How big is the market for AR glasses? You probably have no idea.

Imagine this. I need glasses. I can't find them. I can't see clearly more than a few feet in front of my face. I can find my phone. I turn on its camera. I can see the world, suddenly in focus, using my phone's screen.

AR glasses can, without lenses, completely replace "lens-based" glasses. And make the current state of the art in progressive lenses look like madhuman-inventor-in-their-basement wastes of time.

And let's return to Apple AirPods Pro's and Max' (and Beats Solo Pro's) Transparency Mode. It's taking what's in your world, reducing unimportant sounds (leaf blower) and increasing important ones (human voice).  

That's AR. That's your world, programmatically mediated for improved interaction.

But don't stop there. Now add GUIs -- let's call them HUDs to be kewl -- in the corners, voice assistants in my ears, highlighted pieces of interest in my field of view, reminders, the whole "Predator sight" nine yards.

That's what AR is. It's perfect senses. You can see perfectly, hear perfectly, well beyond even the best human can now, missing nothing. Baby crying? Never miss it. See the baby camera immediately without reaching for your monitor. Calls from your mother when she's worried? Patched through no matter what. Calls from someone you gave your number to in a bar but shouldn't have (do we still go to bars?) who won't stop hounding you? Never makes it past the CPU, if that's what you want. Fakes that the number is dead.

Not awake in time for a meeting? Forgot that you're out of milk on the way home? Did you mention to a friend that you'd see them at 7:30 tonight and it's 7:10? Instant recall without the mediation of looking at your phone; now it's in your ear, politely, or the corner of your eye without your having ever made an entry in your calendar or reminders.

AR is coming. Not VR, not a world to replace "reality". AR qua Reality++. It is coming, eventually. It's already hear, quietly. And just like a smartphone, everyone will eventually pay for the hardware... and the subscriptions that hardware will all but require.

Every capitalist dollar with an iota of brains wants in on this. I wonder when we'll hit the tipping point where those dollars finally start to reproduce like jackrabbits.

Labels: augmented reality, hats o' money

Labels: AirPods, apple, augmented reality

There's only one word for Apple's strategy after watching yesterday's keynote: Untethered.

We've seen the start of this with Handoff, but we saw the carry-through yesterday with the watch, with its built-in GPS and the disconnected hiking app demo, and particularly in the AirPods -- but also sneakily in the Lightning port. More on that last one in a second.

The AirPods obviously constitute the cleanest vision of untethering. First, Apple's embraced and extended Bluetooth. Forget nasty pairing, but also say hello to pair once, access anywhere, as long as you’re in your personal niche of the Apple ecosystem.

And the AirPods do access. They’re not secondary to hearing sound, not limited like even your fanciest 3.5mm headphones. AirPods are more than just a set of controls to pause & skip, maybe answer and end a call (and what a hack it is getting just that much interaction to work over the 3.5mm).

No, the AirPods are much more than earphones. AirPods are an interface. They are your Star Trek communicators. You tap, you get Siri, you ask whatever [Apple] device is near you to do what you need. They're commoditizing device access.

The AirPod isn't just a decent earphone, though it is that. It isn't just a silly salesman's Bluetooth earpiece, though it is that too (you can use one at a time, if you want, and it's Jawbone city all over again). It's not just a way to listen to music on your computer, though it is that too.

The AirPod is Apple's interface to audio-augmented realty. This is the HoloEar to Microsoft's HoloLens.

What really clued me in was my own absolute embrace of Lightning-only input. Now look, I love the legacy audio port. When I called the Beats acquisition as the end of the 3.5mm in 2014, I said the following:

I've often thought of the 3.5mm headphone jack as one of the most impressive wins for open standards. Everything I've used to listen to music portably since I was listening to a tape of my Falco album during runs as a kid to my iPhone today has had one, which means that there's one type of hardware with the potential to last even longer than my monitors -- my headphones.

I still appreciate that, but it's simply not the way Apple's does design. The 3.5mm port is a distraction. Why would you have two audio-out ports? Lightning works fine for audio, and, much more importantly, the Lightning port allows [digital] data to go both ways. Note when the keynote talked about the way the JBL headphones could adjust the amount of noise cancellation based on communication with the phone over Lightning. That's not a great example, but it gets across Apple's point:

For Apple, headphones should no longer be passive. They should be full players in your digital life. They should be interfaces.

Whether that's Apple's Bluetooth++ or Lightning headphones or an Apple watch or macOS Handoff, what's important is that every device works both ways with every other, that every device is literally an I/O port. The new digital hub is completely distributed.

This increasingly distributed digital world is exactly what we should expect to get more of from Apple. You, untethered from any one specific device, with a wealth of ways to access any of them. And as that interface gets less and less substantial, less and less cumbersome, the interface will gradually fade until it converges with what we now conceptualize of as augmented reality. But when it actually hits, we’ll just call the augmentation our phone. Or watch. Or PC. Or nothing at all.

This freedom is what device & software integration — that is, having Apple provide all of your devices — buys us, and it’s impressive seeing how what, on their face, appear to be such minor advances (“Oh wows. Apple’s made Bluetooth headphones. Yays.”), really are small pieces moving on a much, much larger chess board.

How I put it at Michael Tsai's blog:

"The way Apple justified this was pretty disappointing—no real reason was given."

I think this is a softball. Apple likes [imo, etc] to design without concern for legacy when they can. If you were going to design the perfect iPhone today, would it have two audio-out ports? No. Even more, would you add a legacy port that was inferior -- at best equal -- at audio-out? Goodness no.

And we should've seen it coming. Buying Beats signaled the end of the 3.5mm. This seemingly small move has been a long time coming, and Apple has much bigger plans for what you can do with what you wear on your head than the control hacks we've seen with 3.5mm. The JBL example at the keynote, though weak, was telling. Think of headphones as interface, not as audio-out devices limited to music control and a mic for calls.

Though I totally agree with the lack of courage. If this is better, quit with the adapter as a pack-in. If everyone needs an adapter, you screwed up.

Labels: apple, augmented reality, business, interface, iphone, music, W1 chip