
AR will be startup dominated, VR will not - allenleein
http://reactionwheel.net/2016/07/ar-will-be-startup-dominated-vr-will-not.html
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jandrewrogers
This article overlooks a critical difference between these two markets: AR is
a _much_ more complex and difficult software engineering problem than VR. The
foundational spatial computing technology and infrastructure required to make
non-trivial AR applications work well does not exist, and the level of
expertise and effort to build it is very high. The article was written a few
years ago but this is broadly recognized as a significant hurdle today by
companies making serious investments in AR.

If a startup ultimately wins the AR race it will be because they cornered the
market in spatial computing expertise and are extremely well-funded. There is
already not enough of this core expertise for the existing big tech companies
with AR programs to all build viable teams, which bids up the price of that
expertise, never mind enough to go around for a dozen startups.

As a consequence, I expect AR to be something like a winner-take-all market
relatively early on.

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rocqua
I always figured that AR had much less of a latency problem. Because you still
retain the actual world as a visual the mismatch between inertial and visual
movements is less bad.

This means less nausea, better balance for users, and a much less visceral
impact of glitches.

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Retric
I think it’s the other way, with AR your virtual objects that interact with
the environment are going to float around independent of the background unless
you have extremely low latency rendering. At a guess people would find this
both distracting and quickly get sick.

It’s only safe if all your doing is displaying a virtual clock floating around
or whatever.

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im3w1l
Give me a floating HUD please! And I don't just want a clock, I want a
calendar and a map please. And that's just the lowest common denominator
stuff. I imagine different groups could use other stuff.

Maybe blood sugar for diabetes sufferers? Maybe some stuff that integrates
with sports/games?

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SomeOldThrow
I want ad block for billboards and street ads.

~~~
keenmaster
Or propaganda block for countries with dictators. Usually their face is
plastered everywhere to remind everyone of their benevolent master.

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bitL
Optical-based AR is still very imprecise and requires advanced long post-
processing to make it somewhat accurate (~1m precision). Usually, most
startups quickly bring an 80% solution (a few weeks) and then get stuck
forever to make it usable/precise. During that phase they trick their
VCs/investors that a solution is right around the corner, internally the ones
responsible for the initial phase gain promotions and block the ones that poke
at holes in their solution that could never make it to 95%. I've seen it
happening first hand...

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sambal
Were you in NYC by any chance? I’ve heard of something similar happening twice
here now

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bitL
No, this was a SF Bay experience.

~~~
dnjdrbdhdbs
Lol, this is how 90% of startups with technical risk are funded

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stanlarroque
As the founder of a startup creating an AR headset, I think it’s true but the
AR market is not as mature as VR. In every tech product, first comes the
hardware and then the software adds the magic at every update. In the AR
world, we are still at the hardware stage. No one has the answer today for a
compelling device and experience for B2C. There is no Moore law in optics and
the compute power needed for SLAM, computer vision and stereo rendering is
crazy if you want an untethered device (like hololens). You need more than the
traditional CPU/GPU config, you need DSPs, ASICs and perhaps FPGA. Combined
with the optics your NRE is high. We are far from a market that has the same
ROI as VR now, even on the entreprise the adoption is slow. This game is hard
but it will be worth it, and it’s the most exciting venture I’ve been a part
of.

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erikpukinskis
> There is no Moore law in optics and the compute power needed for SLAM

Are you sure? My instinct is that the number of probes required to reach the
same level of accuracy would be halving regularly.

What makes you think it’s not? Are there studies?

The tiniest of creatures can do it very well with very little energy.

~~~
bitL
All open source state-of-art SLAM libraries fail on real-world data, often the
same scene that was processed once successfully fails in another pass. The
problem is with the computer vision algorithms themselves, the "classical"
ones are super susceptible to per-scene constants tuning and randomization
effect; the only hope IMO is Deep Learning at the moment, but that requires
massive computational capability for real-time inference.

~~~
stanlarroque
Yes, the best SLAM we have today based on visual inertial data (Camera+IMU)
uses 500mW of power. It uses DSPs and ASICs. Also, the custom silicon team
from MSFT did a great job for their SLAM and display engine, it's built on
ASICs in what's called the HPU for Hololens:
[https://youtu.be/u0eBd2m_wEs?t=1641](https://youtu.be/u0eBd2m_wEs?t=1641)

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pier25
I made my first AR demo for an expo 10 years ago with ARToolKit and IMO AR
still hasn't gone beyond a gimmick. There are some popular examples like
Pokemon Go but AR is not going anywhere else unless someone makes an
affordable, comfortable, and capable AR headset/glasses. Holding a device in
front of you gets old pretty quickly.

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gfodor
Some assumptions made in this article that are questionable:

\- The dominant use of VR will be content consumption (I disagree personally,
and think it will be communication and collaboration)

\- making content for VR is expensive and difficult. (This has been trending
downwards over time — game engine tech is nearly commoditized, creation tools
are cheap or free, learning resources to create 3D assets and games are
plentiful, and content libraries are cheap and free. VR content tends to be
short form as well, so less need to have massive amounts of custom content.)

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namibj
Do you see a market for VR tourism? There's some capturing stuff I'm working
on without seeing a clear market (at the inherent technical/labor costs
incurred during the capture and compute during post processing).

The economics always bite you in the end.

~~~
keenmaster
>8k VR + telepresence drones that you can tap into anywhere in the world would
be sweet.

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sebringj
I noticed the quest having inside-out tracking with cameras...point being that
VR and AR are fuzzing a bit and it just might converge at some point as
something that makes sense where you simply have more opacity or not depending
on your app need. Then this type of argument is moot when say "oculus slim"
comes out that looks like ready player one and is cool enough to wear
everywhere and has a more contextual app model. (but i still think nueralink
approach is the real future)

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amelius
Yes, but these startups will be working for a platform which will take a
percentage of the profit and will have full control over how apps are ranked
etc. Participating is much like gambling, except for the bigger players (which
usually are not startups).

Instead there should be an open standard, e.g. like VHS used to be (they
probably took a small flat fee but at least they were not in control of the
entire market).

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jayd16
This just sounds like its written in a manic flurry of excitement for AR. AR
is so amazing! There are so many use cases that content will be easy and cheap
to make!

The reality is not so simple.

If we're talking about apples to apples entertainment type content, its
probably easier to make an indie VR game that runs on all platforms than an AR
game or experience.

If we're talking about the computer vision aspects of AR like object tracking,
those problems are hard enough that a creative novice has little hope of
making progress at the moment. That said, this space is probably dominated by
a bunch of tech heavy startups.

And then of course the hardware is dominated by a few players but with some
steam's cross platform SDK it was more than I thought it would be in 2016.

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pier25
mods please add (2016) to the title

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Animats
Yes. This was written before the VR boom collapsed. "Peak VR" was holiday
season 2017.

The most successful content in VR is rather simple. See "Beat Saber", the most
popular VR game.[1] That's from Hyperbolic Magnetism, an indy game company in
the Czech Republic.

On the other hand, "Facebook Spaces" is a total flop. You can browse Facebook
in VR. Nobody wants to.

So the author was totally wrong about VR being dominated by big companies.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV1sw4lfwFw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV1sw4lfwFw)

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ericd
Did VR collapse? From all accounts I've heard, the Quest is incredibly
successful.

~~~
jzl
They're "selling as fast as they are being made", but Facebook isn't releasing
the numbers, so it's still impossible to say. The big question is whether
there will be an ongoing demand as the months go by, or whether initial sales
were all from a burst of interest that simply hasn't been satisfied yet by the
number that have been made.

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davnicwil
I think this article makes very good points, it's very similar to something
I've thought about VR vs AR and the internet analogy - which is that something
that made (and still makes) the internet very approachable for indie hackers
and startups is how simple the UI and UX are (or can be).

As a single person, with the right set of skills and enough care and
attention, you can build a product on the web that looks and feels just as
good, better even, than the big players. You're at no major disadvantage.

The same feels at least partially true for AR. It seems like AR UI is likely,
at least in the near term, going to look like fairly simple overlay of images,
boxes and text over physical objects. Not too different from a web page,
basically. In fact I can even imagine that you could build such a UI with a
markup language not dissimilar to HTML. You could even use CSS mostly as-is to
style the components. Anyone who's capable of building a web page is going to
be able to get going with this and build something useful really quickly.

VR feels obviously different in this regard. Simplistic UI is not going to
look good or have good UX in VR, just as it doesn't in a 3D game. A solo
engineer is not going to be able to compete with big company teams of artists,
designers, etc to craft good looking VR spaces with comparable levels of
quality.

I think the best we can hope for in VR is some kind of generic VR world
toolkit, that's open source, within which one can overlay one's own UI using
pre-designed models etc in a mostly cut and paste fashion (so kind of like how
the browser gives you the DOM, and you just define what you want to display
with simple markup instead of having to literally render pixel by pixel) -
then it might be a bit more possible for solo engineers or small teams to
actually build good looking and useful products. But still, it's a stretch to
imagine that being competitive with custom designs that bigger teams and
companies are capable of producing.

I guess we'll see. I like to be optimistic because usually with software and
open source people find ways to surprise you with ingenuity and make things
possible that you didn't even think of, and come up with usecases and products
that you didn't think of in advance.

~~~
gizmo686
I think it depends on what VR ends up looking like. If it turns out to be just
3d immersive worlds, it will probably be dominated by the big players for the
foreseeable future. We will probably have building blocks that individuals can
use to make something acceptable in that catagory, but the fundamantal value
proposistion of that seems to me to be the visual wow factor, which is already
dominated by the big players and really does require a large investment of
customized art.

On the other hand, I also see a use-case of "VR" as more of a light canceling
monitor, to complement current noise canceling headphones. Think about being
able to sit down on an airplane and pop on your VR goggles and a pair of noise
cancelling headphones to watch an old-fashion 2D movie. Or to have a full
giant-display that can replace your 3 monitor desk.

These types of VR as a monitor use-cases shouldn't be more difficult then
their traditional counterparts (although the tooling and ecosystem isn't as
good on VR yet), so there should be room for solo developers to compete.

~~~
davnicwil
That's a good example of a VR usecase I hadn't considered, but to be fair this
kind of thing perhaps shouldn't be considered VR at all from the app
developer's perspective. By which I mean, the developer wouldn't ever have to
know or care that a user would use their regular 2D app in this VR setting, it
should just work like any other monitor / web browser etc.

I was more talking about applications that are 'native' VR, for want of a
better term. Apps that couldn't exist or wouldn't make sense in other formats
than VR.

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gizmo686
I certainly agree that this usecase isn't really "virtual reality" in concept,
but it is "VR" as far as platforms go, which I think is what is relevent here.

I think that, at least in the near future, developers would need to be aware
of the VR platform when working on such apps. Ignore toolchain and issues,
developers would still need to design a VR first UI. There is probably a lot
of room to innovate around how to take advantage of head gestures; how to take
advantage of virtual vs absolute coordinate systems [0]. And, the more mundane
fact that VR developers have far more screen real estate to work with then
desktop developers, who typically assume that the entire monitor is visible at
the same time.

[0] I'm not sure what the correct names for this are. Bassically, the fact
that there can be an image that is always in the same spot in your vision as
you move your head, as well as images that appear to be "static" and therefore
whose location in your vision changes as you turn your head.

~~~
davnicwil
You're right, of course. In the same way that with mobile it's not just making
the content fit into the screen but making sure it plays nice UX-wise with a
touch interface.

You have convinced me - this monitors-in-VR thing could be an exciting area
for development, and is definitely open to individuals and startups with
little capital. Good shout.

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bitwize
VR will be game studio dominated. AR is more appealing to startups because
it's the ultimate answer to the question: How do we get more ads in front of
more viewers? Simple: Shoot the ads straight into their eyeballs as they go
about their day!

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moh_maya
[2016]

