I have a dozen VR headsets, more of them doing passthrough, I have AR glasses and even a monocle. I prototype in the field. The technology is amazing... but you don't need it to get value. Bring your tablet to the kitchen, add a webcam if you want to try to get visual feedback, display the recipe and... just cook.
I think there is a big gap between :
- how messy the World is (imagine a "normal" kitchen, not a prop for a demo)
- how good existing low-tech solutions are (e.g. just a book or a printed page for a recipe)
meaning that to provide marginally more value the tech has to be excellent at handle a messy World. Sure the tech is radically improving but we are vastly underestimating, as we did for robotics for decades now, how challenging seemingly menial task can be and how to do so reliably.
I always think of my Roomba in this kind of situation, namely when one tries to imagine a future where tech works outside of the computer. Basically my little vacuum robot mostly sits idling in the corner because... a basic broom or a normal vacuum cleaner is radically more efficient, even if it means I have to do so myself.
So... yes I'm techno-optimist but the timescale is IMHO not as close as we hope for.
PS: AR setups (glasses or not) do NOT have to be connected to be useful. Do not get footed by Meta slick ads to imply that only they can make glasses, heck I'm taped a pair together 5 years ago with a RasberryPi Zero. It wasn't slick https://twitter-archive.benetou.fr/utopiah/status/1449023602... but it worked.
Like for example: I don't know, sometimes I'm cooking for my partner. Do they hear a one-sided conversation between me and the "Live AI" about what to do first, how to combine the ingredients? Without the staged demo's video-casting, this would have been the demo: a celebrity chef talking to himself like a lunatic, asking how to start.
I think this is one of those things that society just adapts to. Some people will be in the kitchen talking to "themselves" but that's okay, people understand why. My Mom would often talk to herself when cooking anyway. She was a verbal processor. You just get used to it and eventually it doesn't seem weird anymore.
I think it's pretty obvious that something like this product is going to be the future, but the technology is still pretty raw. Eventually, humans will have some kind of personal assistant baked into their field of view. Maybe we're on the cusp, or maybe we're 50 years out. Hard to know.
I have a dozen VR headsets, more of them doing passthrough, I have AR glasses and even a monocle. I prototype in the field. The technology is amazing... but you don't need it to get value. Bring your tablet to the kitchen, add a webcam if you want to try to get visual feedback, display the recipe and... just cook.
I think there is a big gap between :
- how messy the World is (imagine a "normal" kitchen, not a prop for a demo)
- how good existing low-tech solutions are (e.g. just a book or a printed page for a recipe)
meaning that to provide marginally more value the tech has to be excellent at handle a messy World. Sure the tech is radically improving but we are vastly underestimating, as we did for robotics for decades now, how challenging seemingly menial task can be and how to do so reliably.
I always think of my Roomba in this kind of situation, namely when one tries to imagine a future where tech works outside of the computer. Basically my little vacuum robot mostly sits idling in the corner because... a basic broom or a normal vacuum cleaner is radically more efficient, even if it means I have to do so myself.
So... yes I'm techno-optimist but the timescale is IMHO not as close as we hope for.
PS: AR setups (glasses or not) do NOT have to be connected to be useful. Do not get footed by Meta slick ads to imply that only they can make glasses, heck I'm taped a pair together 5 years ago with a RasberryPi Zero. It wasn't slick https://twitter-archive.benetou.fr/utopiah/status/1449023602... but it worked.
I think it's pretty obvious that something like this product is going to be the future, but the technology is still pretty raw. Eventually, humans will have some kind of personal assistant baked into their field of view. Maybe we're on the cusp, or maybe we're 50 years out. Hard to know.