Will it Sink or Swim? For now, it's floating.
Last week’s Magic Leap reveal landed with precious little enchantment, and more the type of thud one might expect from a whale hitting a well-waxed gym floor. It’s not exactly an uncommon state affairs, either. In fact, it’s an issue that’s been common to a number of high-profile AR launches.
Over at VentureBeat, Jeremy Horowitz has nailed down an explanation for this problem. It’s the result of a fundamental disconnect between the capabilities of the high-end wearable devices we’ve seen and the rather more prosaic options available to non-wearable products. Or, in his words: “The crux of AR’s issue is that there’s no affordable wearable hardware out there. There’s wearable hardware, but it’s not affordable. And there’s affordable hardware, but it’s not wearable.”
Some readers pushed back against my own withering critique of Magic Leap’s demo, for which I make no apologies. Given that the company has received $2.3B in funding, it’s reasonable to expect more than a blurry rock-throwing monster. But it may be worth unpacking why that demo is so uninspired. A small rock monster whose missile strikes an external wall and crumbles may be technically impressive, inasmuch as it shows a holographic element responding to a real-world surface. But what it doesn’t show is any way for that capability to be either independently useful (like an egg timer) or jaw-droppingly immersive (like the idea of a whale that can breach through the solid floor of one’s viewing space).
This tension between what hardware can accomplish, and what customers are willing to pay for, seems to lie at the root of many complex problems with both AR and VR. In some cases, the issues are made that much tougher to solve simply because showing the features of the underlying hardware is genuinely difficult. Starting with the 3-D push almost a decade ago, we’ve seen manufacturers ramp up a number of technologies that are hard to showcase if people aren’t watching the demos live and in person. Other factors, like battery life, software support, and integrated hardware performance have presented profound challenges as well.
Until we find a way to start closing some of these gaps, I’m not optimistic that AR or VR will grow particularly well.
