No one wants AR outside of niché applications. Regular people have no interest in walking around with AR headsets.<p>I saw a 3D overlay AR experience that some people were doing at the Minoan palace of Knossos in Greece. It’s a large multi-level outdoor space. They were walking around with tablets with huge sunshades because of the incredibly bright Cretan sun. I don’t know what they thought of it but they did use it quite a bit. I think you’re better off seeing the ruins, and then seeing a recreated physical 3D model (which they did have at the accompanying museum), or a short film exploring the space. I could imagine that if we squeezed all the AR stuff into the size of regular glasses, this sort of experience might have more take. But maybe it’s just better to see ruins as ruins first and let your imagination do the rest?<p>I could imagine things like turn by turn directions being useful in a nice AR product but that’s just one thing…<p>As I keep saying in my HN comments, I just don’t think people want the AR/VR form factor.
What? Google unstable commitment? Unpossible. My friends work there. They were both reorged four times this year.
It’s not uncommon for individuals or teams to be moved five times a year.
> Google had shifted its focus to "creating software platforms for AR that it hopes to license to other manufacturers building headsets."<p>Assuming that AR/VR is a viable market, then this strategy seems short-sighted. The ios platform is smaller than android and typically more profitable because of it's target market. Sure Google has search, but this is just another area in which it's ceding ground because it can't compete even though it has massive resources and was ahead of the competition.
It's always amazing to me to see people bad mouthing their former employers in this way. Either you're burning bridges or you're not, and this kind of comment seems like a "you won't be employed there again" comment, but if you're going to do that why hold back?