Young one, let me tell you that as you gain responsibility (employment, find a home, start a family)...your gaming days are as good as over. It becomes a casual infrequent hobby at best.
As for a paradigm shift, we've had AR for 10 years now. With the exception of navigating a city by foot, there's zero successful mainstream use cases.
There's not a single VR game that has appealed to the masses so much as to buy a headset. Not one.
It's expensive, inconvenient, anti-social and it doesn't stick.
Same here. I organized a trip to a VR center for the entire team at work.
Everybody had fun, but more like going to a theme park. Nobody ever talked about it again or bought one, just zero interest. And these are tech people.
Fully agree with the premise. Most youngish users have never even experienced true performance. Our software stacks are shit and rotten to the core, it's an embarrassment. We'll have the smartest people in the world enabling chip design approaching the atomic level, and then there's us software "engineers" pissing it away with an inefficiency factor of 10 million %.
We are very, very bad at what we do, yet somehow get richly rewarded for it.
We've even invented a new performance problem: intermittent performance. Performance isn't just poor, it's also extremely variable due to distributed computing, lamba, whichever. So users can't even learn the performance pattern.
Where chip designers move heaven and earth the move compute and data as closely together as is physically possible, leave it to us geniuses to tear them apart as far as we can. Also, leave it to us to completely ignore parallel computing so that your 16 cores are doing fuck all.
You may now comment on why our practices are fully justified.
I think one telling section of the presentation is the very speedy run-through of a few 3rd party apps for this platform. They all looked crappy, quick and superficial pseudo-3D versions of existing 2D apps. Which is a problem on all VR platforms: to deliver a truly engaging and convincing experience is extraordinarily hard and expensive.
Even Disney couldn't deliver (yet). They showed a lot of imaginary scenarios that are not implemented and concluded with: Disney+ will be available. Which is just a 2D streaming app like any app.
I'm not all negative. I think movie watching in this incredibly immersive way might be stunning. That would be a type of baseline "killer app" to fall back on. Assuming it works well, without it being tiring. There's the prospect of gaming, which is interesting as you pretty much use this device stationary.
Those two solo experiences hold promise if the tech is as good as is suggested.
I'm not sold on the productivity scenarios, because they aren't really re-imagined. If your work consists of zoom calls, messages and email, projecting those into the air doesn't really do much and slightly unsharp Excel still sucks.
There's the usual amusement of hypothetical scenarios that only happen in Apple's imagination where everybody is balls deep into every iOS device, is permanently connected and instantly available on a whim. You decide to "relive" memories by projecting photos on your TV (most people never do or just watch it on their phone) and then spontaneously drag in grandma to have a shared live experience.
That's not real world. Grandma is taking a nap, has none of these devices and wants you to come by and visit instead of fooling around with your toys.
Which is the point I'll end with. I'm very much technically impressed and will readily admit that from a philosophical angle, I hope it will fail. I genuinely believe that technology that isolates you even further and gives you even less reason to interact with actual reality is the last thing we need in an already touchless society where mental health problems are skyrocketing.
I do not want a world where dad has ski goggles to record the kids, the kids looking back at a digital version of his eyes. Dad should stop recording at all and just bloody engage.
I must be old-fashioned or even anti-social, but what exactly is the point of watching a movie together remotely? Does it become some kind of group debate that constantly interrupts the movie?