When I started my career 3G was the hot topic, and every investor kept asking ‘what’s the killer app for 3G?’ It turned out that the killer app for having the internet in your pocket was, well, having the internet in your pocket. But with each of those, we knew what to build next, and with VR we don’t. That tells me that VR has a place in the future. It just doesn’t tell me what kind of place.
The successor to the smartphone will be something that doesn’t just merge AR and VR but make the distinction irrelevant - something that you can wear all day every day, and that can seamlessly both occlude and supplement the real world and generate indistinguishable volumetric space.
Leviathan Wakes: the case for Apple's Vision Pro - Redeem Tomorrow
The existing VR hardware has not received sufficient investment to fully demonstrate the potential of this technology. It is unclear whether the issues lie with augmented reality (AR) itself or the technology used to deliver it. However, Apple has taken a different approach by investing significantly in creating a serious computer with an optical overlay as its primary interface. Unlike other expensive headsets, Apple has integrated the ecosystem to make it appealing right out of the box, allowing users to watch movies, view photos, and run various apps. This comprehensive solution aims to address the uncertainties surrounding AR. The display quality is top-notch, finger-based interaction replaces clunky joysticks, and performance is optimized to minimize motion sickness. Furthermore, a large and experienced developer community stands ready to create apps, supported by mature tools and extensive documentation. With these factors in place, there is anticipation for a new paradigm enabled by a virtually limitless monitor. The author expresses eagerness to witness how this technology unfolds.
What can you do with this thing? There’s a good chance that, whatever killer apps may emerge, they don’t need the entire complement of sensors and widgets to deliver a great experience.
As that’s discovered, Apple will be able to open a second tier in this category and sell you a simplified model at a lower cost. Meanwhile, the more they manufacture the essentials—high density displays, for example—the higher their yields will become, the more their margins will increase.
It takes time to perfect manufacturing processes and build up capacity. Vision Pro isn’t just about 2024’s model. It’s setting up the conditions for Apple to build the next five years of augmented reality wearable technology.
VR/AR doesn’t have to suck ass. It doesn’t have to give you motion sickness. It doesn’t have to use these awkward, stupid controllers you accidentally swap into the wrong hand. It doesn’t have to be fundamentally isolating.
If this paradigm shift could have been kicked off by cheap shit, we’d be there already. May as well pursue the other end of the market.
what starts as clunky needn’t remain so. As the technology for augmented reality becomes more affordable, more lightweight, more energy efficient, more stylish, it will be more feasible for more people to use.
In the bargain, we’ll get a display technology entirely unshackled from the constraints of a monitor stand. We’ll have much broader canvases subject to the flexibility of digital creativity, collaboration and expression.
What this unlocks, we can’t say.
How the Find My App Became an Accidental Friendship Fixture
The impact is particularly noticeable among Generation Z and millennials, the first generations to come of age with the possibility of knowing where their peers are at all times. It has changed how friends communicate with one another and blurred lines of privacy. Friends now, sometimes unwittingly yet obsessively, check one another’s locations and bypass whole conversations — about where somebody is, what they are doing or how their days are going — when socializing. All of that information can be gleaned from Find My.
Although Find My is not marketed as a social experience, sharing locations has become a test of sorts, much like being included on a close friends list on Instagram or on a private story on Snapchat can signal closer friendships.
With Find My, “you aren’t actively choosing to do something as you reach a certain location because you’re constantly sharing your location,” said Michael Saker, a senior lecturer in digital sociology at City, University of London. As a result, “there’s an intimacy that’s intertwined with that act,” he added. “There’s a verification of being friends.”
Mainframes were followed by PCs, and then the web, and then smartphones. Each of these new models started out looking limited and insignificant, but each of them unlocked a new market that was so much bigger that it pulled in all of the investment, innovation and company creation and so grew to overtake the old one. Meanwhile, the old models didn’t go away, and neither, mostly, did the companies that had been created by them. Mainframes are still a big business and so is IBM; PCs are still a big business and so is Microsoft. But they don’t set the agenda anymore - no-one is afraid of them.
We’ve spent the last few decades getting to the point that we can now give everyone on earth a cheap, reliable, easy-to-use pocket computer with access to a global information network. But so far, though over 4bn people have one of these things, we’ve only just scratched the surface of what we can do with them.
There’s an old saying that the first fifty years of the car industry were about creating car companies and working out what cars should look like, and the second fifty years were about what happened once everyone had a car - they were about McDonalds and Walmart, suburbs and the remaking of the world around the car, for good and of course bad. The innovation in cars became everything around the car. One could suggest the same today about smartphones - now the innovation comes from everything else that happens around them.