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Augmented and virtual reality have mostly been dead ends so far. How Apple’s vision could succeed where others have failed.
Explaining the inner workings of a nuclear-powered octocopter that will someday explore Jupiter’s moon Titan is a tall order for even the most skilled teacher.
Luckily, when I recently paid a visit to the lab where it’s being designed and tested, an engineer tasked with building the Dragonfly probe for NASA pulled out a pedagogical aid sufficient for the task. It was a HoloLens 2, the augmented-reality headset made by Microsoft
Each of us wore a HoloLens headset that projected a realistic, shared, three-dimensional image of the Dragonfly in front of our eyes—a sort of shared hallucination. We were able to walk around the space probe, my guide peeling back its layers and pointing to individual components.
That experience was remarkable precisely because it couldn’t have been more compelling and edifying in any medium other than augmented reality—the name for tech that imposes digital images onto our view of the real world. In the not-too-distant future, that kind of experience could be utterly mundane. Just as personal computers and then smartphones were once exotic and now both teach and distract us daily, augmented reality is coming for how we interact with the digital and physical worlds.
Apple’s forthcoming headset, which the company is expected to reveal at its developers’ conference starting June 5, is likely to accelerate the adoption of augmented reality—and the broader phenomenon of “mixed reality,” which encompasses full-immersion virtual-reality headsets that completely occlude a person’s vision.
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The key to Apple’s success—or failure—will be its ability to mobilize not just its fanatical, and growing, fan base, but also an army of developers, to make apps and services for its headset the way they have for its other devices.
Motivating those developers will require that Apple demonstrate what has so far been lacking for mixed reality: a blueprint for “killer apps” that will be so compelling that early adopters plunk down for this and future Apple headsets. (No small ask given that the device is expected to cost $3,000 or so.)
My experiences with many of the state-of-the-art AR and VR systems that have come out so far suggest that these killer apps will do things that the flat screens of our current devices struggle with. Most important and transformative: They will let us interact, intuitively, with content in three dimensions.
Into the third dimension
Wallace Lages, an assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University in Boston, has seen mixed-reality headsets go from nearly unwearable behemoths to something more manageable in the past 10 years. When he started working with augmented and virtual reality, in 2014, his first headset weighed almost 3 pounds, and had a heavy cable attached to it. “It was huge!” he says, laughing. (For comparison, Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 weighs about 1.2 pounds, and is self-contained.)
In that same time, these devices have become vastly more capable—if still far from perfect. Their displays have become brighter, more colorful, and bigger, which is essential to making use of the enormous field of view the human eye possesses.
The best way to use all these extra pixels and processor cycles, Lages says his own research has revealed, is to make our interactions with computers more intuitive—and simpler.
A key way to do that is to take advantage of something that our current computing devices are generally very poor at: our spatial cognition. We see and think in three dimensions, we can build vast maps in our heads, and when given the opportunity, we will use our hands and bodies to manipulate objects and move through spaces in ways that aid us in solving problems and recalling information.
Here’s a mundane but potentially important example of how humans use all those capabilities in real life, but are unable to with current computer interfaces: Imagine if we could organize our documents not just in lists and folders and two-dimensional digital desktops, but in the physical space around us.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-vr-headset-announcement-what-to-expect-7e410e38
