Hypereality

I’d like the contents of an iMac pro, just in a box, so I could add the monitor I prefer for software development (a wide flat one).

I’m glad Apple have shared their plans as I now know my only immediate option will be a hackintosh, so I can go ahead and build one of those. Not an ideal solution but looks like the only option that permits display selection.

SpamSandwich said:

Without onboard LIDAR, echolocation or some other means of pinging the surrounding environment or determining the scale of nearly featureless surroundings, A/R will continue to have difficulty determining z-scale information to place the viewer inside a properly scaled environment.

Google's tango program used structured light, like the front facing camera on the iPhone X. 

However ARKit works better than Tango with the rear camera  despite not having structured light showing just how very far you can go in deriving z-index information simply from VIO.  

Yes, its true that with a completely featureless surface VIO will not work, but in reality such surfaces are not so common as to make AR useless as you suggest. 

The power requirements and bulk of structured light, LIDAR etc. means that in the foreseeable future these will remain specialist tools (eg: for face detection as in the iPhone X) rather than general AR camera tools.  

In the meantime VIO will just get better and better and once people have the glasses then there are some very useful general applications that will become possible. 

I was OK with this until I realised that they were enforcing the subscription for existing users.  I paid for both iOS and OSX apps last year.  Effectively that was a lot of money for a little over 1 year of use. 

Complete rip off and I may complain to Apple over this as I believe this is not fair treatment of customers to remove all functionality. I call it blackmail. 

Exported all my Ulysses content as .md docs today into iCloud folders.
Installed MacDown (free) 
Deleted Ulysses 
One star review. 
 
Now what's next?

I'll add, Microsoft are about 5 years early with this tech, but it suits them, they have a long term re-invention plan.

All this stuff we see, including the Surface Studio is niche markets and low volume, but they are generating huge brand credibility and reputation through thus early marketing, thus will pay dividends for them if they can keep going long enough until the transition to pervasive computing based on MR becomes the norm, I think that's a decade out at least, unless Apple does what it did with iPhone sooner than that.

While I'm no Microsoft fan, the term mixed-reality is the right one.

VR - 3D models in a virtual 3D graphic space
AR - 2d layering of information and graphics on a cameras eye view of the world
MR - 3D models added to a cameras eye or 3D view of the world, i.e. Stereoptic through a head mounted device.

An iPhone mapping/navigation system using e.g. Metaio for object recognition would be AR

An Apple HMD e.g.: Zeiss glasses with 3D models rendered would be MR

We'll hear a lot about MR in future, for now Apple is correctly focused on AR and their vast iPhone installed base.

Apple are in a unique position to add augmented reality navigation to their device, this for me is the next generation of Maps, whichever of Apple or Google cracks this use case first will sell a vast number of devices... I think it will be Apple because Android is too fragmented as a hardware platform and this will require specialized hardware in the phone until there is a standard chipset available for competitors on Android. Hopefully Apples patents give them a head start.