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Comment by bluescrn | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

20 years of mobile phone development gave us things that we could barely have imagined back in 2000 or so.

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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).

Yeah but we're dealing with the vestibular system here and other biological systems. It's apples to oranges.

I think that's Zuckerbg's point: he wants to be oranges. He certainly doesn't want it to be apple's.

I don't think the vestibular system is a solvable problem with VR but it is much less / a non-issue with AR. Thats why he always talks about VR/AR.

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