You say: "It sounds to me as though Ben Thompson is bullish about augmented reality for business."
This is a mistaken reading of Thompson. He used to believe AR would be bigger than VR. But he's changed his mind. In his post he explicitly says
"There have been two conventional pieces of wisdom about virtual reality that I used to agree with, but now I think both were off-base."
"The first one is that virtual reality’s first and most important market will be gaming. "
"The second assumption is that augmented reality would be a larger and more compelling market than virtual reality"
That is, he's saying VR for work meetings is obvious next step for remote work beyond zoom. And that now that he's tried it, he thinks VR for work meetings would get enough traction to drive the market. With VR for work coming ahead of AR for consumer use cases.
Augmented reality compared to virtual reality is even harder than a self-driving car is compared to a car-chase video game. Tesla FSD seems to be doing much better lately, although it still occasionally tries to drive through utility poles or vacillates whether a side road it needs to turn into exists or not. But a self-driving car only needs to recognize *an* object - *a* car, *a* road, *a* utility pole - rather than a specific persistent object to which AR labels can be attached. This is a hard problem. It's easier to "recognize" large fixed objects like houses, which can be matched to digitized maps with GPS, but what about smaller objects such as the contents of your house? How do AR labels stay on your books? What if GPS doesn't work? (I believe Tesla does grosstopical navigation by GPS and digitized map; it does not recognize road name signs, much less landmarks.)
There is a 2013 paper published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics titled Telepresence: Communications and Virtual Transportation. In it, authors David Ballard & Yuri Gawdiak lay out a good framework to think about role of telepresence going forward.
Business will be a driver of the technology because of need for deep funding to build bandwidth and force adoption. 2020 saw how a company can force adoption to a new comms platform out of need to flex with the times.
Would expect this to happen with AR/VR and then consumer use come in behind it and accelerate the development of features which add to richness of experience.
"Is that really the history? The Apple II, which was a consumer product, preceded the IBM PC by several years."
Yes. The "killer app" for the Apple box was VisiCalc. For other boxes it might have been WordStar.
"Employers bought their employees computers" is the quote. Not "bought employees IBM PCs". Some number of Apple II or TRS-80s were bought by businesses, to run that software.
The ability "to point your phone at a house and see the Zillow estimate" app suggested by Dr. Kling is very similar to the function obtained from the stolen virtual light glasses in William Gibson's 1993 "Virtual Light" [1].
When walking around Berkeley CA, I often reflect on how interesting it would be to have a augmented reality device that would allow one "look" at a building and "see" the public domain information (e.g. owner, real estate listing, sale price history, tax assessment) associated the building.
You say: "It sounds to me as though Ben Thompson is bullish about augmented reality for business."
This is a mistaken reading of Thompson. He used to believe AR would be bigger than VR. But he's changed his mind. In his post he explicitly says
"There have been two conventional pieces of wisdom about virtual reality that I used to agree with, but now I think both were off-base."
"The first one is that virtual reality’s first and most important market will be gaming. "
"The second assumption is that augmented reality would be a larger and more compelling market than virtual reality"
That is, he's saying VR for work meetings is obvious next step for remote work beyond zoom. And that now that he's tried it, he thinks VR for work meetings would get enough traction to drive the market. With VR for work coming ahead of AR for consumer use cases.
Augmented reality compared to virtual reality is even harder than a self-driving car is compared to a car-chase video game. Tesla FSD seems to be doing much better lately, although it still occasionally tries to drive through utility poles or vacillates whether a side road it needs to turn into exists or not. But a self-driving car only needs to recognize *an* object - *a* car, *a* road, *a* utility pole - rather than a specific persistent object to which AR labels can be attached. This is a hard problem. It's easier to "recognize" large fixed objects like houses, which can be matched to digitized maps with GPS, but what about smaller objects such as the contents of your house? How do AR labels stay on your books? What if GPS doesn't work? (I believe Tesla does grosstopical navigation by GPS and digitized map; it does not recognize road name signs, much less landmarks.)
There is a 2013 paper published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics titled Telepresence: Communications and Virtual Transportation. In it, authors David Ballard & Yuri Gawdiak lay out a good framework to think about role of telepresence going forward.
Business will be a driver of the technology because of need for deep funding to build bandwidth and force adoption. 2020 saw how a company can force adoption to a new comms platform out of need to flex with the times.
Would expect this to happen with AR/VR and then consumer use come in behind it and accelerate the development of features which add to richness of experience.
So much of the early web was made profitable by porn. I wonder how much the metaverse mirrors this business model
"Is that really the history? The Apple II, which was a consumer product, preceded the IBM PC by several years."
Yes. The "killer app" for the Apple box was VisiCalc. For other boxes it might have been WordStar.
"Employers bought their employees computers" is the quote. Not "bought employees IBM PCs". Some number of Apple II or TRS-80s were bought by businesses, to run that software.
The ability "to point your phone at a house and see the Zillow estimate" app suggested by Dr. Kling is very similar to the function obtained from the stolen virtual light glasses in William Gibson's 1993 "Virtual Light" [1].
When walking around Berkeley CA, I often reflect on how interesting it would be to have a augmented reality device that would allow one "look" at a building and "see" the public domain information (e.g. owner, real estate listing, sale price history, tax assessment) associated the building.
Ref. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Light, https://storiesbywilliams.com/tag/virtual-light/