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.
If 'business meetings' are the main expected use, then meta is going to go down hard. My impression is that the recent trends - especially in the much-more-remote post-covid world - are all against meetings. Managers especially are trying to reduce meetings, pare interactions down to their absolute essence and minimum amount of time-suck (making people allocate most of their time pre-meeting to hone their pitches or even essays like at Amazon), avoid 'calendar creep', asking "could this meeting have been an email?" and repeating mantras like "no unnecessary meetings" and "no meetings without a clear, feasible objective."
In many organizations, meetings are just terrible and wastes of time and everybody knows this, but goes through the motions. In fact, the ability to pretend one is 'attending' a meeting while not really paying attention and getting other things from actual work done is kind of a blessing, and if VR messes with that it's for the worse.
Meetings in most organizations lack focus, clear objective, or any clear connection between discussion and decision-making, allocation of responsibility, exercise of authority, or follow-on action. Often they are scheduled on recurring basis by default out of habit or routine and for ease of schedule-making, but without being tied to any real-world need. They are not even particularly good at synchronization or getting everyone on the same sheet of music, since keeping secrets in compartmentalized groups and inner-circles is more important than ever and dissemination / access control weighs against uncontrolled sharing in open forum, or, for that matter, in any digital medium which could be recorded.
So meetings are often devoid of anything remotely resembling 'leadership' and thus frequently devolve into empty ritual, gossipy or inane chit-chat, or venting sessions full of inactionable whining.
"Better than zoom for focused discussion based on a brief, low-stakes, "wow, this VR 3D is pretty neat!" experience (which wears off quick if you've tried it) doesn't sound very realistic or compelling to me. I'd need a lot more explanation and evidence of how just making people put on their corporate-issued headsets is going to make meetings so much more productive that it'll compensate for all the additional cost and hassle.
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.)
As for AR applications, leaving aside AR-based OnlyFans, I suspect AR pets could be both fun and profitable. Compare tamagochis and all those freemium games. Imagine having a pet AR dragon, for instance, which you could decorate, show off, level up and play real pokemon with.
I agree that a fully immersive AR environment - i.e. walking down the street and getting additional info about everything you see - would be hugely expensive and clunky. Microsofts Holoportation seems like a weird middle ground where you would have a more immersive experience than a zoom call but also not be 100% in a VR world. Could see this concept expand if international travel restrictions stay in place or become a common response to curb spread of infections.
If near life size representation and better whiteboarding are a key element to high quality telepresence then the holoport concept moves in that direction.
It does not necessarily have to be expensive and clunky. It's just hard, both software-wise as noted above, and hardware-wise (in particular FoV has to at least double from Microsoft Hololens' 52° diagonal, which is like sitting 24" away from a 24" monitor, ie not really immersive). But I believe it's doable.
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.
I'm pretty sure the porn/AI market is going towards more human-like sex dolls, and sex slaves (in plastic. And <i> Leather</i>). The suggestions for Aug-R about getting all public info are AI questions. Think 2001 HAL answering all your questions that public info can answer.
Ben seems quite taken with the VR meeting, whereby a "presence" is felt. I doubt that business meetings are really a "killer app", like Visi-calc and then Lotus 1-2-3, and the mop-up MS Office combo with powerpoint. (Itself first made for Mac, bought by MS to make sure it would be good for MS dos users (in late 80s, Windows was crap until 3.1 in '92).
I suspect either porn or some game, before any business meeting or need, will be the killer app, if any, for VR. (30%) I also have some 60% thought that VR goes, and grows, more slowly, because of a lack of any killer app - or even highly desired app.
This slower growth will also occur with AR, tho better navigation systems are close to a great use of AR for car driving.
The blog ability to use bold & italics was better. Overall substack a bit better, but not in every category. Substack vs Blog has similar comparison differences as VR vs AR.
My impression is that so far the answer is “not much.” Unlike VHS and the early internet, AR/VR today is highly centralized around the walled gardens of Steam/meta/etc. and they are pretty tame.
My thought as well. I think the role of porn and porn adjacent activities on the development of the www is under-acknowledged. Then when you could get it on your phone...pc sales tanked!
"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.
If 'business meetings' are the main expected use, then meta is going to go down hard. My impression is that the recent trends - especially in the much-more-remote post-covid world - are all against meetings. Managers especially are trying to reduce meetings, pare interactions down to their absolute essence and minimum amount of time-suck (making people allocate most of their time pre-meeting to hone their pitches or even essays like at Amazon), avoid 'calendar creep', asking "could this meeting have been an email?" and repeating mantras like "no unnecessary meetings" and "no meetings without a clear, feasible objective."
In many organizations, meetings are just terrible and wastes of time and everybody knows this, but goes through the motions. In fact, the ability to pretend one is 'attending' a meeting while not really paying attention and getting other things from actual work done is kind of a blessing, and if VR messes with that it's for the worse.
Meetings in most organizations lack focus, clear objective, or any clear connection between discussion and decision-making, allocation of responsibility, exercise of authority, or follow-on action. Often they are scheduled on recurring basis by default out of habit or routine and for ease of schedule-making, but without being tied to any real-world need. They are not even particularly good at synchronization or getting everyone on the same sheet of music, since keeping secrets in compartmentalized groups and inner-circles is more important than ever and dissemination / access control weighs against uncontrolled sharing in open forum, or, for that matter, in any digital medium which could be recorded.
So meetings are often devoid of anything remotely resembling 'leadership' and thus frequently devolve into empty ritual, gossipy or inane chit-chat, or venting sessions full of inactionable whining.
"Better than zoom for focused discussion based on a brief, low-stakes, "wow, this VR 3D is pretty neat!" experience (which wears off quick if you've tried it) doesn't sound very realistic or compelling to me. I'd need a lot more explanation and evidence of how just making people put on their corporate-issued headsets is going to make meetings so much more productive that it'll compensate for all the additional cost and hassle.
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.)
As for AR applications, leaving aside AR-based OnlyFans, I suspect AR pets could be both fun and profitable. Compare tamagochis and all those freemium games. Imagine having a pet AR dragon, for instance, which you could decorate, show off, level up and play real pokemon with.
PS: this is not my idea, but Mitsuo Iso's (磯光雄). He showed what it could look like in Dennou Coil (2007).
I agree that a fully immersive AR environment - i.e. walking down the street and getting additional info about everything you see - would be hugely expensive and clunky. Microsofts Holoportation seems like a weird middle ground where you would have a more immersive experience than a zoom call but also not be 100% in a VR world. Could see this concept expand if international travel restrictions stay in place or become a common response to curb spread of infections.
If near life size representation and better whiteboarding are a key element to high quality telepresence then the holoport concept moves in that direction.
It does not necessarily have to be expensive and clunky. It's just hard, both software-wise as noted above, and hardware-wise (in particular FoV has to at least double from Microsoft Hololens' 52° diagonal, which is like sitting 24" away from a 24" monitor, ie not really immersive). But I believe it's doable.
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
I'm pretty sure the porn/AI market is going towards more human-like sex dolls, and sex slaves (in plastic. And <i> Leather</i>). The suggestions for Aug-R about getting all public info are AI questions. Think 2001 HAL answering all your questions that public info can answer.
Ben seems quite taken with the VR meeting, whereby a "presence" is felt. I doubt that business meetings are really a "killer app", like Visi-calc and then Lotus 1-2-3, and the mop-up MS Office combo with powerpoint. (Itself first made for Mac, bought by MS to make sure it would be good for MS dos users (in late 80s, Windows was crap until 3.1 in '92).
I suspect either porn or some game, before any business meeting or need, will be the killer app, if any, for VR. (30%) I also have some 60% thought that VR goes, and grows, more slowly, because of a lack of any killer app - or even highly desired app.
This slower growth will also occur with AR, tho better navigation systems are close to a great use of AR for car driving.
The blog ability to use bold & italics was better. Overall substack a bit better, but not in every category. Substack vs Blog has similar comparison differences as VR vs AR.
My impression is that so far the answer is “not much.” Unlike VHS and the early internet, AR/VR today is highly centralized around the walled gardens of Steam/meta/etc. and they are pretty tame.
My thought as well. I think the role of porn and porn adjacent activities on the development of the www is under-acknowledged. Then when you could get it on your phone...pc sales tanked!
"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/