Marc Andreessen: VR will be 1,000 times bigger than AR
Another article on technology in search of a problem to solve. Once again, Silicon Valley just can't quite see the human factor in why VR won't be this universal technology that everybody uses. Yes, it will have its place, but that place won't be in every home.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.There's a disconnect between the tech industry and the "real world", 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.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't need to pay for prescription headsets or eyewear, and we are all free to put our iPhones and iPads away at any time.