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Apple's Interest in Augmented Reality Technology Continues at CES 2019
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if you take opinion of this forum minus apple pr department, almost no one likes cook and his crook decisions. why cant he just be an coo - the world would be a better place again - his ego, is such a disgrace!
I am in agreement with those that say Apple hardware isn't up to it. I mean is it willful ignorance to brag about how important GPU processing is and yet fail to put the best GPU available in your systems?
Apple needs to step back and stop forcing what "THEY" want on to users, and instead deliver what the users are asking for. Apple is hastily making themselves irrelevant in the content creation spaces; deprecating things like OpenGL and OpenCL is going to bite them in the ass. The way I figure it, if Metal matures to the point that it handily beats OpenGL and OpenCL, then developers will switch over if they want to stay relevant in the market place; forcing the issue is not the way to do it.
Apple used to be all about open standards. Apple is delusional about their market share when it comes to computing; Microsoft got away with it (closed APIs) because they dominated the market place.
Apple needs to step back and stop forcing what "THEY" want on to users, and instead deliver what the users are asking for. Apple is hastily making themselves irrelevant in the content creation spaces; deprecating things like OpenGL and OpenCL is going to bite them in the ass. The way I figure it, if Metal matures to the point that it handily beats OpenGL and OpenCL, then developers will switch over if they want to stay relevant in the market place; forcing the issue is not the way to do it.
Apple used to be all about open standards. Apple is delusional about their market share when it comes to computing; Microsoft got away with it (closed APIs) because they dominated the market place.
Late to the party? What is this nonsense? What other glasses are stylish enough for people to use and offer augmented reality so good it could be from science fiction movies? Do you even realize the potential for augmented reality as a paradigm shifting technology that could literally change the way we all use modern technology?
Of coarse you don’t. Otherwise you wouldn’t have said this. Apple will release when it’s a finished product and when it is, you’ll see the public opinion change from “I don’t think I’d be interested” to “omg I have to have it”. Have some vision
You mean like the iPhone, where the first smart phones were released in the late 90s, but the iPhone didn't come out until 2007.
Personally I would love some decent AR glasses. I wouldn't use them when just walking around, but for cycling and sailing, having a heads-up-display to show data like location/speed would be great. There are many other activities where being able to overlay data would be useful too.
What you said just shows that like ANY other company they make some good decision (iPod and such) and some bad ones (Homepod etc).
VR is just getting started
I'd say it is still in the "smartphones before the iPhone" era, with Oculus Quest just around the corner with a chance of being the equivalent of the first iPhone and changing the whole industry. I'd recommend watching Micheal Abrash predictions on the evolution of VR (and a bit of AR) in the next 5 years. Steve Jobs is even mentioned there! Smartphone AR is impractical. At CES 2019 there were already a bunch of AR glasses that didn't look terrible and this is the only sensible way to do it.
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I think AR glasses that don't look like AR glasses and provide a quality experience, along with proper privacy and security controls, could be a huge product. Apple is right by looking into this, the potential is massive if they can get it right.
I’m skeptical about it. Funding for VR startups has been decreasing. Just like 3d glasses, many don’t want to wear a bulky accessory with dependencies for a niched experience.
There are three kinds of reality at play inside Apple:
Unrealistic Reality = Winning!
- Virtual Reality - No Apple hardware will ever support real-world virtualization
- Augmented Reality - there is some hope with new Apple gadgetry because of their lead on special-purpose, nano-hardware
- Unrealistic Reality - Ahh.... that is the one to which Cook and Apple marketing seems uber-tuned to: Ever increasing prices for less-than-perfect products.
Unrealistic Reality = Winning!
I think that the thing that killed the 3DTV revolution was lack of content and the fact that a lot of the content that was there was often processed from a 2D source - meaning it was mediocre at best. Plus, there were technological limitations: some glasses were actual electronic devices with shutters that were costly and required power and the non-electronic polarization glasses reduced the resolution of the image (I guess that would not be much of an issue with 8K TV sets?
).I'm actually surprised that it didn't catch in the smartphone space: there were a bunch of phones with glasses-free 3D screens (same as Nintendo 3DS) and I was blown away playing the Asphalt racing game on one of those. And with the ammount of cameras being put on phones and device sizes nowadays I could easily see a stereographic setup with cameras at a distance similiar to human eyes, taking a true 3D photo that could be easily viewed as 3D on a 3D smartphone screen.
As for VR vs 3D TVs with glasses. 3D glasses worked with this small window fixed to your wall. VR is freedom and a fully surrounding, stereoscopic, 3D, interactive experience and with a truly mixed reality in VR headsets it will have the power to literally alter the reality around you. Doing your house chores while being on a beach or in a forest? Can you imagine the gamification of such a mundane thing as vacuuming your floor (scoring points for acuracy, VR showing you exactly the trace of your vacuum cleaner). The only true problem with VR headsets is that they are "socially excluding" - shutting you off from people that are in the same room / space that you are - but seeing how more and more social interaction is happening on smartphones right now, social interaction in VR might actually be an upgrade
BlackBerry, Symbian, and Windows Mobile 6 were at the smartphone party before iPhone was released.
No one should take this forum's opinion to represent any larger picture. This place is an extremely bitter outlier.
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VR. is doing fine in gaming, where it belongs, people are just waiting for better resolution, and better HW to cope with it
And since Apple is NOT into gaming, it seems Apple's destiny is to miss another market.
I hear you bro. Apple is always too late. Way too late to the portable music player market, way too late to the smartphone market, too late to the tablet market, too late to the smartwatch market, and too late to the bluetooth ear pods market.
My wife gave me an Oculus Rift for Christmas. The experience is amazing.
However, the headset is cumbersome and VR maxes out the resources in my PC.
VR is still in its very early stages.
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I agree that AR is most suited to novelty gaming in the consumer market right now.
The only other application I can think of is military. Think soliders on the battlefield with a HUD in their goggles.
Education.
My team has built software allows remote access to laboratory content. We have most of our resources programmed into the application and students can play on their own, do group study, or can even meet up with a TA to review concepts without either of them being on campus. We even have many students who use the software to get ahead on material and we see that when they do this they are able to use their in person lab time more efficiently.
We are also in the process of building a classroom that has 50 VR headsets. We expect that these will change the concept of lectures because they will allow us to replace the abstract images and videos used in power point with more contextually relevant materials. With VR, every student gets a front row seat, they can 'pause' live lectures in order ask the TA a question (which extends the length of the lecture for only that student) or leave a question for the instructor who can than go back and answer the question without losing the context that inspired it. All that and they are able to take and move notes between the VR space, their computer, and their ipad.
To be fair, we are now evaluating how well this works in real life, but the potential is huge. There is a cost issue, both in terms of development and expectation of students having the hardware. I don't see value in every class doing this, but for our material in makes a lot of sense (students from HS to graduate level already use the same books, so if we discover it is useful we could share it will other institutions). As far as when students will have their own VR equipment, that's difficult to predict, but most classes here expect students to have both a laptop/iPad and a smartphone.
I know "AppleInsider" are a rival publication but "continuing to show interest in AR"? How so? More than the average person who walked up to a booth and said "hmmm, interesting"? What more did they show just because they were Apple employees? (I'm guessing sweet FA).
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I've no reason to not believe you BUT the problem with education is it has to be standardized. An education in the richest western country should be the same as given in the poorest country. You can not have a generation of graduates saying "I never got real cadaver experience, we did that stuff in VR".
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Does Apple even have an affordable computer that can run AR/VR? You can get sub-1000$ desktop PCs that can run VR and PC laptops that run VR for 1500$ or so. I don't think Apple has anything that capable for the price.
We (as in me and my team) have had this discussion. To be clear, WE don't think this replaces laboratory instruction. The goal is to make lab time more efficient since it is a very expensive component of the course. That said, I doubt there will ever be global equality in education. We don't have anything like that here in the US. Heck, we don't have that within individual states. As far as cadaver go, there are countries where students don't have access to real cadavers now.
***Oh, and this is my own project, so expect me to paint it in great lighting. You should always be hesitant when it comes to products you have never seen - but the point of my post wasn't to claim these things exist but that the potential is there.