alt Hacker NewsInteresting view, but not quite. The Big Changes in computing happen when both the mode of access, the demographic, and the primary use case change. So historically computing evolved from corporate server + batch -> real time "personal" scientific and technical -> mass market commodified PC for business and gaming -> social media, entertainment, and 'personal bureaucracy' (tickets, bank statements, and such) on mobile.
At each step the tech gets smaller and more physically accessible, the use case gets more interactive and less demanding and serious, and the demographic gets wider and less technically educated.
Apple owned a huge part of the last change with the iPhone.
What's the next step in the series?
Clearly it's not a huge device you strap to your face.
But it's also not an easy question to answer. What is the next step after social media?
From a software POV it's AI, but where's the matching hardware? The next gen has to be even smaller, multimodal, but still physically interactive, likely always on.
Glasses are the closest, but not there yet.
So I think we're still in the early Nokia mobile stage. The concept exists and the current tech is beginning to be workable, but the gamechanger refinement and perfection of the concept is still a way off.
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The tech is workable. The issue is the AVP is heavy and big. So I'd say we're still at the Motorola brick phone not even the Nokia stage yet. Shrink the AVP down to glasses size and I'll agree on the Nokia analogy.
I agree with you, but the critical thing about AVP (just like iPhone, just like iPod, just like Mac) is the user interface. The device is just hardware to deliver the UI.
Apple’s UI work on AVP is under-appreciated. It’s been improving over the years, as real usage showed the need for things like shared world anchors and coordinates, prediction for pose estimation, etc.
The hardware isn’t ready yet. At this point I half-think the UI won’t be truly real until we have BCI (brain-computer interface for the offended party above). But it may well take a decade to really land what an always-on, sometimes-invisible AR UI looks like and how it works.