Comment by utopiah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by utopiah | Hacker News Reader

I have a dozen VR headsets, more of them doing passthrough, I have AR glasses and even a monocle. I prototype in the field. The technology is amazing... but you don't need it to get value. Bring your tablet to the kitchen, add a webcam if you want to try to get visual feedback, display the recipe and... just cook.

I think there is a big gap between :

- how messy the World is (imagine a "normal" kitchen, not a prop for a demo)

- how good existing low-tech solutions are (e.g. just a book or a printed page for a recipe)

meaning that to provide marginally more value the tech has to be excellent at handle a messy World. Sure the tech is radically improving but we are vastly underestimating, as we did for robotics for decades now, how challenging seemingly menial task can be and how to do so reliably.

I always think of my Roomba in this kind of situation, namely when one tries to imagine a future where tech works outside of the computer. Basically my little vacuum robot mostly sits idling in the corner because... a basic broom or a normal vacuum cleaner is radically more efficient, even if it means I have to do so myself.

So... yes I'm techno-optimist but the timescale is IMHO not as close as we hope for.

PS: AR setups (glasses or not) do NOT have to be connected to be useful. Do not get footed by Meta slick ads to imply that only they can make glasses, heck I'm taped a pair together 5 years ago with a RasberryPi Zero. It wasn't slick https://twitter-archive.benetou.fr/utopiah/status/1449023602... but it worked.

I agree with the general vibe of your post but let me make a tangeant:

> I always think of my Roomba in this kind of situation, namely when one tries to imagine a future where tech works outside of the computer. Basically my little vacuum robot mostly sits idling in the corner because... a basic broom or a normal vacuum cleaner is radically more efficient, even if it means I have to do so myself.

For me the whole value of a robot vacuum is that... I don't vacuum, the robot does, and when it does so it when I'm not at home. Reduce the dust periodically by 75% so that it's neater; I'll do a deep clean every few month or so.

(maybe what you're saying is that the cost of vacuuming for you is low enough that it's similar to launching the robot vacuum, in that case I understand you !)

> the whole value of a robot vacuum is that... I don't vacuum, the robot does, and when it does so it when I'm not at home.

I agree, that's indeed the value proposition and that's in fact why I got mine... but do you really "just" do that, namely turn it on (or automatically with scheduling) or rather do you

- very it's charged (because sometimes it doesn't actually get right on its station)

- verify its empty or that its bin isn't full

- remove chairs and cables

then and only then start it?

I had just a few couple of "bad" experiences when it got stuck on something just a few centimeters of the floor or (and that one really sucks) cables entangled inside to reconsider how "worry free" letting it roam without supervision was. I don't have pets but if I did the poop smearing videos would also scare me quite a bit.

I see where you're coming from, because my robot tends to eat the cats toy as well as my computer charger cable. In my case the prep is minimal, as it's just putting them on the sofa. Otherwise the robot has no problem charging and returning home, (I only had issue 3 times in 5 years ?). Concerning the bin I have pets so in my mind I have to empty the bin after each run. But psychologically I see tons of hair so in a way it's satisfying to see a job well done. The pets are fortunately well behaved so poop smearing is a non-issue (some more recent robot also have object detection to avoid this kind of stuff).

In any case, the ritual is to run it every odd day or so just before leaving for work so the mental burden is low.

I worked on some next next gen AR glasses, I saw and used both orion and the prototype version of the rayban meta display glasses

Orion suffered from the problem that plagued it throughout its production: shifting goals and poor product management. The display team promised and then didn't deliver, twice.

One of my friends showed me a demo in meta display glasses (the production one) that allowed you to take a youtube recipe video, feed it into the dipshit machine and it'd spit out a step by step guide for you to follow. That was really nice to use.

The demo I worked on was taking some research glasses and attaching SLAM, always on audio and basic VLM descriptions of what you are looking at and dumping it into a database. You'd be surprised at how useful that context was. at the end of the day you could say "In the meeting I had with x what were the actions" Sometimes it even worked. Because everything that you saw or did was geocoded (ie it knew which room you were in) and linked to a calendar, even though facial and voice recognition wasn't allowed, you could get something akin to a decent executive assistant.

Making it secure and private is a big fucking challenge. I put in face and screen blurring, but thats not really enough. There is OCR based on eye gaze, which is hard to censor. The problem is there is more than enough context stored to infer lots of things.

The problem is not just securing the storage, its finding a decent sharing mechanisms that allows you to perform normal actions without asking a million questions or over sharing.

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