeling of presence. I'm excited to see where we're at with it in 10 years, I agree that today we're not there.
Video conferencing sucks. It's so much worse than a conversation with physical or simulated physical presence. I'd much rather have that sense of presence and having experienced that in VR I can say if the tech improves people will likely go for it.
You lose so many cues, tells and deep interactions that you get with a physical presence via video call. I have seen VR start to solve some of these and I think it will be pretty big if we get to the point where the cartoony graphics are ditched.
Body language is the most obvious. You don't even need very expressive avatars before certain things we naturally do in person become useful tells. I've had multiple conversations in VR, they flow much more naturally than video chats based on the sense of presence.
The quest pro just added expression tracking as well so now you have body language and normal emotional expressions. Wayyyyyyy more natural feeling than video chats, even if I'm seeing an avatar of someone and not their actual face.
Clearly you've never tried it. You do recognize you get no body language at all with current video chats right? One of the many reasons I think current teleconferencing is terrible. Like you just get a head 95% of the time.
It's interesting that you have identified exactly the same shortcomings that mobile had when the first commercial mobile phones came to market in the 80s:
- size
- weight
- battery life
- heat
- network reliability
- cost
These were all eventually overcome, incrementally. However, it did take about 30 years for that to happen, so 10 may have been a bit optimistic.
Another required quality that might be surprisingly tricky to get right is durability. Sunglasses are notoriously brittle, and I can't for the life of me keep sunglasses in good shape for more than a few months. I don't know if there is any great solution besides fundamentally altering the form.
The majority of durability issues of glasses are the hinges. So as long as you can make that part of the frame repairable, I feel like it could be manageable.
Not that there aren’t a bunch of other issues for every day wear. (I wear contacts for vision correction because I find glasses very annoying).
> So as long as you can make that part of the frame repairable, I feel like it could be manageable.
It also has to be impossible for failure of the hinges to lead to damage of the electronic components. I've lost multiple laptops to hinges twisting in ways that they shouldn't have and fracturing the motherboard or keyboard, and that's in a form factor that gets much less abuse than glasses.
> The majority of durability issues of glasses are the hinges
citation needed. For me, it's the scratches and the surface issues. Even though I have no problem taking care of my regular glasses for years, most of my sunglasses become unusable and hard to see through from deteriorating surface and scratches after 6-10 months. No matter if I get $30 or $300 ones.
Isn't that just sunglasses manufacturers simply cheaping out on lens materials and coatings? I don't see what would be stopping VR/AR manufacturers from making quality lenses.
If you wanted to you could make a pair of sturdy sunglasses, I think they are designed to break right now.
With regard to AR glasses, I would put the expensive part in my pocket like a phone, and the glasses would be just like the wireless earbuds, easily disposable / replaceable.
I'm really surprised I haven't heard this more often, because it seems like a given. AR glasses should be trying to offload as much work as they can to the supercomputers we carry around in our pockets. They have a much larger form factor that can support more compute, more battery, a better antenna, etc.
edit To be clear, I don't think we're anywhere near having cheap AR glasses that can just delegate all the work - rather I think there's so much compute that's necessary, we need the combination of what we can fit onboard the glasses and in our phones to make a compelling product.
They're not designed to break, they're simply picking the trade-off point that tends towards the "lightweight enough to wear all day" end of the continuum.
I don't believe it. I have this pair of safety glasses I bought from the hardware store for $5 and they are super light weight and rock solid. I could wear them all day and not even notice. Sometimes I even forget I am wearing them and wear them around inside for a while when I'm finished my work.
If they had some tint and UV protection and I would consider using them as shades.
update: I talked myself in looking at the hardware store website and my next sunglasses will be be some 3M safety glasses with a dark tint and uv. And less than $20.
The counter argument is that they have sank billions into this with top tier optoelectronic engineers working on realizing the vision. It is about as good an effort as you can reasonably get. If they want to go further, they will have to start building out their own exotic semiconductor basic research labs. Perhaps their only mistake is not scaling up the hardware R and D earlier.
One potential play is a joint venture with Apple, unpalatable yes, but they are the only other large scale consumer electronics company with the EEs
and hardware talent needed to execute this. I doubt even the military and government research labs can do a better job.
If there was something like a join venture between Apple & FB, it would be incredibly compelling as a software engineer interested in AR/VR to go work for them on it.
I don't think that's true. We were imagining them, and even trying to build them -- the hardware just wasn't capable of it. Newton, Palm and Handspring showed us the way, and those platforms died on the journey there. Apple arguably only added capacitive multitouch to the mix, apparently the last big piece of the puzzle to make mobile devices natural and fluid (OK, wireless networks weren't quite there when the original iPhone came out).
I'd argue that there are many, many puzzle pieces still needed to begin imagining an AR future. While the Newton showed an incomplete vision of its future, it begged all the right questions. My kids Occulus Quest, on the other hand, just makes me feel motion sick...
> My kids Occulus Quest, on the other hand, just makes me feel motion sick...
This feels like the similar kind of problems of understanding how to accommodate the human into the platform. Early mobile platforms were just "desktop, but smaller". You were expected to interact with the device using a stylus. Small checkboxes and UI elements were common. The device needed to regularly tether to a desktop.
Lots of VR games still allow you to move/rotate using thumbsticks. Part of it is that these games are ports of desktop experiences that wouldn't work any other way. Over time developers will better understand what works and what doesn't, and will design games/apps that don't make you nauseous.
There's also likely a bunch of vision problems that still need to be worked through. I have no expertise in VR but with my limited usage it feels quite close, and I think these problems are not insurmountable.
That's because the form factor of an iPhone is not fundamentally different from a 1998 Jornada.
All we had to do is keep putting different stuff in the box.
What if we changed the rules altogether? Suppose we demanded a phone that was a slab of glass. Literally. A rectangle of glass that you could see through. No visible antennae, no visible battery, no visible circuitry. when you activated it, you saw the same hi res and bright screen you see today on your ios or android device. Now the battery has to be clear. The antennae have to be clear. All the circuitry have to be clear.
Could we get that in the 20 years from 2002 to 2022? Probably not.
And AR glasses would represent a leap that goes even further than that. I'm not saying it can't be done by 2035. I'm saying they would have to get extraordinarily lucky with battery chemistry and display tech to have any chance of making an AR glasses product that did not have serious drawbacks by that date. They'd have to get so lucky that I would feel comfortable betting against it.
That’s a little bit of an overstatement don’t you think?
From the top of my head I can think of GURPS, Shadowrun and Cyberpunk all imagining very thoroughly things that both Mobile and VR gave or can give us, just to mention games that have been highly influential to the generation of people working on these technologies.
There are also loads of books, Asimov’s works have probably been the most influential, almost prophetically, in the creation of today’s Information era.
I'd argue 20 years of mobile development has given us a more powerful Palm with a SIM card and apps including ICQ with encryption, Skype but viable on a handheld device, email with office apps on a small screen, networked games instead of single player, maps, destruction of privacy from use of spyware on apps reporting every swipe, view of contact one has.
I'd argue most enabling changes exclusive to mobile have come from video, which was already a concept, location, which was already a concept, real-time status (which is mainly Twitter and Twitter-likes) and bandwidth. The 'killer feature' at the outset being syncing music and a web browser with sufficient adoption to make saying no to IE 6's vision of the web, and Flash, viable.
But I'm keen to know what was barely imagined back in 2000. Is it shift to mobile devices for a consumption?
Everyone have a look at the NReal Air demo videos and tell me this isn't possible in 20 years of development. It's a bit rough, but it's a product you can buy today, and not at all vaporware.
Cramming a Raspberry Pi worth of computing power and battery into the glasses frame doesn't seem nuts for 20 years of development.
That's an unrealistic expectation based on a faulty view of recent history.
I had my first 'smartphone' in 2003. By 2009 I had a device in my pocket that could almost replace my PC at both work and home and didn't spy on everything I did. In 2020 I had a device that was utterly useless for work and had become little more than an entertainment device that constantly sends data back to the mothership.
While unlikely it is certainly possible that hardware will advance to meet the need but the problem lies in how we do consumer software now. Because the hardware isn't the real product anymore predicting how it will develop gets much sketchier.
Either way, imagining that one change means another is possible or likely is silly.
I tend to disagree more with your view of history than the view of history taken from the comment you’re replying to.
> I had my first 'smartphone' in 2003
For all intents and purposes, the first ‘smartphone’ didn’t exist until the iPhone existed. How do I know? Because essentially every smartphone on the market today looks like an iPhone.
> In 2020 I had a device that was utterly useless for work and had become little more than an entertainment device
This is what millions (billions?) of people want even if it’s not what you want.
In 2000, Moore's law was still going strong and had been for the past 40 years (Dennard scaling not ending until around 2005). At that time it was actually more difficult for people to imagine a future that did not include practically unlimited computing capability. I'm not just talking about the unwashed masses, even many experts and leaders in the silicon industry did not see what was coming - Intel released the Pentium 4 in 2000 and was saying it would scale to 10GHz+ in a few years (https://www.anandtech.com/show/680/6).
This reminds me of how the public viewed computers before Windows 95, or when the iPhone just came out. The flaws are many and severe, but you’d be shortsighted if you couldn’t see the potential
There's a quip somewhere about how the essence of futurist misprediction has been confusing unlike-in-quality and unlike-in-capability.
Unlike-in-quality is the same thing, only better. It rarely changes the world, because it's not an infinite value proposition.
Unlike-in-capability, on the other hand, is offering something that literally didn't exist before. It approaches infinite value, because it has the capability to reshape the world into one that requires its existence.
Mobile internet was unlike-in-capability.
I have a very uphill battle convincing myself AR/VR is more than unlike-in-quality.
Maybe the only thing that gets me there is persistence, but the rub of that is that its requirements all require bulky physical configuration and/or isolation.
At its worst, earliest form, a brick cell phone was still portable, and didn't isolate the user from the world around them.
VR/AR is more unlike-in-capability than phones. If the hardware becomes a pair of glasses that have no friction in putting on, then it can engulf capabilities of TV, phone, PC, anything that has a screen. And unlike-in-quality part would be to project stuff on real world, be completely in a virtual world, etc. There is nothing like it.
I just think that making the hardware is the toughest challenge. Zuck might be underestimating hardware progress.
If he is right, godspeed, future would be amazing. If not, we'll have net positive experiment out of this and it will accelerate AR/VR hardware dev.
> I have a very uphill battle convincing myself AR/VR is more than unlike-in-quality.
Have you actually tried it? VR in particular demos poorly for people where most of their experience with VR is Google Cardboard. Even VR systems from 5 years ago are dated. You have to try it, especially some notable non-gaming apps
The current VR headsets seem more akin to the car phones or those huge brick mobile phones of the 70s/80s rather than smartphones. Lots of people saw its potential. But it was not ready for the masses.
Even with 'perfect' glasses, batteries, networking and tracking, you're still faced with the problem that the virtual world is populated by intangible apparitions while real-world obstacles remain very tangible. And conceptually, none of the solutions to those problems are ever going to become cheap or convenient, because they're problems with basic physics.
> It needs a battery that runs all day. It needs to not get hot and burn someone's face. It needs to be fast and responsive in terms of both local processing and network data transmission.
The first AR glasses will be close to dummy terminals. For them to become feasible, wireless networking infrastructure has to become low-latency, high-reliability, and high-throughput – but not necessarily ubiquitous. There's no need to have powerful compute in a small form-factor if that can be outsourced to nearby servers, and this is something that could be possible in the confines of a major city, and the hardware would be rolled out much like another mobile carrier.
>You would need a headset so small and light it's not too far off from a pair of sunglasses
Why? You don't have to transport VR. VR is the complement to mobile phones: mobile phones are used when you leave home, VR is used when you don't leave home.
The big question is: Are people going to leave home or are they going to stay home?
My guess is that it depends on how much energy is available. If there is no infrastructure worth visiting for billions of people, then VR will become a success.
>It needs to be inexpensive enough that everyone on Earth who currently has a smartphone can afford one.
If work happens in VR, then employer will finance the hardware for their employees.
Maybe. I thought we'd have more accessible shitty AR sooner. But VR has a lot of hard problems that don't seem solveable with a good hour of reflection in order to get it to the VR people see in movies.
With Apple allegedly joining the space in less than 2 months, and multiple sunglasses-sized devices out there already (nreal, rokid, etc), I think we'll know very soon whether XR has a chance of going mainstream this decade
You would need a headset so small and light it's not too far off from a pair of sunglasses. It needs a battery that runs all day. It needs to not get hot and burn someone's face. It needs to be fast and responsive in terms of both local processing and network data transmission. It needs to be inexpensive enough that everyone on Earth who currently has a smartphone can afford one. And, he is correct, it needs to have apps so compelling that people find hard to participate in society without one.
It's not even a guaranteed thing that such a device is even possible. Even if it is, no way would it be ready for 2025, maybe not even 2035.