AR & VR - Is this really the Future?

here are a few AR and VR related headlines from just the last couple of weeks every up-to-date Windows 10 PC now comes with the built-in AR and VR platform and every major PC maker like Dell HP and Asus built a headset for it Facebook hosted what was arguably the world's largest VR event ever and give us a glimpse at two upcoming oculus headsets magic leap a company that has never even released a single product but we think it might one day we least something AR related just collected new investments putting it at a total of two billion dollars and the relatively new company called Pi max VR just finished a successful Kickstarter campaign for a VR headset with two 4k screens and 200° a field of view I tried it at Aoife and it looks amazing and all of this happen in the last three to four weeks companies are clearly investing incredible sums of money even though consumers don't seem to be too interested and the internet is full with videos and articles claiming that ER and VR are dead so what is going on there is a clear fundamental mismatch is AR really the future or is it just a fad well I'm Martin from tech Arthur this is the first episode of calm before the storm my new series and let's find out before we get into predictions about the far future though let's first run through what is available with VR and AR today VR by definition requires covering up your full vision with something virtual so it is basically always experienced through a headset mobile VR where users slide their phones into headsets like with gear VR and daydream are relatively cheap and offer a basic experience stand alone headsets have really just become a thing with oculus releasing the goal recently which basically runs the components and the OS of an Android phone slightly customized but in the headset itself no phone needed and finally we have the high-end stuff the headsets that are hooked up to powerful machines to provide reasonably high quality images for tracking and so on PlayStation VR is an affordable entry into this category and on the PC from oculus an HTC vive were the first two players all three of these require a powerful machine and external cameras for positional tracking the newest competitor is the Windows mixed reality platform that now ships by default on Windows 10 pcs and all major PC makers made a headset for it like my dell visor for example and mixed reality headsets also bring some major improvements to the mix they actually do inside-out tracking with these little cameras on the handsets so there's no need for external cameras and they also run on lower-class hardware like regular laptops for example so that's the VR spectrum today and to put things into context let's also talk about sales figures there's no reliable source for them online but here are our best estimate market researchers claim that oculus and vive have sold around half a million units each sony confirmed that it has sold over 1 million PS VR headsets by June this year and Samsung confirmed that sold 5 million headsets by January data is a little scarce and these numbers aren't exactly huge but I guess it's a start for a technology that started reaching consumers just two years ago and with Google Facebook Samsung Sony Microsoft and all major PC makers having pretty expensive bets and VR now I think we can reasonably expect much more growth in the future unlike VR which for now is trapped in headsets er doesn't have to be because every time we add digital things on top of real things in real time we can call it a yawn so if you've ever used snapchat filters or played pokemon go then congratulations you have technically used it before currently there are really two ways of achieving AR I will call the first one the snapchats method where we open up a device with the camera and the screen we capture a video feed and then we just add something on top of the video in real time so this is kind of half AR because we're not adding things on top of actual reality but rather a proxy of it and man that everyone copies snapchat with this not just other social media services which by the way you should totally follow me on I'm tech out there on everything but on snapchat but also Apple Google and Microsoft as well those three have added of Mantid reality platforms right into their operating systems so the phones and even computers were analyzed what their cameras see for depth and lighting and stuff they will create depth maps and at any app place digital objects onto them that stick to surfaces have shadows and just generally try to behave like real objects would so that's the snapchat method but there's also what I'll call the hololens method which is way more advanced the hololens projects little floating hologram like things on top of actual reality the screen itself here is see-through so users don't have to see reality through the camera and the screen of their phone they just see reality with the projections on top so this is really futuristic but for now it is restricted to basically only the microsoft hololens and even though this is an impressive headset it is mostly just meant for developers as it is very expensive and has a few major issues like a very narrow field of view so that's a our for now adding things on top of camera feeds seems relatively trivial now and hundreds of millions of people use it and enjoy it but adding things on top of actual reality is limited and expensive for now holo land sales figures according to its commercial lead are and I'm quoting this in thousands not hundreds of thousands but again this only took a R in its current form about two to three years so that's where we are today most big tech companies are pumping out VR headsets and platforms even though consumer interest in them seems relatively low and AR has also seen lots of investment and unlike VR even some pretty widespread adoption but only because it was tied in with the free services and the devices we already used anyway not because people were actually willing to pay for it in other words companies are investing a ton of money despite not being able to make money back right now which can only mean one thing they expect massive returns in the future how massive Mark Zuckerberg announced that his latest oculus conference that he's hoping to see 1 billion users of VR devices he conveniently omitted a timeline for that but still that's about 200 million more users than all of Instagram has for now Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speculates that AR and VR or as his company likes to call it mixed reality will be one of the three technologies that will shape our future the most by the way if you were wondering the others are artificial intelligence and quantum computing you know they're regular stuff so mixed reality is in the top three with those Tim Cook the CEO of Apple when recently asked in an interview what technology he is the most excited about said it was a are like out of all technologies he chose a are as number one he said he sees a are being used by consumers by every business he knows anything about in education and everywhere else so three of the world's most important tech CEOs are telling us that some combination of AR and VR will basically be the next big computing area and yet consumers it seems to be pessimistic think about why that could be I kept coming back to this the Gartner hype cycle it's a model Gartner has developed for understanding the spread of radically new technologies and it states that as a technology first appears people get excited companies tell them that everything will be possible and the future is now the hype gets real and expectations get inflated but when a first units start shipping out and the experience doesn't live up to those expectations consumers very quickly give up in a category and become disillusioned the first generation of products usually doesn't look anything like the future they were promised bitter journalists and self declared youtubers like yours truly declared the death of an industry and consumers decide it's time to move on but if the technology has real merit companies will keep hammering at it until they fix the early problems and eventually people start seeing its benefits again and according to Gartner this is where AR and VR currently are on the curve and I think they're not too far off the first wave of VR and AR was definitely overhyped and many users give up on a category that's what we're seeing right now but I think there's also a clear renewed interest from companies to start fixing some of the inherent issues of the first generation and if they do there might be a resurgence so let's take a look at what the biggest players are up to for the future Facebook seems to have too important project for the near future first they of course want to expand their AR cameras in all of their social media smartphone apps fairly obvious second is project Santa Cruz which will be Facebook's first fully standalone headset that will do inside out tracking with four cameras on the headset itself this is planned for 2018 and if you think about it it's kind of the VR form-factor dream no cables no external cameras no reliance on a phone or a PC just full VR freedom Facebook really seems to hope that this category will become its main platform going forward and it's not hard to see why sure it's a cool form factor but maybe more importantly it also moves Facebook away from the competing Google and Microsoft platforms which it hates to rely on even if oculus OS for now just seems to be a custom Android build Santa Cruz is a first step towards Facebook building standalone VR headsets running on an OS Facebook can't control so that's the near future they have also announced that their latest developer conference that they think in the far future AR glasses that just project things on top of the real world hololens style will eventually replace smart phones and TVs microsoft thinks and talks about AR and VR as two ends of its mixed reality spectrum and i think people don't realize just how much most of Microsoft's newest creations support this platform the so called Universal Windows platform apps which are modern apps built for Windows 10 like Skype or the Twitter app don't just work on PCs and windows phones but also in mixed reality so as Windows 10 on the PCs gets more apps so does mixed reality Microsoft's latest design language called fluent design adds translucency lights shadows and a more material feel which sure looks pretty on a PC but really starts to make sense in a 3d environment where apps appear as physical objects that need physical properties Microsoft's new focus on pain 3d and building a vast library of user-generated 3d objects might feel a little silly on a PC but instantly make sense for you've guessed it mixed reality so the direction of all the existing development projects already work towards strengthening this new platform but let me also make some predictions as the Xbox is becoming more and more just a regular PC we can be fairly sure that it will soon support the Windows mixed reality platform as well and that would be a big deal Microsoft's other big project at the moment called Windows core previously known under the codename Andromeda OS aims to strip Windows 10 down to its you know core and to make all the extras on top of it modular so it can be adapted to run on anything from giant servers to tiny wearables or a standalone mixed reality headset running Windows 10 for example just imagine any Hardware maker could just take the stripped-down version of the OS and all the sensor technology and just make AR and VR headsets with it sounds pretty cool to me and the final prediction I have for Microsoft comes from this sentence now mixed reality will span from PCs to bones or Paik headsets see through headsets in in the near future headsets that can do both so I can't tell you what exactly Microsoft meant by that but here's a basic guess we already have cameras on the Front's of our headsets and screens inside it seems pretty obvious that sooner or later the user could just be shown what the cameras see so that way headsets could technically switch between VR and AR and twelve and there's so many more predictions I could make but one thing is clear Microsoft is all-in on mixed reality their weakness though is that they don't have a viable smartphone strategy which conveniently brings us to Google and Apple the core strengths of both is that they own the most important device category out there the SmartWatch ok ok I'm just checking if you haven't fallen asleep yet obviously smartphones are the most important platform for both AR and VR right now Mobile has the most users and these two companies are leveraging their positions but you know what I'm not sure it's working for them as well as one could expect given their dominance I mean Facebook and snapchat the two most important users of smartphone AR both use their own AR algorithms as far as I can tell and not those from Google's AR core or Apple's AR kit and Sampson the most important Android phone maker in the world has sold way more oculus powered gear VR headsets than Google has sold daydreams on top of that I also haven't seen them talk about any of the more advanced stuff either like inside our tracking or moonshot projects like the hololens and they could totally be working on those things in secret but all I can see from them for now is that they are focusing on mobile AR and VR and having big challenges establishing themselves as the dominant platforms on their own platforms so anyway from all of this I can conclude seven big trends first I think inside-out tracking will become the new standard for VR headsets it already works reasonably well on my Dell visor a second I think there will be a big push for standalone headsets in the near future starting with the oculus go third as standalone headsets don't have to rely on Windows or Android I think we'll have a new era of platform Wars new platforms can emerge like oculus OS which I think will move further and further away from the standard Android and really any company with a few good ideas and enough money could just build a new platform magic leap is rumored to build a pair of holo land style AR classes that I imagine would run on a whole new platform steam or HTC could come up with something of their own or Amazon could do with AR and VR what they did with voice assistance just show up with a few cool products spend endless amounts of money on them and voila platform Wars forth I think the boundaries between AR and VR will get blurred VR headsets with cameras on the front will do both at the same time v while AR and VR is currently mainly for gaming I think we will soon start seeing other applications to Windows mixed reality especially lets you use desktop programs like Microsoft Office for example and two oculus is moving into this direction too as a matter of fact I typed out and researched most of the script for this video in OneNote on my Dell visor and while I totally know that only a geek would ever do that in 2017 everything worked surprisingly well also companies are working on social via AR to Facebook has spaces and Microsoft has alt space VR which are social vr platforms or you can hang out and collaborate with other people so gaming it might lead the way but other categories will become relevant as well sixth I think people will start realizing that not everything in AR and VR has to be 3d just because we moved from static paper to dynamic screens doesn't mean that we replaced all static texts and images with video in the same way I think we will realize that 2d apps and content are just fine in these new environments as well and we'll live right along with the 3d stuff and my last prediction is that AR and VR won't be mainstream for at least five more years to come which is why it's okay if people don't care about it now and by the way that's what people in the industry are predicting to Facebook for example clearly put AR and VR on their ten-year roadmap as far into the future as they could why because many breakthroughs have to be made before they can go mainstream just to name a few who will need more computing for better visuals better input methods because our current controllers are really only designed for gaming as well as better lenses with wider fields of view that don't fold up and distort close to your face and can change between focal lengths for example these are big challenges but as head of oculus research my Culebra said the question with these problems is not if we will solve them but rather when we will solve them so they will happen but until then AR and VR will complement our existing devices not replace them so those are my predictions and five to ten years will have compact standalone headsets with good performance and inside-out tracking that can switch between AR and VR and let you not just game but have social experiences and get real work done and further in the future we will have proper see-through glasses that can project virtually anything on top of reality it is true the AR and VR industry are eerily quiet now but I do think there is a big storm coming up on the horizon and we'll just have to wait for it so I'd like to know what you think I actually put together a Twitter poll it's in the description of this video so go there and cast your vote alright so that was the first episode of calm before the storm and if you guys enjoyed it I'll be to make many more to come make sure to follow me on Twitter and my other social media channels to subscribe to me over at YouTube and to watch my old videos because they're still relevant

Channel: TechAltar

Views: 102,756

Rating: 4.9390507 out of 5

Keywords: AR, VR, Future, Trend, Analysis, MR, Augmented, Virtual, Mixed, Reality, games, Windows, Windows Mixed Reality, Oculus Rift, Augmented Reality, Steam VR, HTC Vive, Vive, PSVR, Dell Visor, Dell, Visor, Cliff's house, Cliff house, UWP, UWA, Gear VR, Oculus, Samsung, Daydream, Tango, ARkit, ARcore, AR kit, AR core, Hololens, Magic leap

Id: RKWT4UC3ZIk

Length: 18min 0sec (1080 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 07 2017

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