There were a couple points I wanted to elaborate that I noticed as I was cutting the latest episode.
First, I made a comment along the lines of “AR has been around pretty much as long as we have had computers” I think this was a bit of a misstatement. I was thinking as long as I had been playing with computers, but really I think the framing is closer to “…since we’ve had mobile computers.” Temporally, I would say this is about the late 90s. Not splitting hairs too much on the specifics of the definition of AR since we did that ad nauseam in the episode.
Second, wanted to clarify what I meant by “there have been no novel inventions in AR.” Generally, there have not been fundamental research breakthroughs to change the way we implement augmented reality in computing devices. Sure, there have been great advances in processing speeds, hardware sizes, modularization, frameworks, etc – but no real groundbreaking inventions. There have been very novel applications of these things – I still see these all as incremental steps. I’m not sure I can posit what a breakthrough invention might be. Perhaps a usable Google Glass type interface, contact lens screen that is always on, or reaching a bit – ocular implants.
We had a great time recording this episode. Truth be told, we recorded this and the previous episode in the same session. We weren’t explicitly planning to break it into two episodes, but ended up having about 45 minutes of cut content so split it two weeks.
We have our first guests lined up next week, so watch out for some other voices in upcoming episodes.