Technology
The awkward phase of augmented reality is going to be long and painful.
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Last week, with a decentralized approach, I showed how Twitter looked at the future of the web so they would not be stuck unilaterally de-platforming the next world leader. I scribbled some thoughts this week on another aspect of the future web, the ongoing battle to own augmented reality between Facebook and Apple. Only the beginning of a very messy transition from smartphone-first to glass-first mobile computing will be the release of the hardware.
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The Big Thing
If new "reality" tech has telegraphed anything in the last few years, it is that tech companies will not be able to skip the awkward stage of augmented reality, they will have to barrel through it and it will probably take a long time.
The clearest fact is that daily users still do not seem as interested in AR in 2021 as the next generation of platform owners are benefiting from a massive transition. There's some skating element to where the puck goes among the soothsayers who think AR is the inevitable heir to the platform, etc., etc., but the fight to reinvent mobile is at its core a fight to kill the smartphone before its time has come.
A war to remake mobile phones in the image of the winner
It is appropriate that Apple and Facebook, ambitious companies that are deeply in touch with the possibilities they could have capitalized on if they could do it all over again, are the primary supporters of this AR future.
While both Apple and Facebook have thousands of employees quietly working in the background to build their AR tech moats, we have seen and heard a lot more about the efforts of Facebook. The company has already served through Oculus several iterations of their VR hardware and has publicly discussed over the years how they view the convergence of virtual reality and augmented reality hardware.
The hardware and software experiments on Facebook were experiments in plain sight, an advantage given to a business that did not sell any hardware before they began selling VR headsets. Meanwhile, Apple has provided developers with a developer platform and a few well-timed keynote slots for developers using their tools, but a measurement tape app has been the most ambitious first-party AR project they have publicly launched on iOS. Behind closed doors, all else has taken place.
That secrecy tends to make any reporting particularly juicy on Apple's plans. A story from Mark Gurman of Bloomberg this week highlights some of Apple's next steps towards a long-rumored AR glasses product, reporting that as early as next year, Apple plans to release a high-end niche VR device with some AR capabilities. It is not the most surprising, but it shows how desperate the mobile kingpins of today are to facilitate the introduction of a technology that can turn existing tech stacks and the wider web on their heads.
