Google is Building an AR Headset (theverge.com) 52
Meta may be the loudest company building AR and VR hardware. Microsoft has HoloLens. Apple is working on something, too. But don't count out Google. The Verge: The search giant has recently begun ramping up work on an AR headset, internally codenamed Project Iris, that it hopes to ship in 2024, according to two people familiar with the project who requested anonymity to speak without the company's permission. Like forthcoming headsets from Meta and Apple, Google's device uses outward-facing cameras to blend computer graphics with a video feed of the real world, creating a more immersive, mixed reality experience than existing AR glasses from the likes of Snap and Magic Leap. Early prototypes being developed at a facility in the San Francisco Bay Area resemble a pair of ski goggles and don't require a tethered connection to an external power source.
Google's headset is still early in development without a clearly defined go-to-market strategy, which indicates that the 2024 target year may be more aspirational than set in stone. The hardware is powered by a custom Google processor, like its newest Google Pixel smartphone, and runs on Android, though recent job listings indicate that a unique OS is in the works. Given power constraints, Google's strategy is to use its data centers to remotely render some graphics and beam them into the headset via an internet connection. I'm told that the Pixel team is involved in some of the hardware pieces, but it's unclear if the headset will ultimately be Pixel-branded.
Google's headset is still early in development without a clearly defined go-to-market strategy, which indicates that the 2024 target year may be more aspirational than set in stone. The hardware is powered by a custom Google processor, like its newest Google Pixel smartphone, and runs on Android, though recent job listings indicate that a unique OS is in the works. Given power constraints, Google's strategy is to use its data centers to remotely render some graphics and beam them into the headset via an internet connection. I'm told that the Pixel team is involved in some of the hardware pieces, but it's unclear if the headset will ultimately be Pixel-branded.
Google is building [insert tech here] (Score:3)
Google is a super-mega-company. You could very easily predict that Google is Building an [whatever tech you want to insert here] and almost certainly be correct. They are experimenting with development of literally everything and all aspects of human lives.
The same is true for Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. (And those are just the American super-mega-companies.)
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You could very easily predict that Google is Building an [whatever tech you want to insert here] and almost certainly be correct.
Panopticon
Yep, but how serious (Score:1)
Google is a super-mega-company. You could very easily predict that Google is Building an [whatever tech you want to insert here] and almost certainly be correct
Exactly, so the real question is, how serious are they about this? Is this like a 20% project or what?
Or, is this just another iteration of Google Cardboard [google.com], a literal cardboard box that let you use your phone as an AR/VR screen.
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Google cardboard was actually pretty cool. I still occasionally slide my phone into my old goggles to watch 360 videos from YouTube.
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Will it be blockchain enabled? (Score:2)
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Repeat (Score:2)
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Exactly. And they'll only open it to a select few people who will waaay overpay for it and then they'll shelve it, leaving everyone else out in the cold.
"But don't count out Google" (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, but I will count them out. Here's my prediction: If it ever sees the light of day it will be a half-finished product, launched haphazardly, then they'll wait a year or so while it fails to conquer the world, then announce they're scaling back and in a year or two more it will be pretty much gone. It's how Google rolls.
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They can't have success unless it is popular with developers.
Developers aren't going to buy it and invest time learning their system, because it will be cancelled before they can even get their software out!
Look at the current state of social media and messaging, and how much money is being made off of it. If google hadn't cancelled Google+ and Google Wave, they could be the heart of multiple third-party efforts in these areas. But they're not. They're not even present in this space. Even Nvidia's Omniverse
Google.. (Score:2)
They've already made and abandoned AR once (google glass) and have taken a couple of passes at VR and abandoned them.
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Believe it or not, Google Glass is actually still in development and quite popular in many industries.
https://www.google.com/glass/s... [google.com]
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If you look around at that link you'll find you can't actually buy it.
If you're a mega-corp and want to use it in a factory, perhaps you can. But you'll have to train developers to use it, because developers couldn't have bought it themselves to be familiar with it.
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You don't have to be a mega-company but you do have to go through an authorized distributor.
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The frames of the current version are made by Smith Optics, but they still refuse to sell it to the public.
Somebody called them names and they'll never leave the house again!
Google wastes too much money (Score:3)
I wish google would spend more time on improving the quality of existing projects, rather than building new and shiny ones. I think this is causes by having overly young workforce. Every time you vising their campus, you feel like you are on the elementary school grounds. Very few people past 30.
When you are starting out, you don't want to work on some old project, you want to build something new and shiny. However most of the work is in maintaining and improving the existing things.
AR seems to be the new 3D or "google glass". Lets see how long this one lasts.
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I used gradle as the Android build system for approximately Android 4-9. Are you talking about the system Google uses internally to build the platform?
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I've been told by a friend who was there 10 years ago that they give an incentive bonus every time a new thing "ships". There's a massive incentive to push new things regardless of whether they're better.
Android 12 already pictures "augmented" reality (Score:3)
No one, not even Meta is doing AR yet (Score:2)
Meta is doing VR not AR.
To my knowledge, no one has an AR product released to the public which is a shame because I think AR has the potential to be bigger and more useful than VR.
The Occulus has external cameras so could potentially be hacked to do AR but is too bulky for true AR and I have no idea what the specs are. From what Iâ(TM)ve seen, the external cameras might not even be color which is odd. AR likely should be designed completely different though. It should be a heads up transparent disp
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Looks like some of these are actual things released to the public:
https://econsultancy.com/14-ex... [econsultancy.com]
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Yeah, there are quite a few AR apps for phones. I guess I was specifically talking about AR headsets. Something you could wear and still navigate in the real world. Google cardboard would be a cheap entry into the space but to my knowledge there is not even any AR apps that take advantage of that. The closest we have to AR in the real world is HUDs on cars or planes but to my knowledge, they are exclusively displaying disconnected information not overlaying onto the real world.
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Ah, right. Cadillac had real AR at one point but I think they dropped it. I think there are some jobs where people use AR equipment, but that I wouldn't call that released to the public.
Lynx is doing AR (Score:2)
Lynx-r.com [lynx-r.com] is doing pass-through AR on an open platform without a walled garden nor data tracking. Their kickstarter-funded devices are in final production (expected delivery in April) and the CEO is in full promotion mode going to all trade fairs, showing a fully functional product.
Apparently they are also doing colaborations with other companies and institutions for things like testing AR medical procedures in operating rooms [twitter.com] with a customer-grade priced device.
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To my knowledge, no one has an AR product released to the public
While it is true that Google Glass is only sold directly to corporations, Microsoft HoloLens is available to the public. ($3500)
They have a regular version, a clean-room version, and one that's attached to a hard hat. Though I don't really understand paying $1000 extra for a hard hat.
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Google Glass is not really AR either. It is a separate screen in your field of vision. The information on the screen can in some ways augment your reality with information but it's not a full overlay on reality where it can for instance highlight obstacles on the road.
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Colt has been doing AR for over 60 years
The model AR 15 is still very popular
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The technology isn't there to make something non-bulky. AR glasses won't be cool until they look like normal sunglasses or at least those dorky Amazon Echo glasses.
I believe the Oculus Quest camera uses just an IR camera, so it can work in the dark.
Over-Hyped Tech Rotation (Score:3)
Every decade we see the same attempts to revive common vaporware:
1. 3D Television at home (Best Buy sold plenty... how many are still used for 3D?)
2. Augmented Reality (Hello, Google Glass!)
3. Virtual Reality (Lots of iterations, still neither affordable, comfortable, etc)
4. Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles (I'm actually still hopeful, but we're really just not there yet.)
Tech that has escaped the cycle:
1. Video conferencing. This is now a mainstay of MANY workers' lives.
What am I missing?
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FaceTime was huge before the pandemic (Score:2)
Saying it wasn't a mainstream thing until after the pandemic is like saying Apple invented mp3s.
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I think I'd still argue it as mainstream only from the pandemic era and beyond because SO MANY people refused to accept it as sufficient for conducting business or even business relations (conferences). Many of us had no choice from March 2020 onward, so while we begrudgingly accepted it, it's now mundane and normal now for most white-collar/knowledge workers.
You reminded me of the Rollerball tele-conference (Score:2)
John Houseman played an executive of the energy mega-corporation who was looking for a consensus from other global powers so as to have killed an extremely influential person who was blocking their agenda.
Talk about predicting the future! lol
https://neotextcorp.com/cultur... [neotextcorp.com]
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Flying cars.
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YES!! How are people still investing in this?
And to be fair, there was a significant benefit to this endeavor with the advent of quadcopter/multi-rotor aircraft, but there have still be insufficient advancements in volume/noise and, the most important part, licensing the PILOTS. Because we all know that these aren't cars... they're small aircraft.
Folding phones seem like the next 3D TV, IMHO (Score:4, Insightful)
What am I missing?
Folding phones seem like a solution looking for a problem. When 3DTV came out, I thought to myself...well, they must see something I don't, because I just don't get it. Now I know they were just throwing shit in a TV and hoping someone else would figure out a good use case for it.
Folding phones are similar, IMO. Oooh, you get an phone that's twice as thick and 10x more likely to break by introducing integral moving parts...and by magic, your phone display becomes the size of...wait for it...2 phones, side by side!!! That's worth carrying around something twice as thick and twice as heavy!!!
The other reason I think they're doomed to fail is that small tablets failed. I LOVED my Nexus 7, but apparently not enough people did because iPad minis don't sell well and Google discontinued their Nexus line. However, if I wanted a larger screen that's less convenient than a phone, I have an iPad. I've never looked at a phone and thought...hmm, I wish this was twice as thick.
AR? Meh...it's just a hands-free version of what I can already do on my phone. I can see phone-based AR filling an interesting niche, but I don't really see goggle-based ones becoming too huge.
It reminds me of those cameras they tried selling that paired with your phone. You could pull out a nice camera and attach it to your phone. It sounds awesome. It looks awesome in pics, but they were a failure.
It makes sense on second thought...You're spending $1000 for an attachment to take better photos that you remove when you're done. The reason people use camera phones is because they're attached to the phone...easy, convenient, discreet. If quality matters, you'd spend a tiny bit more and get a full frame camera which will take MUCH MUCH MUCH better pictures. So companies were banking on having customers buying something between the best option for quality and the best option for convenience.
AR goggles are gambling customers don't care about convenience so they can have both hands free? How much info do you need in real time that you can't pick up your phone and look? I suppose for a surgeon or something like that, sure, but not for regular folks. Who wants to buy an expensive, uncomfortable headset that probably has short battery life and all sorts of inconveniences? Then again, I'd love to be proven wrong.
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2. Augmented Reality (Hello, Google Glass!)
Every decade, huh? How many iterations of AR have there been?
Also: a lot of people still play Pokemon Go: https://activeplayer.io/pokemo... [activeplayer.io]
"Not AR", you say? Yes, it is. If people owned easily donnable full-featured AR-devices even more people would play Pokemon Go or similar games. Making such devices is a huge engineering challenge, so it'll be a while. The privacy thing will melt away (sad, but true). If you'd have told me 20 years ago that people would willingly buy always on microphones connecting to m
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I'll assert that the early 2000s game "Majestic" is firmly within the augmented reality genre. The only difference in that instead of it being entirely vision-based (Google Glass, Pokemon Go), it included websites, phone calls, and AOL Instant Messenger messages.
In regards to the Oculus Quest 2, you're right that we're solidly in the early adopter phase, but plenty of other technologies were beyond early adoption before fading into obscurity once again. 3D TV fits that bill perfectly.
2010 2 million 3D TVs s
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I'll assert that the early 2000s game "Majestic" is firmly within the augmented reality genre
Sure. In the early 2000s, AR was all the buzz. Everybody knows that and your single example based on an extremely stretched definition of AR as we were discussing it proves that.
2010 2 million 3D TVs shipped.
2011: 21 million 3D TVs shipped.
2012: 41 million 3D TVs shipped.
2020-2022: Meta has shipped 10 million Quest 2s.
You made three errors there.
1. You show a trend for 3D TVs, yet do not show it for VR headsets ( 2020 to 2021: 2.6x in units sold, see: https://www.npd.com/news/press... [npd.com] ).
2. You compared an entire category of devices to one very specific device type.
3. You've implied that all 3D TVs were sold because they had 3D features. It is far
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1) 3D TV at home was promoted once.
2) Augmented reality has never tried for the mainstream. Certainly it isn't now.
3) Virtual Reality on the Quest is awesome and seems to be selling well. It's generally recognized as a nascent technology at this point.
4) Hydrogen Cell vehicles were the next big thing for a few decades. At this point, it's obvious it's never going to happen.
In short, at no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thoug
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I am pretty confident we can soon add solar panels and electric cars to the list.
AR is great (Score:2)
It clearly labels anyone in my field of view seen wearing an AR headset as a dork.
Hyperreality - is your destiny to be a job monkey? (Score:2)
Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Not sure when it was originally published... I want to say in 2007.
Always count out Google. (Score:2)
Their 'failed' and 'abandoned' and just 'plain shit' graveyard is bigger than any company out there.
Google starting a new project is like an ADHD kid starting a large ship in a bottle.. It might be completed, maybe, sometime, who the fuck are we kidding...
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So we may have three AR choices ultimately... (Score:2)
Apple - expensive walled garden, but they won't be monitoring and monetizing your every interaction.
Alphabet/Google - cheaper, fewer restrictions, monitoring that says it's aggregated and minimally invasive (as long as Brin and Page are in control).
Meta/Facebook - same as Alphabet/Google, except they will monetize your every eye movement, inhalation, and borborygmus.
I personally will wait for Apple, because I'm lazy and can pay for privacy.
HR headset (Score:2)
I read it as HR headset. Presumably it reduces brain activity by about 50%.
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Are they going to drop it like before ? (Score:2)
But why invest into something they're just going to drop again ?