Hacker News Reader

Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

Seems like AR is a lot more approachable than VR in that you don't have to strap on so much gear to immerse yourself into a Virtual Based / Enhanced reality. Even Snap seems to be invested in AR if you think about it, how many snaps don't feature some augmented visuals? If people go crazy over that to the point that Facebook, and even iOS steals that type of AR functionality, there must be more to AR than meets the eye.

To a computer geek it may not seem impressive now, but to the average person it casually sneaks up into their everyday life.

View on HN

It seems as if VR is one of those things where getting to 90% isn't very useful for most people and even if you get to essentially 100% (wireless, usable with mainstream processing power, comfortable lightweight goggles), it may not be all that interesting outside of some niches like certain types of gaming or virtual worlds. A lot of the time people don't want to be immersed.

AR, on the other hand, is very amenable to incremental development. You don't need a Google Glass 2.0 with all the technical and social challenges associated with that. A phone that you can point at something and get information about it is already useful.

I think VR is forever destined to be a niche sideline. Seems like I've been hearing that VR is about to take off every few years since the 90s. It resolutely fails to do so and aside from some "wow" at tech demos and games there's no killer VR app that makes it a must have.

AR is much more instantly obvious to all with things like Night Sky and augmented maps.

In some ways, you could almost argue that VR (and immersive experiences generally) has garnered less interest as it's become closer to reality. The Kinect is gone. The Wii fad is over. The VR devices that do exist have pretty much highlighted the difficulty of creating fully immersive experiences, especially in a typical home environment. And, as you say, there's really been nothing that makes the typical or even not so typical person go "I gotta get some of that VR."

I suppose we may get there someday but it may also be one of those things that it seemed logical to assume people would want (and many thought they did), but they mostly don't.

Seems to me, good AR takes as much or more compute work than good VR. You say "oh it runs on any old phone" but with the exception of a way to strap it to your face, if your phone can do really low latency image tracking then it most likely can do a simple VR scene too.

The proof is in the pudding, isn't it? We have way more VR games than AR apps, don't we?

Definitely. I think Apple really envisions something like this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs ...being the future, and they want to get ahead of it.

I think that video is more of a warning about the dangers of cognitive overload, cybersecurity, and estrangement.

It looks impressive whilst also being oppressive.

>It looks impressive whilst also being oppressive.

That's an apt description of the technological future in general...

They offer fundamentality different experiences so I'm not sure we should be grouping them together as much as we do. It's like saying "It seems like cars are a lot more practical than boats" - but they're intended for different things.

There might be some cross over in some of the technology, and how you consume it, and the end game may be AR eyewear/contacts that can do proper virtual reality, but for now - they're quite far apart from each other.

You say that but I'm not sure that's empirically true or just your own personal anecdote. Mainstream sub-$200 VR headsets exists today and people use them daily. AR is fun, but you I can't point to AR actually selling anything.

Even Animoji is a special case for apple. They had the face unlock tracking so this kind of face tracking feature makes sense. It's not general purpose AR though. Does Apple have any official app features using AR that isn't face tracking?

Apple is hyping AR more because they don't have any VR to speak of but in terms of what's actually released and what people are using I could see an argument that VR comes out ahead in that comparison.

I can't point to AR actually selling anything

Maybe you personally can't, but that doesn't mean it doesn't. Our company increased a client's purchase rate, A/B tested over 100s of thousands of AR user instances, consistently by 1.89% in a sales cycle. So yes it works.

Where implemented well, there is a measurable shift in user behavior.

Apple is hyping AR more because they don't have any VR to speak of

No. It's because they want to own the AR mapping and content landscape which are both required for glasses to work.

Youre right I personally can't name it but I'd be interested to know what app has 100s of thousands of AR users browsing products. What app would this be?

>No. It's because they want to own the AR mapping and content landscape which are both required for glasses to work.

This also makes no sense. They don't own the text or image content creation landscape and they still make computers and browsers. AR already exist (although they're quite expensive and cumbersome) so a new proprietary asset format might be nice but its not a requirement. What are you saying here? Just that they're pushing AR to force adoption of USDZ?

To the first question, I'm under NDA for the company we worked for but it's a F50 retailer.

Other than them, Ikea, Amazon, Wayfair and a handful of other e-retailers with MM+ users have AR integrated into their apps with comparable bumps.

This also makes no sense.

It makes perfect sense if you have been an AR developer for 10 years. The simple version is that you need to a 3D "google maps" of sorts, to do something called re-localization before you release glasses. Bootstrapping such a system wouldn't get you very far, literally, because people will be expecting persistent content wherever they go without you - the user - having to insert it. So you have to have a pretty robust mapping corpus to start with. There are a half dozen ways to do this, but the best way is to source and create these maps with mobile/handheld AR systems first.

To the content piece, if you can "save" content to the real world - in context - which is what ARKit2 is now doing with their multi-user re-localization/multiplayer, then you can build out the "real estate" system you need for persistent objects - again, something necessary for AR glasses to "just work."

For more you can watch my talk on this from a few years ago I did remote for UMASS EE graduate students:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_0aoE9nrqM

This is the current land rush in the AR dev world - Apple and Google already own it unfortunately.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com