Report: Apple CEO “cares about nothing else” Than Building Breakout AR Glasses Before Meta
Report: Apple CEO “cares about nothing else” Than Building Breakout AR Glasses Before Meta
This AR obsession is utterly baffling to me. There are so few real applications and the hardware requirements are insane so it's not something that will get widely adapted anyway. Sure in a decade or so it might have matured enough to have shed all these issues, but AR/VR feels like a really out of touch thing to prusue, especially if you look at the garbage ideas they have on how to use it - virtual meetings??
I get movies and games on these, possibly even some recording and porn, but these are not their B2B wet dreams anyway.
In theory, there’s a Million awesome business applications for it.
Let’s say you’re in construction and your glasses tell you exactly what to build where and how.
You’re a waiter and the glasses tell you which table ordered what, needs attention, etc.
You’re a network engineer and the glasses show you on every port which device is connected.
And don’t even get me started on the military applications.
Of course we’re not there yet. But that’s why they’re so obsessed with it. They want to be the first.
In the current US political climate, giving everyone glasses with always-on cameras run by big tech companies seems particularly dangerous.
I agree. But unfortunately, nobody gives a flying fuck.
I think for the most part society has gotten used to being on someone’s camera when in public at pretty much all times.
It’s something I used to think about, now I just, don’t.
Everyone has been looking for the next big hardware thing. It looked like it might be foldable phones for a little while but I reckon AR Glasses are the ultimate endgame until they start making bio implants.
They've gotten used to it in different political circumstances. But as people start to see how an authoritarian and vindictive fascist government works with surveillance tech to invade and endanger people's lives, attitudes to things like always-on cameras may start to shift.
If it helps, they don't have the battery life to be constantly recording or sending that much traffic. And that stuff can't be invisible, us nerds can see it all. That's one of the things dystopian sci-fi dramas have to gloss over, it all still runs on the properties of physics, sending a wireless message, even if the contents themselves are encrypted, we can still figure out where it is going and how much data it is by reading the wave. No way to block that from being possible.
Plus, there is no reason to be covert or secretive about manipulating people. They have been literally saying it out loud for years now, and it's still just as effective.
Imagine being anyone anywhere whipped like an Amazon worker. Will the waitress have to piss in bottles? Bad for tips I think.
How does the construction app know what needs to be constructed and how?
How does the waiter app know which table ordered what, needs attention, etc?
How does the IT app know on which port every device is connected?
These things are all real hard to know. Having glasses that display the knowledge could be really nice but for all these magic future apps, having a display is only part of the need.
As somebody who wanted google glass back in the day and thinks AR glasses would be really really cool, this is ultimately where I end up on it, and with a lot of tech in general: the primary usefulness of any of this shit is in accurate and relevant information, and that’s the part of the equation that these big companies are definitely NOT in the business of producing. In fact, they seem to have discovered a while back that inaccurate and irrelevant information being blasted in your face is the real money maker. And now with AI/ML producing so much/filling in gaps, I just can’t imagine that it’s going to get any better.
That being said, I think the tech is so cool. I’d love to travel to a new city and be able to get directions around to different sightseeing spots and real time star ratings above all the restaurants instead of anxiously glancing at my phone the entire time. If we ever get to that level of goodness I’m in, but I have a lot of doubts that it’ll ever be more than another attention-seeking thing attached to your body.
If you have all that info you could probably remove the human from the equation and automate it.
As for the NPC-Waiter 🤢
We were already there 10 years ago with Google Glass. Despite its failure in the consumer market, it found significant success in enterprise settings in the exact scenarios you've listed.
Except, all of these are scenarios in blue collar work. Apple seems hell bent on making this succeed in white collar areas with its emphasis on meetings, which is extremely baffling.
How Is Google Glass Doing in Enterprise and Industrial Settings? - Engineering.com - https://www.engineering.com/how-is-google-glass-doing-in-enterprise-and-industrial-settings/
All of this can be done with AR on a mobile phone.
Only when you need to do this AND have both hands free do AR glasses become necessary. So surgery, bomb refusal or something niche like thar.
This might be the dumbest take I’ve heard today.
Everything your smartphone does your laptop can do, too. Therefore, smartphones are useless!!
Everything AR can do that your smartphone can do today will be a hundred times more convenient because you don’t have to carry a slab of glass with you all the time. You just have to wear glasses. Like I already do anyway.
The only reason for smartphones to still exist in a world where AR is compact will be if we can’t figure out a way to efficiently input data without annoying everyone around us. As soon as that problem's solved, nobody will be using smartphones anymore.
