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Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

I respect Marc, but I totally disagree. AR has so many practical business uses that VR just doesn't have. Look at the AR demos Microsoft has produced for industry...they are super impressive. And they work along with sensors and other IoT devices. This is for a headset that is in its infancy.

The only way I can see VR having higher value is gaming. AR certainly will not be a gaming device (imo) but HUD to display valuable information is the future. Once it's at a state of being compact it can penetrate the consumer market, right now it really only has business uses.

VR headsets are kind of already ready for gaming...but who do you know that games with one of the sets? It's few and far between. Obscuring your vision entirely just makes people feel silly and vulnerable. I also think gaming is a sedentary activity, people aren't really that interested in moving around. If they were, they'd go play paintball.

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VR is already seeing significant adoption in business for training. Anywhere where training on the real thing is difficult or dangerous, where the real equipment is expensive and / or hard to transport or where the real training scenario is difficult to recreate physically. Even where these factors don't hold very strongly, the combination of immersion and repeatability has value over traditional training approaches.

We're seeing success using VR for surgical training but it's also seeing use for training in aerospace (Boeing both for pilots and maintenance engineers, NASA for astronauts), factory work (Volkswagen), sports (NFL) and retail (Walmart). Training and education is going to be a huge market for VR and for many scenarios VR is better than AR.

While VR can be used for training in the use cases above I would think AR would be better and used much more often in their day to day jobs. Imagine a retail employee scanning everything with AR goggles or an airplane tech having AR to read manuals or display info while they are fixing stuff.

>VR is already seeing significant adoption in business for training. Anywhere where training on the real thing is difficult or dangerous, where the real equipment is expensive and / or hard to transport or where the real training scenario is difficult to recreate physically.

As someone familiar in the training industry, it's still nowhere much to be seen...

Another big one is mining. Often the machinery doesn't have a duplicate, and the mine loses millions of dollars per hour of downtime, operating on already thin margins. Reducing maintenance times and risks by having the apprentices practice first in VR so they aren't a burden on the experienced technicians is a huge opportunity.

I agree, I see 2 distinct big markets:

AR = Business

VR = Entertainment

I think you're right about AR having more business uses than VR, and VR bring mostly for gaming. But I also think the gaming market for VR is and will be much bigger than the business market for AR.

Most of the AR business uses are dubious or downright stupid (kind of like a lot of IoT stuff) whereas there is already a real market for VR gaming.

There are simply more hours in a day to spend on business than there is on gaming. Enterprise spending is nearly $4T whereas gaming is $150B, that’s a 26x difference.

I can see AR working in cars with HUDs that highlights everything on the road for you at night. We are already adding all the sensors in the cars that are produced today.

I see AR integrating much more in our day to day lives, small things like screens, keyboards, and other UIs. VR is for more immersive experiences, be it for entertainment or for business. A lot of industries are testing VR for tasks such as oil and pipeline exploration.

There are signs that Microsoft may be thinking that AR could win out in the end in gaming as well. They've got some gaming demos that are nearly as impressive as their industry demos.

Studies have shown it will always be safer and less disorienting to leave people at least their peripheral vision when playing games where they move about a physical environment, and if you are going to do that you might as well make that physical environment a part of the game.

There's always going to be games that are more immersive in full opaque VR than AR, but games have been immersive in 8-bit on a tiny CRT screen, the small "quality" difference between AR "partial" immersion and VR "full" immersion may not matter in the long run to good games.

I think AR for table top gaming could be huge, even turning Minecraft into a Lego like game. I'm not entirely convinced of many other use cases in gaming though.

I think the same reason table top gaming works so well, you might see a lot of advantages to "wall-mounted" gaming. Most existing games could work well, just sending a bit more of their existing depth buffers to AR systems. Certainly easier than what a lot of VR ports of traditional 2D monitor games need to go through (particularly if they hope to avoid motion sickness concerns).

Also, as I said, I think the safety factor of AR pushes it to be more useful in "full room" games than opaque VR, and there's a lot of room for interesting games in that space, and probably a higher ceiling in terms of interested players in AR than in enclosed VR because of the safety/motion sickness/etc issues.

The thing that's missing would be the feel of touching the objects. Particularly, this could be bad for toddlers learning to manipulate stuff

I think there will be a move to integrate tactile objects with the "holograms." Like a piece is tactile, but it's actions (shooting, etc) are not.

AR is really only useful when the object or information you're visualising is smaller than the room you're currently in. That includes a lot of things and works for a lot of situations but most of the world doesn't fit inside a room.

I'm not sure VR headsets are the future of gaming either.

I had one of the PSVR headsets and it makes gaming even more isolationist.

Playing a console (where I believe the majority of gamers come from) is quite casual, you sit on the couch quite a distance from the screen with a basic controller.

Playing on the PC is more serious endeavour, often with headphones and sitting quite close to the screen.

VR is even more serious than playing on the PC, you need a dedicated space (to run around), you're completely cut off from the outside world.

VR means you really want to set yourself up for a long gaming session, due to the headset it is always going to be quite isolationist in ways other avenues are not.

Nothing is going to beat the true AR - Actual Reality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0AlNLloC8A </joke>

I don't see VR replacing the white board any time soon. I see AR doing that.

AR is a business thing, VR will be in every home, taxis, airplanes, schools, you name it

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