Imagine a car mechanic remotely helping you to do what's needed to be done. This use case is showcased in one of the videos and it is probably not as complicated as building an AI engine to help a user repair his car.
This is actually a relatively silly use case for this. A lot of the actual difficult things that a mechanic can do for you usually involve more strength than you have. Or just experience in actually working with things that they can't see.
Now, a mechanic using this to "see" things that are actually in control of a remote robot? Pretty cool. Showing you the thing that is right in front of you? Cute, but ultimately silly.
Yeah, I'm just not sure that I buy the idea that there's a big market for an expert coaching you through doing repairs via AR goggles.
How exactly does this work?
You still need to pay for an expert's time -- in fact, you probably need to pay more for it, because the expert is probably faster to do a thing than to explain the thing to you and then you do it. Also, the expert now needs to be someone with these additional skills of coaching someone through an operation.
Tools are still needed -- is there actually a big market for the kind of repairs you can do with the tools that everyone has lying around at home but which is complicated enough to need hand-coaching by an expert?
I mean, maybe! Especially if you can locate the expert in some place where labor prices are much lower (so: India). But then you also need the person to buy the AR goggles. And how often does this use case come up? Is this like 3D printers where people try to sell me on the concept that I could pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for something that can make me things that cost less than $20 and which I need three of every year?
I agree this is highly unlikely to be a common use case. I might use it, because I try to do most things myself, and I could often use some expert advice. And I know the people who would help me, but it'd be inconvenient to have them come all the way out here. But overall, this is a one-in-a-thousand use case.
But:
> Tools are still needed -- is there actually a big market for the kind of repairs you can do with the tools that everyone has lying around at home but which is complicated enough to need hand-coaching by an expert?
Almost all repairs on appliances, cars, houses, and so on can be done with tools you have laying around the house; they don't require anything more than a hammer, drill, screwdrivers, wrench sets, etc. The only thing you're typically not going to have on hand is replacement parts, which are usually not too difficult to get your hands on and which you would have to pay for anyway.
When people do this, it's not going to be an "expert", it's going to be something along the lines of "hey dad, look at this real quick."
> But then you also need the person to buy the AR goggles.
The Ars reporting showed someone using a Surface to view and annotate the HoloLens-user's view, not another set of HoloLens. So the barrier is much lower, any Windows 10 PC should be godo enough.
Have you ever worked on a car? Tons of specialized tools can be needed for some tasks. Do you have a set of triple square bits? General purpose puller? Bearing extraction tool? How about half inch drive Tor-X sockets? 200 ft lb torque wrench? When you work on a car for fun, you find that your collection of tools balloons just for all the things on the car that require one specific tool. If you think you can do everything on the car with just a simple socket set, you'll wind up stuck and having to buy a new tool for every task.
Yes, although granted when I said "almost all repairs" I did not have in mind major automotive work, but more along the lines of general maintenance and little things going wrong. Of course if you're doing something like rebuilding the transmission you'll need more tools than the average bear.
Fair enough, but my point was that for things where you'd benefit from a mechanic walking you through a task, you'll probably need some specialty tools to do the job.
None of those things require the augmented reality aspect of this: you don't need to place math and physics lessons into your local environment. They'd do just as well with VR, and indeed it doesn't sound to me like they'd do MUCH worse with just a plain old screen. What is it that you're imagining we couldn't do with a tablet that has swipe gestures to rotate the demo around all axes?
An electronics teaching kit might not work on a tablet (but would in VR), and note that any kind of really fluid manipulation of a virtual environment is going to involve a whole additional technology that gives precise locations of your hands (at least). The HoloLens allows a few simple gestures, not the ability to handle virtual objects in many degrees of freedom.
I'd approach this problem differently. Not from a service industry angle but from a product vendor angle. Imagine a world where AR-glasses are widespread.
I'd be pretty interested in buying the kitchen sink that comes with an AR repair guide or the furniture that comes with AR assembly instructions.
So I think the interesting market is in building the infrastructure/app that makes it easy for vendors to create the content and ship it as a (free) addon for their products.
You could draw on a much bigger pool than professionals. There are plenty of people who know a skill and don't professionally sell their services but could spare a few minutes occasionally to help someone with a problem. If you combine skill tracking with instant global availability of services, you have a lot of room for development.
I don't think that 'strength' is the issue but better tools
and a lot more experience are the core parts: I remember watching one mechanic changing the light in my car: what took me ~15 minutes (I'm not kidding) took him ~30secondes..
And that's like riding a bike: you cannot really tell someone how to do it..
But the hologram need not be a person! At least, it won't be once this use case makes sense. The hologram, will be an AI hologram. Just like the light switch installation in TFA, it would be silly to have a human expert show you how to install a switch, or trade out a component in your car, once an AI expert will do.
If there's a market for this, why doesn't it already exist? You could take your smartphone under your car, and video chat with a mechanic anywhere in the world. The mechanic could even draw arrows or highlight areas on your video in real-time as it's looped back to your display.
The furor is not about dropping XMPP; it is about dropping the philosophy of open communication they championed: "Client Choice, Service Choice and Platform Choice" (https://developers.google.com/talk/open_communications). If Google chose to drop XMPP in favor of some other protocol that allowed others to adopt and interoperate, the discussion would have been about the effort required to migrate. But this move by Google is a huge blow to those who hoped for a world of ip based open communication solution.
Google is in a position to define the course of internet and has used that power in several ways in the past. This move from an open communication network to a closed network, to me, is as defining as WebGL and WebRTC are, but in a very unhealthy way. Google's move therefore is clearly 'evil' (as per their own definition of evil) as it is a clear choice they made to safeguard their vested interests, stating that other corporations are unduly benefiting from their openness as a reason.(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfK8h73bb-o [2:40])
They stated that major networks did not interoperate with them. But in 2007 AIM started interoperating with Google Talk. http://gmailblog.blogspot.in/2007/12/gmail-chat-aim-crazy-de.... Doesn't that count? What did Google do to promote federation, other than asking people to contact them to federate? It appears that when Google was small, they tried to be open to benefit from other big players. Now that they are the biggies, they don't see any value in being open.
I believe more than any other company you mentioned, Google benefited significantly by projecting themselves as the messiahs of internet, purportedly promoting openness and standardization. They captured the imagination of people like us by promising to be only doers of good, placing the objectives of internet and humanity ahead of the corporation's benefits. They did so, as long as it worked in their favor. Those initial adopters who stood with them for these objectives are either absorbed into Google to work as if Google's interests are internet's interests or they are too few and left with fewer alternatives to significantly influence Google and its corporate objectives. With many of the influential personalities deeply affiliated with Google, we have fewer voices calling a spade as a spade.
> It appears that when Google was
small, they tried to be open to
benefit from other big players.
Now that they are the biggies,
they don't see any value in being open.
Sad but true. Corporations who have to worry about keeping their share price forever in the green will have to compromise on their ideals. They will still talk about their ideals but they won't put their money where their mouth is.
This raises the question of how much we users can trust any for-profit corporation, since at some point that corporation will value its own profit above our intersts. One possible answer is that we can trust them with short-term transactions, but not with any kind of long-term relationship, especially one that's hard to get out of.
Let us say each message exchanged in XMPP is about 200-300 bytes. If in a session (time between app foreground and background on a mobile device), user exchanges 10 messages, we are talking about net data transfer of less than 3K bytes. Each of those characters might be compared to 10 tokens while parsing (thee is scope for significant optimization). I think, the battery cost of 30K comparison on CPU isn't comparable to the cost of rendering one of those messages on the screen and it might be sub 1% of the cost of keeping the screen lit for that user session.
Optimizing parsing cost, at the expense of breaking foundational philosophy of their communication services, is hardly justifiable. XMPP has several overheads, XML will not top that list.
What if Mircorsoft had called Windows 8 as some Neo OS v1 (or beta)? What if they had said that this OS is:
1. Optimized for low power chips and is very power efficient
2. Cloud centric and integrates all the modern breed of sensors like accelerometer, GPS, proximity, ...
3. Supports touch and pen inputs as natively as Windows supports keyboard and mice.
4. Super fast
5. Runs your legacy Windows applications
6. Supports most of the devices like cameras, scanners, printers meant to work with Windows
7. Runs in several form factors
8. Gives a familiar .NET and HTML environments to develop applications
I think, calling it Windows has set an expectation for start button and desktop as the landing screen and led to this widespread disappointment. Microsoft failed to get users to approach it with a desire to explore. By making their new OS the mainstream OS shipped with every PC sold (with or without necessary hardware support), they neither chose the initial seed users right nor gave the OS a good chance with right devices.
Doesn't whitelisting amount to closing of interface? They may very well use the CalDav protocol which is open, but how good is it if the consumption interface is not open?
Perhaps it was done to prevent spam, or to prevent misbehaving clients from wreaking havoc on its servers.
From hearsay, I understand it's reasonably easy to get on the whitelist if you're a moderately-known app developer or a legit institution. This would lead me to believe Google's reasons are less nefarious in this case.
This thing is really crazy!!