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Apple CEO Tim Cook On Virtual Reality: There's No Substitute For Human Contact (cnbc.com)

Posted by msmash on from the reality-vs-virtual-reality dept.

As major tech companies ramp up their efforts to develop new technologies to make sense of virtual and augmented reality spaces, one company is noticeably off the game. We're talking about Apple. And it may have something to do with how it perceives these nascent technology spaces. From an article on CNBC:"There's no substitute for human contact," Apple CEO Tim Cook told BuzzFeed News. "And so you want the technology to encourage that." It's not the first time Cook has indicated that Apple might favor AR. "We are high on AR for the long run," Cook said during an earnings call this past summer. "I think AR can be huge." Huge, indeed -- one could look to the sudden and explosive success of Pokemon Go to see an immediate real-world example.

2 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Difficulty of AR vs VR by sjbe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Apple is working on an AR project, because it's easier than VR...

    AR easier than VR? Seriously you have that backwards for the really useful stuff. AR is a much more difficult challenge. I used to work with VR for a living a few years back. There are some tough problems to work out with it but we've been doing useful things with VR for some time now. Flight simulators are a version of VR. Games have been a thing in VR for well over a decade. I used to do industrial simulations for production planning and training. Cool stuff but way easier than the really cool AR stuff.

    AR is a tougher nut to crack in a lot of ways. Unlike VR which has a made up world that you can control entirely, AR has to deal with the real world and the flood of data that brings. It also requires knowing not just where someone is looking but where they are and the ability to update data in relation to that in real time with useful context. That's a challenging thing to do for a lot of the really interesting problems.

  2. Human contact already disappeared by sjbe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Human contact will go the way of the headphone jack.

    You apparently haven't been hanging out with a lot of teenagers lately. Human contact largely disappeared with the emergence of the smartphone and social networking.

    That said one only needs to look at our current election to see that human contact can be highly overrated in the hands of some people.