<story><title>Marc Andreessen: VR will be 1,000 times bigger than AR</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/05/marc-andreessen-audio-will-be-titanically-important-and-vr-will-be-1000-times-bigger-than-ar/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zapzupnz</author><text>Another article on technology in search of a problem to solve. Once again, Silicon Valley just can&amp;#x27;t quite see the human factor in why VR won&amp;#x27;t be this universal technology that everybody uses. Yes, it will have its place, but that place won&amp;#x27;t be in &lt;i&gt;every&lt;/i&gt; home.&lt;p&gt;Prolonged stretches of being unable to see the real world, invoking feels of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty are completely alien to those who work in huge, warehouse-sized, empty rooms in secure facilities, trying out what they assume everybody will want to put in their ornately decorated front rooms.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a disconnect between the tech industry and the &amp;quot;real world&amp;quot;, so to speak, and it really makes you appreciate companies who can see the limits of certain technologies in certain domains. Take Apple, working to make AR easy and friendly on iOS; if, one day, VR takes off, then Apple is already prepared with plenty of machine learning and physics frameworks.&lt;p&gt;Until then, they present AR as the next best thing to VR in a safe, controlled, and non-threatening way; we can see the real world very clearly both through our devices and around them, we don&amp;#x27;t need to pay for prescription headsets or eyewear, and we are all free to put our iPhones and iPads away at any time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wildermuthn</author><text>Most technological breakthroughs are first perceived as toys and hobbies of the rich: personal computers, cellphones, mechanical carriages, Facebook. In this context, sour-grape reactionism is unfortunate but not surprising.&lt;p&gt;VR is where computation becomes human. No keyboards, no monitors, no mice or joysticks, but instead hands, gaze, movement, and voice. VR presents itself as a new way to receive information, but its essential innovation is data input in its most natural form.&lt;p&gt;Enabling humanity to engage with itself and its machines with a fully embodied interface is a 10x improvement over touch-screens. Small example: whiteboards. The simple act of a talented group viewing and marking a large flat surface can change the world. Today, this is not possible without co-location. Once a VR headset with positional and hand tracking hits the market (Oculus promises this spring), the rate of world-changing collaboration will no longer be restricted to geography. Once these virtual whiteboard trend toward Jupyter notebooks, VR will not only have triumphed over location-restricted bodies, but also location-restricted computers.&lt;p&gt;The future is bright and VR will be at the heart of it, regardless of how many people currently mistake it for a toy.</text></comment>
<story><title>Marc Andreessen: VR will be 1,000 times bigger than AR</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/05/marc-andreessen-audio-will-be-titanically-important-and-vr-will-be-1000-times-bigger-than-ar/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zapzupnz</author><text>Another article on technology in search of a problem to solve. Once again, Silicon Valley just can&amp;#x27;t quite see the human factor in why VR won&amp;#x27;t be this universal technology that everybody uses. Yes, it will have its place, but that place won&amp;#x27;t be in &lt;i&gt;every&lt;/i&gt; home.&lt;p&gt;Prolonged stretches of being unable to see the real world, invoking feels of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty are completely alien to those who work in huge, warehouse-sized, empty rooms in secure facilities, trying out what they assume everybody will want to put in their ornately decorated front rooms.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a disconnect between the tech industry and the &amp;quot;real world&amp;quot;, so to speak, and it really makes you appreciate companies who can see the limits of certain technologies in certain domains. Take Apple, working to make AR easy and friendly on iOS; if, one day, VR takes off, then Apple is already prepared with plenty of machine learning and physics frameworks.&lt;p&gt;Until then, they present AR as the next best thing to VR in a safe, controlled, and non-threatening way; we can see the real world very clearly both through our devices and around them, we don&amp;#x27;t need to pay for prescription headsets or eyewear, and we are all free to put our iPhones and iPads away at any time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mattnewport</author><text>Our customers for VR training are not particularly tech savvy and not part of the Silicon Valley bubble but we don&amp;#x27;t find any of the issues you raise to be concerns with our customers.&lt;p&gt;VR probably won&amp;#x27;t have a place in every home, just as TV or Alexa type devices don&amp;#x27;t have a place in my home. I think the market can ultimately be as big as those technologies however.</text></comment>