Original title: Standing at the crossroads of VR and AR, what will happen next? | Global Focus
Editor's note: In recent years, the development of VR and AR has gradually entered the slow lane. How to achieve a better VR/AR experience with the limitations of the existing science and technology? This article was compiled from an article published by Sam Lessin on The Information titled "A Game Plan for VR and AR in 2017."
In the past few years, VR and AR have experienced a period of rapid development, but now stand at a crossroads. The PR curve, which had previously been enhanced quite rapidly, has gradually become stable because of the backwardness in technology, content, and utilization.
In the past few months, Augmented Reality (AR) features that can support the addition of interesting filters have been temporarily put on hold, and virtual reality (VR) has also been found to be underperforming in many cases (at least a lot of companies also This information has been revealed. It neither simulates reality well nor participates deeply in the experience. It is also difficult to call it a perfect scenario to deal with simple scenarios that do not require high-speed bandwidth and processors.
The question is whether anyone can understand that if VR/AR applications are built on existing limited technology, these technologies can produce enough momentum to support the steady development of the technology line. Will the support for the development of VR and AR be similar to the previous fate?
People in the AR/VR start-up ecosystem must understand what kind of experiences exist today's existing science and technology.
The following are the most persuasive answers I have heard recently.
VR: Single Player Escape From The Reality - Inspired by Kindle
When I was discussing with some young scientists recently, one of the scientists said sincerely that he thinks that the application of VR's killer is reading. Because reading a book is a good thing, it is easy to be disturbed by the outside world during reading. If we can block outside interference and concentrate on reading in a quiet and peaceful environment, isn't that great?
Of course, if the primary purpose of virtual reality is to use books to read, it may sound ironic and not in keeping with the development of history. The limitations of existing technologies also do not provide enough pixels to bring a good reading experience.
But if you put aside satire, assuming that the bandwidth and hardware requirements are not high, VR is now the most able to escape people from real life, this is very important.
As we continue to pay attention to meditation, the depth of discussions on digital medicine, and the increasingly noisy world, what happens if people start to use VR technology to escape the many annoyances of modern times?
One of the characteristics of wearing a "helmet" is that we can't look at the phone. VR may also be using hypertechnology to allow us to "escape the world of technology."
AR: Geography Filter Experience - Inspired by Foursquare
The traditional theory of augmented reality (AR) is technically more difficult to implement than virtual reality (VR), so it is assumed that it will develop more slowly and understandably. However, there has been some progress in AR recently.
First, AR requires less bandwidth than VR. When the pixel requirements are high, some problems will become difficult to solve, but you do not need to transmit so much raw data. Second, if you think of cell phone cameras as windows to understand the world, hundreds of millions of people now have hardware that can support AR.
So far, most applications are particularly stupid. For companies that simply want to apply this kind of technology to their photos, it is acceptable. Some people also say that it's a big breakthrough to put elf eggs on the elf (these people don't realize that when you turn on the camera, the game becomes simpler).
However, I think that the greatest value of AR in the near future may be to add an auxiliary function layer to the positioning to make the experience more real. Essentially, I think the true function of the AR Camera Platform is to make the experience Foursquare provided 10 years ago more realistic.
One of the most obvious examples is private photos. Although some applications can already display positioning on photos, I think that “walking in†to a place, opening a camera, and viewing all the photos you and others have taken here will give you a more realistic experience. The same is true for old photos. So I was very surprised that neither Google nor Facebook have yet launched such products.
Another related direction may be to provide detailed voice guidance services. Yesterday I went to SFMOMA and the company launched a well-received voice guide service, using exact geolocation to illustrate art. The original purpose of this application is to provide voice travel services, but if you tell me that I can use the camera to experience more details on the artwork, I'm not surprised at all. In any case this is a new idea, but this seems to be achieved through the science and technology we have today.
Discovering and Providing Content - Inspired by Blockbuster
One of the biggest misconceptions people have about VR content is that the process of creating a 3D experience is very time-consuming because the amount of traffic needed is so large that modern networks cannot download high-quality content in a limited amount of time.
Even if good content really exists and people have the hardware to be able to run it, then few people will have the patience to wait for the download.
This looks a bit like we are in the 90s of the 20th century - or in 2017, where there is no complete Internet infrastructure network. This means that other people have the opportunity to put a hard drive in front of you, which contains some excellent VR content. Or at least there is a home caching device that can download content of interest to you early on in a period of time, so you may see it right away when you want to try the VR experience. Therefore, it may be necessary to redesign some video similar to Blockbuster or Netflix that originally provided such services.
Even with better distribution methods, we do not understand what this better VR experience actually is. I'm also not sure if anyone would be interested in high-resolution 360-degree sports events and concert experiences - I think watching games this way is actually a bad experience.
I can imagine that in the near future, expensive content delivery services can deliver this kind of home content to those who were originally willing to pay for the service. Maybe one day, Netflix can evolve into a broad content distribution platform.
Looking for killer applications
For a long time, it cannot be said with certainty that VR and AR will not occupy an important position in the technology community. I have always been skeptical about this because I don't always understand what a killer application can be. I personally do not think that the so-called killer application is a social application, that is to say use VR or AR to talk or contact with others. If you can do it is of course very good, because this is a good development direction. However, the AR value that is limited to self-portraits is just like an out-of-date static filter - it will die out with large-scale use. And I also have little interest in spending time with friends in virtual space.
In addition to the ideas I just mentioned, there are even more hidden and more powerful answers hidden in other fields.
Compilation group produced. Editor: Hao Pengcheng
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