The only consumer case for this, other than the already discussed ones, that I can come up with is some sort of remote in-store shopping device. You pop these on and you're walking the aisles of a store to pull items off a shelf, compare prices, check inventory. But crikey...thats a huge stretch.
Aside from gaming—which might be a viable multi-million unit market—what's the large (and broad) scale use case?
Movies. It gives you a virtual display as big as 200" anywhere you are and in true 3D and in some cases OLED.
Art. It gives you an infinite canvas for drawing onto arbitrary surface anywhere you are, also in 3D.
Music. It lets you attend virtual concerts and watch a live stage from the sofa.
Sports. You can pay for a virtual camera sitting at a live sporting event and feel like you are there.
Gaming is a big use case for this because it can be made to work with any gaming device. People can connect a Nintendo Switch to it and play with a big virtual screen anywhere.
Education. Currently educators and parents are competing with devices for a child's attention and failing. They are losing to gaming. AR/VR devices can gamify education.
What holds VR back is most of the hardware is too expensive (Oculus Quest is one of the few at a mainstream price), too bulky and they can't be used much for the above due to the form factor and technical setup they need. Apple's hardware is always done in a way that is intuitive to use. There were tablets before the iPad but they were only used in business. When iPads arrived, kids could use them easily.
With a mass-market price point (starting under $799), lightweight form factor, good first party software support (app store + easy to access movie content), they can easily sell millions of units per year.
Thanks. Interesting ideas. I'm still skeptical.
Movies, Music, Sports: So I need to buy a headset ($800 a pop) for everyone in my family to enjoy a movie (basically now in isolation) when we could just sit back on the couch and enjoy some snacks and watch a large flat screen together? This seems like more work (and cost) than necessary for the additional benefits.
Art, Education: Um, okay. Sure. I'm old enough now to just chuckle at suggestions that some new amazing technology will be used to revolutionize things like art or education. TV was going to be that. LOL. I'm sure there are applications here. But I'm skeptical this moves lots of units.
Gaming: Yep. I get it. This is the one that does make the most sense. In part because a lot of gaming actively strives to create immersive experiences. I could even see some physical, location-based games like escape rooms being done in this way. Maybe. But even escape rooms have an interactive social aspect to not be discounted.
And at the bottom of it all, these examples end up doing things that isolating people from the social experiences of enjoying these things (e.g., watching movies, concerts, or sporting events.) I'm curious whether mass numbers of people actually want to do that on any kind of regular or consistent basis...enough to justify the cost.
And any argument that suggests "this can/will be social" and "you can/will be interacting with others" ignores the neurological and physiological aspects of real (face-to-face, in-person, physical proximate) social experiences. This is a very human thing. You could say it's one of the things that makes us human. I'm not sure people are keen to give that up. Oh sure, they will try it. They'll experiment. They'll dip their toe in the water. But I think they will end up finding it wanting/lacking something that can be achieved without an expensive device strapped to their face.
TBH this feels a lot like Dean Kamen's aspirational ideas of complete cities being built (or re-configured) around the Segway personal transporter. It is a great technology. But it just didn't shake out as a change the world kind of thing and ended up being just a niche product.
So...I may end up being completely wrong. But I'm definitely a skeptic at this point.
For use cases there is no real limit for anything that could benefit from extra information but that information needs to be sourced from somewhere and there will be a huge amount of it floating around.
Imagine walking around anywhere and having access to a wealth of extra information about everything you see. Imagine the device itself being able to identify what you are 'seeing' by using AI. It could be a leaf you find and want to identify the tree. It could be the food on your plate and you want some nutrition advice. Imagine if it had access to your health data and could use it to offer up advice. Imagine reading something in another language and seeing it overlaid with the translation in your native language. Imagine the same for spoken language.
For leisure, health, business, home, everyday situations and just about everything you can imagine, use cases will pop up.
It's a little like the internet in its infancy. Some people had a hard time getting beyond the idea of email and basic web pages.
AR/VR/MR/XR or whatever name eventually sticks will become compelling for future generations. I'm sure we'll see all kinds of new problems associated with it and there are pros and cons involved.
But we'll have to go through infancy and move to maturity while adapting to change along the way. I don't know how long it might take but information technologies and being deployed faster and faster.
No doubt initial devices might be comparable to those first 'brick' mobile phones in some ways but expect things to move fast.
We are entering the yottabyte age according to some ICT bigwigs so the backend of these emerging technologies has to keep pace with them and figure out how to keep the data flowing.
Art, Education: Um, okay. Sure. I'm old enough now to just chuckle at suggestions that some new amazing technology will be used to revolutionize things like art or education. TV was going to be that. LOL. I'm sure there are applications here. But I'm skeptical this moves lots of units.
More on the subject of art, there is a video here talking about MR rendering with iOS (39:40):
Because we are so used to 2D screens, a lot of people probably assume it will be much the same in a different form factor but it's capable of proper 3D. The animated dragon in the video shown at 41:52, the ball crashing through the floor at 42:35 shows how different this will be than computing platforms we are used to.
Artists will be able to sculpt like a sculptor in real dimensions, costume designers can dress virtual mannequins.
VR technology is experimenting with these kind of things but they are currently not designed from the outset as AR products, even though some offer passthrough because their main audience is gaming. It's been the same with all technology products before Apple. Blackberry before iPhone, Windows tablets before iPads, IBM PC before Macs, MP3 players before iPods. The trend is the same, the tech guys all make their nerdy, user-unfriendly, trashy products and they appeal to the same types who know how to set them up. Then Apple comes along and makes products that work well for everyone.
Some of the ARKit demos on iOS are amazing but they are very limited on a handheld device. Once those migrate to glasses and people are fully immersed in those experiences, it will blow people's minds. In the Apple Store, they can partner with Disney and when kids wear them, they can show Disney characters walking around them, particles flying around, even change the entire store environment and lighting. There is a demo from 5 years ago showing this in VR:
The problem is, nobody wants to sit around strapped in to a bulky nerd helmet and gaming PC like this neckbeard Youtuber MonkieDude22. The content producers are able to deliver but the platforms aren't right. They are too expensive, too bulky, software/setup is too clunky. On every platform, Apple are the experts in user experience and this is what the AR/VR/MR platform is badly in need of. It may still only be a less frequently used product but it will be a compelling enough experience that lots of people will want to use it for something.
Apple has a knack for creating the use case that we haven't thought of yet.
That's known as Gretzky's Blades, skating to where the puck will be. Because of that a lot of Apple products are slow burns. iPods, iPhones, iPads, Watches and other products were all claimed to be flops because they didn't sell hundreds of millions the first days of sale. Never mind most manufacturers would love to have the sales numbers of those "flops". Sales grew and detractors withered.
This will be a fairly narrow niche product at first. FUD and pricing will keep it out of the hands of many. Apple's implantation may put others off. People like me will merely be wondering is this a product that might somehow interest me. We won't know that until it ships.
I'm looking for something a little beyond video games and not video games. So it's wait and see for the hand Apple deals.
I think at this point for a stand alone headset that people would actually wear throughout the day, AR is far more likely than VR(weight, latency, FOV, etc). What I would like to see is integration across devices so that the AR would be useful. IE, if I get it my car, it recognizes its in my car and will overlay mapping detail, speed or other useful statistics. If I am at my desk at work, it will work with my Setup and allow me to place additional screens or assigned notifications or somehow be additive to my workflow, but continue to keep me up to date on emails/messages when I am away from my desk. If I was at a live sports event, it would give me something like the "Fox Box" with scores, stats, etc. Basically, I am not necessarily looking for a highly interactive experience at this point(in fact, I would find that dangerous for driving or even just walking around). I would just like something that intelligently puts the relevant information in to a my field of view, but not in a extremely distracting manner.
What I would really like to see is all devices and stores(cars, motorcycles, computers, grocery stores, etc) start to incorporate a standard communication platform similar to "Matter" for the smart home. One of the simplest explanations I could give is if I went to Lowes and wanted to know where the plumbers putty is, the glasses could interact with information from the store and guide me to the location(just spent 10 minutes walking around the plumbing section of Lowes to find it at an end cap by the sinks...).
All these AR/VR haters will probably all be online or in line bright and early on launch day.
Who are the "haters"?
Is that a serious question?
Yes. Just curious who you are calling "haters" on this subject?
Does it matter? Anyone who whines about haters of any kind can be immediately disregarded.
Is that what I was doing? Whining?
Absolutely. An unprovoked complaint about nameless "haters" (possibly) saying things in the future that you have predetermined that you don't agree with. Clear cut whining.
It's very easy to tell who among the commenters has actually tried VR. Anyone dismissing games clearly hasn't played any immersive VR games, which are incredible even while still in their infancy. Between PSVR 2 presumably later this year and whatever Apple comes out with, I'm extremely excited.
I'm also wondering what the XR dev situation on the Mac will be. It's been a while since Rift/Vive support on Mac withered on the vine and died off. I'm really hoping that comes back for people working both to develop for Apple's XR platform but also stereo/360 video and game engine content.
Comments
Imagine walking around anywhere and having access to a wealth of extra information about everything you see. Imagine the device itself being able to identify what you are 'seeing' by using AI. It could be a leaf you find and want to identify the tree. It could be the food on your plate and you want some nutrition advice. Imagine if it had access to your health data and could use it to offer up advice. Imagine reading something in another language and seeing it overlaid with the translation in your native language. Imagine the same for spoken language.
For leisure, health, business, home, everyday situations and just about everything you can imagine, use cases will pop up.
It's a little like the internet in its infancy. Some people had a hard time getting beyond the idea of email and basic web pages.
AR/VR/MR/XR or whatever name eventually sticks will become compelling for future generations. I'm sure we'll see all kinds of new problems associated with it and there are pros and cons involved.
But we'll have to go through infancy and move to maturity while adapting to change along the way. I don't know how long it might take but information technologies and being deployed faster and faster.
No doubt initial devices might be comparable to those first 'brick' mobile phones in some ways but expect things to move fast.
We are entering the yottabyte age according to some ICT bigwigs so the backend of these emerging technologies has to keep pace with them and figure out how to keep the data flowing.
Because we are so used to 2D screens, a lot of people probably assume it will be much the same in a different form factor but it's capable of proper 3D. The animated dragon in the video shown at 41:52, the ball crashing through the floor at 42:35 shows how different this will be than computing platforms we are used to.
Artists will be able to sculpt like a sculptor in real dimensions, costume designers can dress virtual mannequins.
VR technology is experimenting with these kind of things but they are currently not designed from the outset as AR products, even though some offer passthrough because their main audience is gaming. It's been the same with all technology products before Apple. Blackberry before iPhone, Windows tablets before iPads, IBM PC before Macs, MP3 players before iPods. The trend is the same, the tech guys all make their nerdy, user-unfriendly, trashy products and they appeal to the same types who know how to set them up. Then Apple comes along and makes products that work well for everyone.
Some of the ARKit demos on iOS are amazing but they are very limited on a handheld device. Once those migrate to glasses and people are fully immersed in those experiences, it will blow people's minds. In the Apple Store, they can partner with Disney and when kids wear them, they can show Disney characters walking around them, particles flying around, even change the entire store environment and lighting. There is a demo from 5 years ago showing this in VR:
The problem is, nobody wants to sit around strapped in to a bulky nerd helmet and gaming PC like this neckbeard Youtuber MonkieDude22. The content producers are able to deliver but the platforms aren't right. They are too expensive, too bulky, software/setup is too clunky. On every platform, Apple are the experts in user experience and this is what the AR/VR/MR platform is badly in need of. It may still only be a less frequently used product but it will be a compelling enough experience that lots of people will want to use it for something.
This will be a fairly narrow niche product at first. FUD and pricing will keep it out of the hands of many. Apple's implantation may put others off. People like me will merely be wondering is this a product that might somehow interest me. We won't know that until it ships.
I'm looking for something a little beyond video games and not video games. So it's wait and see for the hand Apple deals.
What I would really like to see is all devices and stores(cars, motorcycles, computers, grocery stores, etc) start to incorporate a standard communication platform similar to "Matter" for the smart home. One of the simplest explanations I could give is if I went to Lowes and wanted to know where the plumbers putty is, the glasses could interact with information from the store and guide me to the location(just spent 10 minutes walking around the plumbing section of Lowes to find it at an end cap by the sinks...).
I'm also wondering what the XR dev situation on the Mac will be. It's been a while since Rift/Vive support on Mac withered on the vine and died off. I'm really hoping that comes back for people working both to develop for Apple's XR platform but also stereo/360 video and game engine content.