On the subject of AR/VR, what are some good examples of a new technology where lots of well-funded companies make incremental progress on it before it finally becomes "good enough" and goes on to be a hit product? E.g., some counter examples: The iPhone was developed by a team in secrecy at Apple and was released and became successful right away. And the early personal computers, like the Apple II, were based on the work of hobbyists. Can anyone think of a good example of a technology that was in the same position of funding and hype that AR/VR are in today that then became a successful product?

interesting question, it is certainly unusual in how we've all decided that eventually it will be awesome ahead of time

@robenkleene Are you looking for products or for technologies? It’s a little unclear because you ask for one and give examples for the other. There were other smartphones before the iPhone, as there were other personal computers before the Apple II. Likely, it'll take a few more products in the AR and VR space until one becomes successful, whatever the metric for that is. And I doubt we will be able to tell until a few years passed. It's easy to say that now in hindsight, but I don’t think many people considered the iPhone a success back in 2007.

IOT comes to mind.. also a field that sees a LOT of activity and frankly I don't know of anything in the space that is super compelling

Does electric cars qualify? Or is it still too early to tell?

@Stefan Good question re technology vs. a product. I think "technology" is probably the wrong word. What do you call a particular arrangement of components into a product? Maybe I just mean "product category", e.g., like smart phone or PC. And so with AR/VR we have the product category, but no hit product. Whereas most successful examples I can think of the product category and the hit product seem to come at once?

@robenkleene I’m not sure I follow and think your counter examples are actually examples: When Blackberrys were popular, weren’t they smartphones? They came before the iPhone. And there were others before them. Altair came before Apple I. This reminds me of this distinction between being first, being best, and being cheapest. If I understand you correctly, you’re asking for who was first and best at the same time?

The core distinction for the iPhone was the touch screen, e.g., if it were an example of an AR/VR like situation, would mean there would be a bunch of companies all really excited about touch screens, and then boom the iPhone, successful product. But it didn't happen that way. I don't remember people talking much about touch screen phones before the iPhone. Or even touch screens in general, though they certainly existed.

How about computers? There was tremendous hype about them, starting in the late 1940's. They were called "electronic brains" in the popular press. There was a misconception that they could think, reinforced by pulp science fiction. The first commercial general purpose electronic computer sold to a customer was the Ferranti Mark I in 1951. They sold 2 of them, and lost money. Remington Rand was much more successful with the Univac: they sold 46 of them (starting in 1951). There were lots of companies competing in this space at the time, but only IBM survived. IBM entered the market in 1953 with the 701 (they sold 19 over a 3 year period).

The iPhone was an almost immediate success. What made it such a succesful product was not the touch screen; Nokia had built touchscreen devices before. What made the iPhone the monster hit that it is today, was the iTunes app store, which was a revolution in publishing history. When the Apple App store launched, it offered authors royalties from sales in multiple currencies, all converted to dollars and put into one lump sum, paid monthly (after 45 day delay after the close of the month), with no bullshit fees (just a $99/year license for unlimited titles), Nokia's app store was dysfunctional, and the cellphone vendors each had their own stores, and it was confusing and only giants like EA could handle it. At the time, EA was shipping over 100,000 different builds per year to all the vendors! Total chaos!.. And from a slice of the pie point of view this was a revolution. At the time, Amazon Kindle paid only 30% royalties... Apple paid 70%!. Amazon had to redo their royalty rates because they looked greedy. Only MS offered a higher royalty rate for high selling titles (up to 80% royalties). In the history of music or book publishing such royalty rates have never existed. In recorded music 10% of wholesale was considered superstar category. We are talking 70% of retail... This App store is 30 billion a year business in royalties to hundreds of thousands of developers who could never otherwise sell their product. That my dear friends is why the IPhone is so popular. It has a lot of great software. If you take the iphone and take away the software, old Nokia products match it pretty well frankly. Apple has many rigidities in their system, but their publishing model is a shining beacon compared to the greedy bastards that run the music and book businesses. If you study the letters of Edgar Allen Poe, you will find some really savage comments about which circle of hell he expects publishers to end up in...

@Edward de Jong / Beads Project it is easy friends to forget how hard it was to get any new software on smartphones back in the day!

Adding to I believe that AR/VR looks like early mobile computing. It's a little weird because of the 90s hype, but if you include the timeline from Newton to iPhone and accept early PDAs, Nokia touchscreen phones, etc. as being in the same lineage as modern smartphones you don't have a category that came out of nowhere and became a success.

The iphone touch screen display didn't arise out of a vacuum. Here's Alan Kay talking about the DynaBook in 1972:

Suppose the display panel covers the full extent of the notepad surface. Any keyboard arrangement one might wish can then be displayed anywhere on the surface. (Then he talks about how the touch screen tech works.)

If you look at the accompanying illustrations in https://www.mprove.de/visionreality/media/Kay72a.pdf, it is clear he is describing an iPad. The Apple Macintosh was based on Kay's work, so everybody on the Mac team was familiar with this vision. In 1985, after the 1984 Macintosh release, Bill Atkinson pitched an updated version of Alan Kay's Dynapad to Apple: "a flat-pad communicating computer called Magic Slate". (ref: https://www.wired.com/1994/04/general-magic/) In 1988, Marc Porat joined Apple, then started an official project called "Pocket Crystal". The concept drawings looked like an iPhone: a pocket size phone+computer, with a display covering the entire front surface. This project was spun off as General Magic in 1990. Bill Atkinson joined the team. Multi-touch displays, and the accompanying gestural language (such as pinch to zoom) had a multi-decade history in research labs before it was adopted by Apple. The technology went viral when Jeff Han presented a modern multi-touch interface in a 2006 TED talk, and the talk was published on YouTube. The iPhone was released a year later.

But for the first year they told people to make web apps, and the app store was something I knew was missing, both from my experience knowing how hard it was to get mobile apps released (I was working on apps that needed carrier approval) and growth of digital distribution platforms in indie games (xbla, real arcade, etc)

90s VR was research. 2010s VR is a hobby — or a tool for specific contexts. Was just talking to a friend who uses VR in the writer's room on TV show: can look at any set, can block out scenes, that sort of thing.

Many of these examples come down to timing. There's plenty of examples of too early (PDA's), or not the first but perfect timing (iPhone). So the thing about VR is really that because we already had a "too early" episode with it (in the 90ies), when it resurfaced this time, everyone assumed the time was just perfect. And it looks like it isn't. Oculus DK1 in 2012 was definitely "early" from a consumer pov.. the amount of resolution, latency, fov, weight and other improvements we need for a compelling consumer experience is going to put VR at atleast 10 years later than that, possibly more

The biggest barrier to adoption is good software

How does mobile AR — Apple’s ARKit on iOS, Google’s ARCore for Android — fit into all this?

To do AR properly you must have some accurate depth sensing technique. The XBox Kinect was the first mass-marketed input device of that type, and it was amazing, however, it was very low res, and eventually the limited number of possible apps had exploited it, and it faded away. I expect at some point Apple will generalize what they did for the Face recognition camera and add the necessary chips. However, these chips will run continuously, and that is a power drain, so probably being held back because of power considerations. Once we get one more step up in battery density the phone will add more sensing devices. If you look it over financially if you can just create one more Pokemon Go, that is worth billions. That title is one of the highest grossing titles in the history of all games.

Also what about the “Glasshole” factor (public backlash of Google Glass)? Can AR be successful in a consumer market at all given the sensitivities?

the face system is tuned solely for a short distance, and has a very narrow design; to do AR you will need a much higher resolution, wider angle device that can measure the room you are in, it will require an entirely separate, and much more powerful chip, and the thing about face unlock is you aren't running any other processes yet because you haven't unlocked the phone, so it is a sleep mode. However when the AR is running, you will be in an app which is already consuming CPU and GPU cycles, so you are now in the full operating mode. I wouldn't be surprised if they added some pre-processing chip just to help the AR computations. And since you want to launch with software that shows off the feature, i would expect it will take apple years to bolt this onto the phone. But it is coming because they are going to need some sizzle now that Honor and Xiaomi are nipping at Apple's heels with their products. The samsung galaxy 20 just leaked today, with a rumored 4 cameras. At four cameras i think you max out on that aspect, and in a couple of years they will be hungry for some exclusive amazing new feature. In just a few years the cellphone will replace desktops, and you will just dock the phone to a large monitor, and that will be your computer. The latest phones are already 6GB RAM; that is more than probably the majority of laptops out there. I will never give up my giant monitor, but i could easily live with a tiny computer; i just switched from Mac Pro to Mac Mini, a very slight speed improvement, but 20 times weight reduction. We saw it with mainframes, minicomputers, workstations, personal computers, cellphones are the next evolution of the computer.

@Edward de Jong / Beads Project I see what you mean. Yes, energy efficiency is an important challenge. Apart from hardware and battery improvements Apple has bet on software early to help tackling this issue. It’s interesting that the latest generation of iPhones got such a significant battery bump. Also they’re putting the latest chips even into their non-Pro phones. Seems like they’re preparing their customer base for something that needs a lot of computation and energy… I’d like to think that we skip the “phone docking station” future (which I saw an early prototype of in an IBM research lab back in 2005; haven’t Samsung’s Android phones been supporting that for a few years now?) and go straight to AR.

@Stefan Also what about the “Glasshole” factor (public backlash of Google Glass)? Can AR be successful in a consumer market at all given the sensitivities?

That was a reaction to wearing glasses with a camera on them. People were reacting to the privacy implications of being recorded whenever the glasshole was looking at you. 'bynorth.com' sells a nice looking pair of AR glasses with no camera; maybe these won't elicit the "glasshole" reaction?

@Doug Moen Maybe there are specific glasses with specific use cases that don’t need a camera. But do you think these will represent widely successful AR? How will people know if it’s a pair with or without camera? Is successful, wide-spread AR even possible without some form of constantly scanning your immediate environment? And it’s only going to get worse with camera + environment depth scanning + AI analysis on what’s happening around you (face detection and recognition is just one possibility of many). Also interesting: You can walk around with a mobile phone today and do all these things, and likely no one will say anything… hey, which Disney character are you?

i’m optimistic about VR at the moment for a few reasons: the oculus quest is better and cheaper than it has any right to be, quill and animation tools are already crazy easy to work with even if they’re only at the photoshop 1.0 level of functionality, valve’s knuckles controllers are finally bringing high-fidelity input to VR, and novel physics engines like boneworks are providing an environment that can react properly to those inputs. beat saber and boneworks are both providing evidence of latent consumer demand when the software is actually good enough, and certain hobbyists are proving that pretty much anyone can build similar quality engines in their spare time (can’t find the youtube vids of the one i’m thinking of). the core value of VR depends on people being able to really DO stuff in it, and while i think oculus etc was a good initial boost in terms of the persuasiveness of immersive experiences, it feels like people and companies are finally starting to address acting in instead of just being in virtual spaces. also VRchat is completely bonkers—i haven’t had the chance to try it but just from let’s plays it definitely seems like a community of misfits that might produce something exciting

definitely! there are also some interesting virtual office startups that aim to emulate having eg unlimited monitors in meatspace—i think that’s a cool backdoor into novel ways of interacting with apps and data by providing an immediate and legible value proposition to users

I have been surprised by just how present conferencing in VR is, really qualitatively different than video. I can even imagine a future where VR is preferable over face-to-face. For instance, the ability for multiple people to have the exact same perspective on an object.