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Comment by spsful | Hacker News Reader

This is what I don't understand about their plan. Who on earth is planning to adopt this? We've seen a push from all sides of the tech industry to open up the AR/VR space, and it never took off.

Remember the Snapchat Spectacles? They still sell them but I don't think they were ever popular. Google glass? Popular, but discontinued. Apple's ARKit? Definitely much less adoption than their commercials would have led you to expect.

It seems like this is an experiment bound to fail, so good luck to the execs at f̶a̶c̶e̶b̶o̶o̶k̶ meta who have to clean this up in the end.

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I can't speak for VR, but AR definitively has a future.

You already see practical use of this technology with HUD-tech (Heads up display) in cars, but beyond that you'll find great applications for it within medicine/operations, transportation (directions), marketing (product information, authenticity verification), and the list goes on and on...

Yes, AR has some potential as an industrial or otherwise specialized technology. It won't be revolutionary or change the world in any way, but it will probably improve several kinds of processes, a background tech.

VR is much more likely to either become the new TV or to die an obscure death, like 3D movies.

VR becoming the new TV is highly unlikely because many people multitask while watching TV. this is very difficult to do with VR.

You could multitask in VR, without even anyone noticing?

How can you wash dishes while your entire view field is covered by some movie?

I was more thinking about the "second screen" multitasking that's quite common. With VR, the second screen is like build-in.

I was thinking more of TV in the way it captured audiences in the 50s, 60s, 70s. You're probably right though that AR has a bigger chance of capturing something like the way TV is interacted with today (a background activity).

3D movies will come back and die again. And again, forever

Exactly, this whole things screams “we don’t know what people want”. The video looks like a very well made parody.

>Remember the Snapchat Spectacles? They still sell them but I don't think they were ever popular. Google glass? Popular, but discontinued. Apple's ARKit? Definitely much less adoption than their commercials would have led you to expect.

This is all pretty inaccurate. Glass wasn't even a VR/AR headset. The released Spectacles were just cameras. They're releasing a new Spectacles devkit that's actually an AR headset soon. Snap filters are still very popular and ARKit is also quite popular although it hasn't really hit a killer business case.

Remember this AR Demo from Apple way back with the iPhone 8?

https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/12/16272904/apple-arkit-demo...

And what commercial applications of this have we seen in the last 4 years?

Pokemon Go?

Unifi has an AR app for working with their switches[1] that shows some HUD info for each port. I've never used it on my switches personally and judging by that video it's more trouble than it's worth. But it exists. I suppose in a large data centre this might be useful, but the technology still seems pretty immature.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dlB-UAhTyw

Related tech that got traction is BLE in servers with corresponding apps, like Dell Quick Sync. Lets you flash the ID light of a server from your phone, among lots of other things.

Both Glass and Spectacles were sold only to the "chosen ones".

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