If the pandemic taught us anything was that Augmented Reality enabled us all to give up on structured pants (think how a ZOOM call is AR cuz if my world is enhanced by Any Pane of Glass then Zoom oughta qualify as AR). Pajamas, sweatpants and biker shorts became appropriate in every class, social gathering and even C-Suite level meetings. But as those gatherings have come back to being in person we have each made very personal decisions about what parts of work/life balance are better #IRL and those that are sociologically not worth commuting to.
Pick the most common devices first and build an app that seamlessly integrates all of the dynamics of your work&life. Then add in one of the devices of the “future” to xpand.
Since I wrote my 2018 book, The SInDy Project, I have invested significantly in my Five Device Theory & Everything is a Spectrum ideology. Basically, if I am able to identify the most effective&efficient “reality” to communicate with my team (and if this and other vocabulary feels made up, please take a moment and read Words We Made Up now). So by “team” I am referring to any digital meetup that includes more than one human no matter whether we choose to be avatars, Digital Twins or humans in real reality.
And, if these humans have decided that whatever they are talking about, building or trying to understand is better in a space with few distractions, then, Virtual Realty is the best place to meetup. So they should grab the goggles on their gaming desk and go climb, surf or whatever they choose to do together. V.R. is an immersive, escapist place where all of the current and past realities can be pushed to the recesses of your mind.
Would you call this A.R. or V.R. outside? Or maybe it’s “Mixed Reality” which an old term but might be the best way to block out the sounds of the NYC subway.
Or, if the team has decided to share something very important like a milestone birthday or a bad medical diagnosis, then being in person may be critical and burning airline miles/propane and all the other expenses to get the entire team or family together may feel like the only option, no matter the effort, time or cost. So, dare I use another acronym??? F.R. is critical (that’s Fhysical Reality cuz PR was taken by public relations).
Lastly, if your meetup stands somewhere along the wide spectrum between V.R. and F.R then, A.R. has a wide swath of hardware&software to enhance, embellish and illuminate your meeting. AR can be defined as glasses that you see the office around you while simultaneously you can see “holograms” of other people in the space with you. It could be defined as what VR people call “passthru” which is where a device really good and blocking out the reality I am in in FR can allow me to see the meeting as well as my space where I am technically alone.
Does that make sense?
And if so, do you see the problem? I am afraid its similar to when the smartphone became better at being a camera than it is as a phone. Anyone else wish for the days when phones followed the curve of your face so you could hear and talk more efficiently. But I love that it slides in/out of my bluejeans so I gave up. But I wonder if combining the benefits of pupilometry and volumetric capture which are SO COOL IN an immersive VR Head Mounted Display like the PICO that when we also try to make the same device sexy enough to wear out on the subway we sacrifice the qualities that I use it to escape from my real world.
This is the cluster of devices I included in a White Glove service during the lockdown. Today, Apple changed everything, again.
Everything from wearables, the IoT and 6DoF glasses have limitations and expectations. And given the limitation of battery life&size + computing power needed, I get that this is a tough trade off. So why not keep the devices&solutions separate? Even f we just focus in on the fashion aspect of this situation. Like the sweatpants, I want to ask you: would you wear those ski googles around town? Unless you were skiing or wandering in the desert, I cannot see myself leaving the house in Apple’s new Reality Pro HMD if it is going to look like the leaked sketches suggest.
Click for Tom’s Guide thought leadership on why they are waiting for the Quest3 instead of Apple’s Reality Pro. I personally am done with Meta/Facebook/Zuck.
But Tim and the legacy of Jony Ive have surprised us before. They have even gone as far as tricking us into assuming something that is later deemed rediculous. So I am just offering a fashion forward thought based on the fantastic products Apple have put out before: why not lean into Form AND Function and make a sexy pair of glasses that I can wear to everything and have my prescription in them. Then make them seamlessly integrate with all the great iPad, iWatch and iPhone Apps we think of as appropriate for a flat pane of glass and enable developers like me and other Web3.0, spatial computing companies like mine easily up cycle our current apps to spin magically on glasses that I wear on my head 24/7? Easier said than done you say….OK fair point.
This man is a hero. Click thru to learn more.
I will leave you with one last thought in the Form vs. Function debate in our industry and hopefully add value to how you think about adding these glasses or goggles into your business strategy or parenting arsenal: what do you want from technology when you are outside in the physical world and what do you want from us when you are at home?
We are doing a lot of consulting for progressive hospitals such as Dr Brennan Spiegal at Mount Sinai and when I see bed-ridden elders wearing V.R. Goggles to suspend their pain&disbelief of their IRL critical care I am aware that the patient doesn’t have a single concern about how big the headset is or if they feel vertigo in my VR apps. They just want to check out of their current hell and be with their friends or family somewhere besides the nightmare hospital.
Don’t sleep on SNAP to continue to innovate form AND function thankfully!
And on the other hand, when I see trendy bros strutting around Brooklyn in the same clunky headset, I worry they are going to run out in to traffic not just because they can’t see but because they are not so smart. Soooooo they should wear a cool pair of <<<<GLASSES>>> that augment the world around them! It already exists and Apple is the perfect company to change the game completely. Google Maps will already pop up on the steampunk glasses from Panasonic and tell you the architectural history of the apartment building you are standing in front of and Carmax has an app that works on the glasses from HTC Vive that will show you the Carfax when you just look at the VIN# on the dashboard!
Zuck looking cool in his Ray-Ban’s which are competitively priced, come in my prescription but can’t do anything except take movies of everything in front of me. Its no more than a BodyCAM for his database.
For me, I am going to use the Apple Reality Pro at home where I am comfortable looking like I am wearing ski goggles and the NReal Light AR Glasses when I am outside because when my grandmother dials me into a digital meetup at her bedside at Mt Sinai, I can just double click the side of the glasses and be there with the entire family, on demand, without having to look like a fool wandering around in traffic in some product built by the same guy that brought us Cambridge Analytica which introduced me to Steve Bannon and got Donald Trump elected.
No thanks, I’ll stick with Woz, Jobs, Ive and Tim Cook. I can’t wait to see what they give us.
