AR will be startup dominated, VR will not
I think this article makes very good points, it&#x27;s very similar to something I&#x27;ve thought about VR vs AR and the internet analogy - which is that something that made (and still makes) the internet very approachable for indie hackers and startups is how simple the UI and UX are (or can be).<p>As a single person, with the right set of skills and enough care and attention, you can build a product on the web that looks and feels just as good, better even, than the big players. You&#x27;re at no major disadvantage.<p>The same feels at least partially true for AR. It seems like AR UI is likely, at least in the near term, going to look like fairly simple overlay of images, boxes and text over physical objects. Not too different from a web page, basically. In fact I can even imagine that you could build such a UI with a markup language not dissimilar to HTML. You could even use CSS mostly as-is to style the components. Anyone who&#x27;s capable of building a web page is going to be able to get going with this and build something useful really quickly.<p>VR feels obviously different in this regard. Simplistic UI is not going to look good or have good UX in VR, just as it doesn&#x27;t in a 3D game. A solo engineer is not going to be able to compete with big company teams of artists, designers, etc to craft good looking VR spaces with comparable levels of quality.<p>I think the best we can hope for in VR is some kind of generic VR world toolkit, that&#x27;s open source, within which one can overlay one&#x27;s own UI using pre-designed models etc in a mostly cut and paste fashion (so kind of like how the browser gives you the DOM, and you just define what you want to display with simple markup instead of having to literally render pixel by pixel) - then it might be a bit more possible for solo engineers or small teams to actually build good looking and useful products. But still, it&#x27;s a stretch to imagine that being competitive with custom designs that bigger teams and companies are capable of producing.<p>I guess we&#x27;ll see. I like to be optimistic because usually with software and open source people find ways to surprise you with ingenuity and make things possible that you didn&#x27;t even think of, and come up with usecases and products that you didn&#x27;t think of in advance.