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Galloping furiously through the forest on my trusty steed, intent on intercepting the courier agent before it arrives in the next town with my 2AM texts to my ex...

I think it could go either way, honestly. As far as modern efficient e-mailing goes, it will simply be nice in many ways to have floating apps in the room instead of windows on a monitor, once the comfort/productivity tradeoff improves. But also, maybe when I open a real letter, my glasses recognize it as a letter, scan it into my library and blow it up into a floating virtual page, with or without OCR, maybe with additional context and history. Maybe I can choose to open a UI to respond digitally, or maybe it physically points me to my paper and pen. I can do any combination of writing a real letter or a virtual letter and sending it digitally or using the oldfashionedletters.com plugin to send out 100 cursive wedding invitations supported by whatever digital back-end is activated when the recipients' glasses detect reception of the letter. Point is, there's a unification of both approaches and they each gain new superpowers.

You're talking about novelty wearing off, but I think that might just be the difference between good and bad skeuomorphic design. Your email scenario is definitely a plausible thing that someone would make right now, and it would absolutely suck and die, but maybe it's just part of an experimental trend that will exhaust itself like that period in the 90s when every new cd-rom you'd pop in would autolaunch a unique, horrendously ugly and confusingly skinned UI that looked like it was straight out of a Cronenberg movie. It suddenly becomes easy to make a bunch of dumb shit and it takes time to see what sticks, and there's a lot of silliness on the road to best practices... but they ARE buried somewhere in there, we DO eventually get to a fundamentally better way of interacting with computers.

For me, the killer app for VR is actually AR.

I want to be able to put on a pair of glasses and pull up a 3D diagrammatic overlay of anything I'm trying to fix around the house or in my car, complete with tutorials. If I'm in a hardware store, I want to be able to say what it is that I want and have a path to it highlighted. I want to be able to turn a depressing walk in a crummy downtown neighbourhood into a relaxing walk in the forest. I want to be able to stroll along in that forest talking to someone as though they were walking right next to me even though they are very far away.

This stuff is, technically, not that far off. I just hope a company that respects user privacy gets there first.

Yeah, AR is definitely the killer app for me — though the implementation might end up being like Apple’s AR-through-VR.

Games like Horizon Zero Dawn or Cyberpunk 2077 have diegetic AR HUDs that highlight some of the stuff you could do, and I’ve definitely felt the desire to have some of those features available IRL.

It's a but further off than you might think. Even the Vision Pro is on the border of acceptability for working and reading in, and that's literally the bleeding edge of miniturized display technology. Going from a traditional flat panel display to a waveguide and projectors with an optically transparent display is a MASSIVE endeavor, at this point is essentially limited by physics (bound by current research) let alone issues with heat, battery life etc.

The AR products that eventuallg spur mass adoption are almost guaranteed to be backed by billion dollar investments, with the expectation of more user data than ever before.

By your own logic if the Vision Pro is on the border of acceptability, and it's here, now, is it really going to be THAT long? To get to the endgame, sure, but things are only getting better and cheaper, and what intermediate steps will cross that threshold? Yes it takes a long time for the Meta glasses category to fully merge with the Vision Pro category, but moving either one just a little bit towards the other will be incredibly useful and accelerate the process. Also, regarding the "bleeding edge" comment, obviously that's true in many respects, but iirc there ARE a few industrial headsets out there that, for way more money, beat it on some isolated core specs like panel and passthrough resolution (who knows about overall quality; I suspect the Vision Pro is better or equal with lower specs per Apple's MO). There are also other other form factors developing right now, like I suspect that it won't be long before we see some very compelling version of the minimal Bigscreen VR style goggles with the addition of cameras tethered to a Steamdeck-type device that you can hide in a bag (if not pocket).

> I want to be able to turn a depressing walk in a crummy downtown neighbourhood into a relaxing walk in the forest

I cannot wait to get mugged by the gingerbread man

Do you know the mugging man?

The mugging man?

The mugging man.

Do I know the mugging man... Who preys on Drury Lane?

TL;DR: The killer app is boring (virtual monitors) and we don't have good enough headsets to do it yet

> There may be some useful 3D visualizations for understanding things

> Moving a mouse is so much faster and easier, even more-so with abstract filter/assistant tools.

Exactly. The only thing I'm hyped for so far is the idea that one day, we'll have virtual monitors. First, we need good enough headsets. The technology has improved since OP's article, but there's more work to do.

Some of it is software. We'd have to do the awful work of implementing backward-compatible virtual monitor and window management. Look at X vs Wayland for an example of how hard it is to get things right.

Despite how hard all of this is, I suspect it's the way forward because:

* it'd be cheaper and more flexible than complex multi-monitor standing desks

* thousands of years after inventing writing, we still rely on writing 2D characters on 2D surfaces for language

* we can inset AR and 3D panels into manual windows the way we already do to reality with physical 3D displays

I think headsets are decent enough for virtual monitors, as in the resolution and latency are reasonable and head and hand tracking works just well enough. The software quality, HCI design and UI problems are bigger issues IMO, e.g. having a native multi tasking enviroment, proper mouse support, better gesture control over virtual monitors, better viewing of large surfaces based on eye tracking, voice controls.

TL;DR: Starting with AR overlay monitors + mouse would simplify deliverables to focus on hard technical hurdles could be the focus

IMO, some of what you mentioned is contradictory. That's not a bad thing. For example, virtual monitor and gesture-based headset-only devices might have different use cases. It's like the difference between a an iPhone, iPad, and ARM-based Mac. All might share software and hardware components, but they're each good at very different things.

To my understanding, focusing on the virtual monitors first has a number of benefits:

* Simplify deliverables and OS integration significantly

* Help developers by providing cheaper multi-monitor setups

* Dogfooding

* Get certain technical parts (foveated rendering, etc) right before trying to nail new input methods

> but even everybody will quickly realize that standing and crouching and waving their arms around all day "picking up" data-objects and and "dropping" them into virtual filing zones is going nowhere.

It might just solve the obesity epidemic though.

Losing weight is way more about diet than exercise. The body gets really efficient at doing repetitive motions and starts burning fewer calories for the same actions.

Moving will always burn more calories than not moving.

Not necessarily.

> In 2016, Pontzer and colleagues published a study putting forward the constrained energy model: Energy expenditure does increase with more activity, but only to a point. Once physical activity gets really high, the body will adjust other components of the metabolism to keep your daily energy expenditure within a narrow range

https://physiqonomics.com/biggest-losers/

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/07/study-off...

99.9% of people do not need to worry about reaching a “really high” level of activity where it will stop burning more calories.

That's why there are games where, ya know, you can do stuff that isn't safe / legal IRL but is exciting.