If it's 3 to 4 years away from being real, would they really hold a presentation in the theatre? Not exactly an ideal setting for a discussion, and way too early for any kind of useful demonstration.
Also at this early stage in a product's development, Apple very carefully controls and compartmentalises information. The software team wouldn't have any idea what the hardware looks like, or who is working on it. If you know the people in other teams, there's more likelihood of cross-leaking. There's no way their whole road map would be shared with the entire team.
They may well have had some sort of meeting, but I suspect this is a case of extrapolating way too far from piecemeal and confusing scraps of information, combined with a fundamental misunderstanding about how Apple approaches projects like this.
We're probably not going to see Apple AR tech in soldier HUDs on the battlefield. Or in the F-35. I could be wrong, but it may not be a cultural fit.
The enterprise customer here is the AutoDesk / Adobe client who wants seamless 3D design integreted into digital content creation workflows and even additive manufacturing. And that is very exciting. Being able to animate and composite 3D models with live action video in a holographic environment will make creating movies just as fun as watching them.
But the driver for consumer adoption I believe is entertainment. That's where Ocuclus and Magic Leap seem to be placing company bets. Hit games like Beat Sabre and Vader Immortal give an inkling. Someone is going to create a phenomenon like Avatar for VR and content will never be the same.
Civil aviation: A single headset could replace/augment all displays on GA planes, and add information not generally available of fixed displays, like terrain and weather. Pilots currently fly with iPads for terrain/maps and ask ATC for weather. The reason I believe in this is, cockpits are 50 years old in average, no room for more instruments, there is a lot of money to save and a lot of money available for devices, it’s a “mass market” enough and it is a wealthy/high education population.
I absolutely would! And I know what you are getting at. But you can't look at the relatively poor performance of 3D IMAX ticket sales as evidence that classic 2D cinema constitutes a kind of "End of History" culmination of the art form. It's just really hard to make something like "Gravity", which hit like 80%+ 3D sales percentages internationally.
Instead, for a peak into a possible near future I'd look to new immersive experiences such as teamLab's borderless
Visitors to Yayoi Kusama's Infinite Mirrored Room at David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea get exactly one minute each to experience the sensation. And it's expected in excess of 100K+ will make the pilgrimage ;)
A Look Inside Yayoi Kusama's New, Eye-Popping NYC Exhibition
2D cinema may not be a culmination, but the last 100 years of 3D movies makes it pretty clear that it will never be more than a sideshow with occasional sparks of brilliance. The experience isn't good enough.
AR could be more compelling than VR if the tech is there, but there's other issues. While VR has issues with mass market adoption (such as motion sickness) that AR may avoid, it will most likey still have a high price point and a lack of an ecosystem full of compelling content.
I'm sure Apple has been long hard at work here but I would be surprised if this grew beyond a niche product given the state of VR now, so they definitely aren't in a rush.
Could be that Apple is tired of getting the bang taken out of their announcements by internal leakers so they feed them false release dates.
Or Apple learned from their apparently terrible management which caused software quality to plummet. If you announce plans well ahead, more people can say if these plans are feasible.
Where do I even start. feeding teams false release dates is the worst management idea I've ever heard, it's deliberately sabotaging your own chances of success.
On the other hand, expecting that more people having a say very early on if something is feasible will actually lead to better products, is approximately the second worst management idea ever. Towards the end of the product development life-cycle yes, there is an argument for that because more people can try out use cases and situations that are hard to anticipate. But early on, the wisdom of the crowd is your enemy. If large numbers of people thought something was a good idea, everybody would be doing it. Innovations always orriginate from individuals or very small teams.
Consensus will lead you to mediocrity. Innovation by its very nature requires that you must do something unusual and likely dismissed by the consensus. It's not that being different is better by itself, but being the same can't be better by definition.
> If it's 3 to 4 years away from being real, would they really hold a presentation in the theatre?
Just a few weeks ago both Kuo [1] and Gurman [2] predicted early 2020 for the AR glasses. Tim Cook's public statements, ARKit and all the rumors have suggested that AR is Apple's focus so I would be very surprised if an Apple VR headset came out first. Curious reporting by The Information
Also remember how there were widely reported rumors that Apple had canceled the entire project a little while back, which made no sense given that this is the future of computing and every big tech company has been investing heavily for years.
Given the wild swings of rumors (launching 2020! Canceled! Launching 2023!) it’s almost like Apple is deliberately seeding the market with leaks in order to confuse its real intent. Which would be smart.
My guess with no insider information is they launch smartglasses in 2020 or 2021. First version may not have optical display but still does something cool with a camera.
My reasoning is basically,
1) Snapchat spectacles are getting closer to normal glasses, all you need to do is miniaturize those ridiculous bug eyed lenses
2) ergo Apple needs to get in the market with something fashionable and useful before someone else steals their lunch
Or "all the rumours could be true at once", through a simple misinterpretation of how Apple's internal politics work.
Like, say, Apple could have an AR department with several parallel hardware R&D efforts, where they're constantly cancelling projects when they realize they're dead-end concepts, and putting the staff from them onto new projects.
Yeah, it’s within the realm of possibility that Apple truly is that dysfunctional these days (ie MacBook Pro debacle).
However I don’t think that’s the case here. You have to believe that they have their best resources working on wearables/smartglasses. Look at how Apple Watch and even more so AirPods are just crushing it. Because laptops are the past and wearables are the future. I would wager that this level of dysfunction is kept far from AR.
I'm not seeing how my description was of a dysfunctional business practice. I was attempting to describe a "basic research" arm of a company, one that is trying to advance a field. Some research projects pan out, some don't. And you can't keep your best minds on the ones that don't seem to be going anywhere.
You can research Human-Computer Interaction just like any other research subject, and I wouldn't put it past Apple to have all their best industrial-design staff working on dozens of different AR design prototypes to feed this HCI research, in the hopes of discovering something that creates a whole new AR wearables market segment, rather than just competing in the existing one.
Once they actually "pick an approach" to AR wearables from the firehose of internal HCI R&D projects, then it'd probably be a project of a year-or-so to get it built and shipped (given their existing manufacturing and logistics relationships.) So, when a project is "3-4 years off", I'd expect that to mean—if true—that they're planning on spending the next three years running a tournament of AR approaches; and then build the thing right at the end.
I don't really disagree with the possibility that Apple is working on AR in the way you describe. I guess the point I was trying to make — as a longtime believer in Apple's vision with the Macbook Pro/iPhones/Watch/Airpods to prove it — is that they didn't use to make products from a firehose of internal projects. They had a clear vision for the future and shipped it. Not all of them succeeded (Newton) but during the Jobs era they were right more than not.
This isn't to say that having a tournament of approaches isn't a viable way to figure out a new product. But it speaks to a different, less visionary approach.
I get what you’re saying. I think the difference isn’t so much a lack of a “visionary”, as a lack of decent AR-centered speculative fiction to pull from.
The modern tablet, for example, was essentially designed by the prop designers of Star Trek. The proposed HCI for the device category was entirely laid out by actors fiddling with the prop. No one at Apple needed to have much “vision” to see that if they could pull off something like that without technical constraints forcing any compromises, it’d be a great design.
Most of computing for the last 50 years has been like that in one way or another. We’ve had SF writers, artists, and movie-makers leading the way, and industrial designers cribbing as closely to them as they could. (You can still see this today with driverless-car control-panel designs. You think these designs aren’t just directly copying the “cool car” genre from the 80s?)
(If you’re wondering: “so what made Apple a visionary company, then? That word must mean something...” It’s mostly that they evolved or “massaged” technology in the directions required to get these hypothetical designs built. Rather than building the designs that were possible with commonly-available tech, they invested capital into “operationalizing” previously research-level tech, in order to put it into their devices. A phone you can turn to watch movies in landscape? Better turn “accelerometers” from a weird replacement for mercury switches into a one-cent part!)
But AR is a bit different, in that, while speculative fiction has been somewhat concerned with what AR does (and even more on what VR does), writers in the genre haven’t spent nearly as much time (that I know of, at least) trying to figure out what an AR device that people would be willing to wear would look and work like. So, in this case, the industrial design isn’t just “laying around” waiting for an ID artist to pick it up and say “yes, I’ll make it look like this.” And, on the other side, no audience has been pre-conditioned by this material to think “I want something that looks like the thing I know from book/movie X.”
And, even worse for our intrepid industrial designer—even in the movies based on books that do feature AR wearables, in the movie version, the wearable doesn’t tend to appear at all. AR experiences still exist in such movies, but AR devices, if they’re there at all, are implicit; and most of the time, aren’t even supposed to be there, with AR instead literally an augmentation of reality (using holograms or something) rather than an augmentation of perception. (This is usually a choice by the director: actors act better when they can be in the same room as one-another, reacting to a common “thing” they’re seeing; individual-perceptual AR kind of ruins that, just like cell phones kind of ruin slasher movies.)
Now, mind you, I’m ignoring the elephant-in-the-room of AR in speculative fiction: cyberpunk. But I don’t think Apple could really sell its consumers on perception-changing brain implants, could they? ;) At least, not in 2019...
Also at this early stage in a product's development, Apple very carefully controls and compartmentalises information. The software team wouldn't have any idea what the hardware looks like, or who is working on it. If you know the people in other teams, there's more likelihood of cross-leaking. There's no way their whole road map would be shared with the entire team.
They may well have had some sort of meeting, but I suspect this is a case of extrapolating way too far from piecemeal and confusing scraps of information, combined with a fundamental misunderstanding about how Apple approaches projects like this.