2020 Kickoff: Progress to Date and the Long Road Ahead
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Summary
Major companies are investing billions of dollars per YEAR into making consumer-grade, high-utility AR Smartglasses a reality, but progress is slow. There’s no Moore’s law in displays, optics, or batteries. These underlying technologies still remain a big hurdle in developing AR Smartglasses good enough for mass adoption. Additional hurdles remain around the system’s understanding of your intent and the world around you, as well as the social acceptance of these devices.
In this 2020 Kickoff episode, I look back at progress in 2019 and share a few thoughts about what I expect in 2020. As I was thinking through what I wanted to share, I posed these questions to myself:
Why do AR Smartglasses seem inevitable to me?
Who’s chasing this dream? Why?
What progress have we seen in 2019? What hurdles remain?
What does mobile AR teach us?
Why the long road through the enterprise?
What can we expect in 2020?
You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.
Jason McDowall
Links From The Episode
- Article: Welcome to Mirrorworld by Kevin Kelly at Wired
- Data: Facebook’s quarterly R&D spending
- Article: Facebook’s Andrew Bosworth on Why Oculus Didn’t Build a HoloLens-Like AR Headset by Janko Roettgers at Variety
- Article: Facebook is building an operating system so it can ditch Android by Josh Constine at TechCrunch. Includes more info on recent AR spending growth.
- Article: Facebook’s Chief Researcher: ‘When The Next Generation of VR Shows Up, It Will Be Because We Did It’ by David Heaney at Upload VR, which summarizes an interview by The Information
- Article: Snap CEO Evan Spiegel says smart glasses are 10 years away from mass adoption by Salvador Rodriguez at CNBC
- Article: Hololens 2, Not a Pretty Picture by Karl Guttag
- Article: Varjo Launches $10,000 XR-1 Dev Edition, Combining VR & AR in a Single Headset by By Scott Hayden on Road to VR
- Company Website: 8th Wall - AR toolkit for mobile websites + AR Show interview with CEO, Erik Murphy-Chutorian
- Blog Post: Creating the Future of AR Experiences on the Niantic Real World Platform - Includes mention of the Beyond Reality Fund. Also Part 1 (at AWE) and Part 2 (at VRAR Global Summit) with Ross Finman
- Episode Transtript