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While Google is obviously good at producing technology, their holistic product strategy towards their goal of ambient computing is incredibly behind. You know who has the most AR phones, smartwatches, and wireless earbud market share? Apple. Google has dropped the ball on ALL of those things, which makes it kind of hilarious that they talk about ambient computing already, meanwhile they only just bought FitBit (ie are yet to turn them into Google devices) and don’t even have wireless earbuds available yet, let alone ones with noise canceling.

Google probably bought FitBit to try and get larger market share of people’s wrists.

There’s no one you can buy to compete with Apple in the smart hearables space right now. Sony? Bose? HK? They all make headphones, not hearables.

So, they are behind on the hardware. Fine. That’s to be expected, and they’re working towards it. But given that, they might want to really build a huge moat/lead in the race to build, maintain, own and regulate an AR Cloud. Niantic just bought 6D, and Niantic’s last round had them valued at $4B. If you really believe that AR is the next computing platform, then I think it would make sense to spend the money to acquire Niantic now. Maybe they’re trying.

Caveat – I am not saying I want this to happen, this is just a discussion on whether or not you think it would be in Google’s interest to pursue this strategy. I think many of us are thrilled to see the continued growth of a newcomer in this space. I know Matt from 6D is often here on the forums, so feel free to say hi even though I doubt you can comment much on this particular post 🙂

Right now with no AR Cloud it’s not like I’m going to randomly pull my phone out to explore some cool AR concept. It’s either functional (ruler, room mapping), or games/activities/experiences that I would probably enjoy more with a bigger screen of a tablet, given that both the phone and tablet require your hands anyway.

I’m still new to AR, but I see his predictions everywhere, especially from two years ago. He seems to just constantly talk about the future of AR and say it’s two years away. Has he been able to predict things well in the past? Why is he such a figure in the AR ecosystem? So many of his predictions sound like Trump speak when he talks about „secret sources telling me secret things“ that all turn out to be false.

I’m still trying to wrap my mind around what it takes to build an AR app. RealityKit seems to be Apple’s new game/physics engine (replacing SceneKit) for AR experiences. Would one choose between Unity and RealityKit? How do you make that decision?

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Also, if you’re feeling generous when responding, what is Metal and how does that fit into the picture? Thanks.

ARKit 3 introduced people occlusion, motion capture, and collaborative sessions. Despite this, I personally haven’t seen many AR apps that use these new features (Zenia is an app that helps you do yoga w/ mocap but it’s meh at best)? If you know of any, I’d love to try them.

What would be cool in ARKit4? What new features do you think might unlock new AR experiences that consumers will actually want to try?

I ask because I’m really interested in AR, but truthfully find that there aren’t any AR apps right now that hold my interest for more than day or two. Maybe they’re not popular enough yet, maybe we need better ARKit features available to developers? What do you think?

Personally, I don’t know if we need more features to make better AR experiences. Maybe they need to improve the existing SW features (mocap is shaky right now) and then focus on HW by adding a true depth camera for the rear facing input and maybe more advanced U1 chip features.

As I understand it:

• ARKit – the SDK Apple provides so developers can build AR apps or add AR functionality to apps
• RealityKit – I’m not really sure. It’s for building/animating content that you would then use in your ARKit app maybe?
• SceneKit – I don’t really know
• QuickLook – this is how Apple lets developers create AR experiences in Safari. Is it still built using ARKit though? Is it a separate SDK?
• Reality Composer – way of making AR experiences if you have your own usdz files to use but I don’t understand how this is different than ARKit?

These might be basic questions but I appreciate the help ahead of time. Thanks!