
The State of Augmented Reality - silvain
https://sayduck.com/2019/09/27/state-of-ar/
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mindgam3
Read the article expecting to find a review of different apps and ecosystems,
maybe some big picture thinking.

Instead I read a description of Apple products and a sales pitch for OP’s
company.

Title is perhaps a tad inaccurate.

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egfx
I experienced what was apparently “state of the art” AR at E3 this year. It
was Unreal Garden using HoloLens. If you’ve never tried AR, you’re not missing
anything. The experience was that of looking at a minuscule and low res lcd
screen a few inches from your face. Not only is it awkward at first but the
visuals aren’t very clear and the headset is very bulky. I would argue AR
through an iPhone camera is much better.

In fact AR is especially bad compared to VR where the experience is fully
immersive. With AR you get a confused blurry reality where you can literally
see the seams and this messes with your brain that something isn’t right.

~~~
sovreign
That is why I am excited about TiltFive - AR TableTop. Restricting the
environment to a table (31" by 31") makes the experience more aligned with the
existing hardware. Still teathered to a laptop/desktop but you get 110° fov
with 720p each eye. Once developers and users get a sense for mixed reality
better/more novel applications will get more development. AR productivity
software feels revolutionary.

~~~
egfx
Yeah. Maybe if you didn't need to move around as much and you were looking at
a fixed point in space I could see how it could feel more immersive. It's
interesting to note that AR feels more natural the less you move around.

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Animats
The article is annoying, but the technology is impressive. Some videos of
actual apps show a solid lock on position in the world.[1] Unclear how well
this works when stressed, but at least in brightly lit areas with lots of
edges the tracker can follow, it looks OK.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuO31Ro2ypg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuO31Ro2ypg)

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jonplackett
If Apple created a way to launch proper AR experiences basically from a link
without having to download a full app - a bit like a snapchat lens, I think
they’d clean up in AR.

WebAR is OK but too limited. Just give me some javascript control of not just
the objects but how people interact with them and I’ll make you something
awesome.

I think there’s a huge missed opportunity here for Apple, for developers, for
users.

~~~
darknoon
WebAR is a term these guys invented. On iOS there are main 2 technologies:

\- usdz (standardized zip file of pixar usd and assets) \- reality composer
(proprietary new format in iOS 13. you can add limited interactivity, but all
scripting is in a limited graphical language) \- also apps with ARKit + your
custom render or SceneKit

~~~
jonplackett
Basically I’m saying why not make something that merges the best of both of
these - quick/instant to download but with proper scripting so you can make
more I sterwetinf stuff than just a object viewed in front of you, at least
JavaScript, ideally swift. I’d love that from both an end user and developer
standpoint.

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sghiassy
Outside of Pokémon and Ingress - interacting with AR through a tiny phone
screen still seems gimmicky and only mildly helpful.

Kinda feels like AR needs smart glasses to be adopted culturally before it has
its moment. Thoughts?

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lostmsu
I can see another use: if a phone could show a camera feed with directions
overlaid on the street.

~~~
dorkwood
Google already does this with "Live View".

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kgarten
Call me old fashioned, but 2nd screen AR is not really augmented reality to
me. Augmented Reality in its core means there can be virtual objects in my
“reality” that look real. It’s not about looking through a phone screen.

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leohart
AR Quick Look is not Web AR. You cannot write web code (JS, HTML, CSS) to
interact with your AR elements within your scene. It's very easy to spot fake
Web AR: do they have a link on their website that you can click on and it
works on all phone browsers? No? It's some proprietary stuff that is wasting
your developers' time.

The current state of AR is * Hardware is not there yet. Phone-based AR is the
current hardware until then. * Fantastic content is still in the work. Content
creators and developers are aware that app download is the biggest slog on
distribution. Nobody is going to download (and keep) your app to experience AR
for 5 minutes. Most AR experiences last less than 30 seconds. * True Web AR,
where you can literally go to a link on your browser and experience
interactive AR, is the best medium for content delivery. Write HTML, CSS, JS
and get AR content. This works on both short-form (< 5 minutes) experiences
and long-form (>5 minutes) experiences. * Foundational layers of AR are either
missing or vendor lock-in: persistence object (e.g. come back to the same
space tomorrow and see the same thing), multiplayer (e.g. see the same content
from your own angle with your friend), distribution (e.g. the same content
getting specialized for different form factors), creation tools (e.g.
environment scanning, object scanning, ...).

Many (see other comments) people are correct when they say that phone AR is
not what AR should be. That even the Hololens or the Magic Leap are not it.
This will change with time but it's a catch-22. You need some hardware to get
more content to get more hardware to get more content.

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redka
At least for the browser, current AR efforts all fail short of having low
enough latency to allow the projections to "stick" to the marker area when the
camera is moved. Another thing is the poor support for bigger, multi-marker
areas. I wanted to create a local multiplayer game with smartphones rendering
stuff on the ground but the current technology just isn't there.

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dang
An unrelated 2012 article with the same title:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4350924](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4350924)

~~~
gone35
Wow, thanks. Sobering to see how, in a sense, how little has changed since.

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nickthemagicman
What happened to magic leap?

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moron4hire
It's ok. I have both a HoloLens 1 and a Magic Leap One [0]. The Magic Leap is
kind of like HoloLens 1.5.

Unlike a sibling comment, I don't think it's a "borderline scam", but I do
think the company is struggling to live up to their own hype. When it was
released, it had a lot of problems. The latest OS update is much better. I
first tried it around OS v0.17 and it was pretty shaky and crashed a lot. By
v0.20, it was running much better, but that was like 6 months later. I think
they felt pressured to release earlier than they should have.

I've been pretty busy at work with a mobile VR project, so haven't touched the
Magic Leap in a while. Current OS version is 0.22. Curious to see how it's
doing.

[0] I keep a full list of my hardware here:
[https://seanmcbeth.com/vr.html](https://seanmcbeth.com/vr.html) Ask me
anything about anything on the list. The notes on the page are a little
outdated, as I have now used all of the hardware I have (and have it all
readily accessible on a shelf at work). Maybe I'll update the notes tomorrow.

~~~
speedplane
> I've been pretty busy at work with a mobile VR project, so haven't touched
> the Magic Leap in a while. ... Curious to see how it's doing.

Magic Leap has always raised a swath of significant red flags, but for me, one
of those red flags is that the company is based in Florida. As Roger Stone
famously said, "Florida is a sunny place for shady people". I'm pretty
skeptical of any company or person based there that makes transformative
claims.

I would love to be downvoted and proven wrong about this in comments below, so
if you have good counter-examples, please share.

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blueboo
All those demo gifs omit the one thing they all require.

Hands.

Stumbling around trying to interact with a magic window your holding is a
crappy experience. AR is “second-nature”, now?

Very few bother with the novelty a second time.

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krapp
>Stumbling around trying to interact with a magic window your holding is a
crappy experience. AR is “second-nature”, now?

That is the primary way that most people interact with a computer and has been
for years, so "second nature" seems pretty accurate. The people "stumbling
around" are the ones with the VR goggles strapped to their heads, getting
headaches and vertigo and running into furniture.

>Very few bother with the novelty a second time.

I feel like a few Ingress and Pokemon Go players might disagree with you.

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aetherson
Is there a sense in which Pokemon and Ingress and the Harry Potter game are
"AR"?

Sure.

But they aren't the same thing that hololens or magic leap are trying to do,
and conflating them with that kind of AR is silly.

