Comment by comex
6 years ago
The Virtual Boy was VR, not AR. VR is suffering a “hype hangover” of its own these days, sure, but I’d say not to the same degree as AR. The tech works much better (it’s just a screen with a fancy lens in front), it has at least one solid use case (games; mostly played at home, so less worry about the social awkwardness of wearing something on your head), and millions of VR headsets have been sold.
Keep in mind that Pokemon Go (AR) has generated over $700M in revenue for iOS App Store & Google Play. [1] That’s 7x the $100M in revenue Facebook generated from the entire Oculus Store (VR). [2]
[1]: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/pokemon-go-statistics/, Pokémon Go Statistics
[2]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/25/oculus-eclipses-100-millio..., Oculus eclipses $100 million in VR content sales.
The difference is that PGo is an AR toy putting stickers on screen, not a 3D experience. And it's riding hard on Pokemon IP and Pokemon collector gimmick, not easy to replicate with other games in same or different genres. The failing AR projects are presenting it as a virtual reality experience, as general as everything we do on monitors first.
Yeah, I'd say Pokémon Go only barely counts as AR, although it's improved since launch. Basically I agree with everything in [1].
But honestly, I wasn't even thinking about phone AR when I made my comment. Phone AR feels like almost a completely separate category from headset AR. On one hand, it doesn't face nearly as many technical barriers. No complicated optics leading to low resolution and low FOV. No problem drawing black. No need to convince people to buy an expensive bulky object and wear it on their face all the time. On the other hand... the use cases are obviously far less futuristic.
Still, there's significant promise. I'm looking forward to the first phone AR experience to solidly implement a shared virtual environment, where users can place 3D objects anywhere in the real world and have them appear at the same location for all other users. I think phone hardware isn't quite good enough yet to make this work well, but it can already approximate it (see Minecraft Earth), and the barriers aren't nearly as fundamental.
[1] https://arinsider.co/2019/04/10/the-age-old-question-is-poke...