Apple's AR ambitions could expand into Personal Shopping and tech support sessions

mayfly said:
I hope Apple isn't chasing rainbows and unicorns in the AR/VR sector. From what I've seen, especially the failures of Meta and Google's offerings, the entire tech industry may have overestimated the demand for these products and services.

From the unit sales, it seems there's interest in the concept of AR/VR:

https://www.uploadvr.com/meta-sold-20-million-quests/

Most people would love to have a Matrix-like or Holodeck-like experience but so far, nothing is delivering this. People who bought the hardware aren't using it much. A lot of the time they are bought as novelty Christmas gifts as it's a gadget that people don't already have but there's not much software for them and they are difficult for average users to setup.

A lot of things right now are tech demos. They showed off photorealistic avatars recently - digital Zuckerberg still looks as unnatural as the real one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVYrJJNdrEg

There's a new technology for capturing and rendering 3D environments quickly called Gaussian Splatting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD0oBE9LJTQ

Combined with AI voice and text generators, this could be used to recreate digital versions of people that can 'live' forever. Some people never get over a long-term partner, this would let them exist virtually at different ages.

The hardware design, price and lack of software is holding it back but spatial computing is the next computing paradigm that will eventually be used frequently in some form.  It can't replace traditional computing for a while, in the near-term it will offer impressive short-term experiences. Once people experience watching a movie on a 3D virtual display the size of a room or stepping into a virtual memory, traditional digital media will feel like newspapers and magazines today.

I think Apple's strategy of focusing on everyday things will improve frequent usage. Once people experience movies this way, they will want to watch all movies this way so it's less likely to end up in a drawer but the entry price is a big barrier for adoption just now.

It's clearly going to be an industry that gains traction slowly but it's one that will never go away, this is the future of interacting with digital content, it's just uncomfortable with the technology we have right now.