Apple Looking to Create an 'Entirely New Application Paradigm' for AR and VR

AR is where it is at.
Walk into a store. Look at items on the shelves. Eye tracking knows what you are looking at. HUD displays the price of the product, how often you buy the product. If you buy the product often and have run out at home, a reminder might pop up and indicate how many items would be worth purchasing (based on your purchase history).

You pick up a pack of biscuits, instantly the ingredients list pops up (no more impossibly small ingredients lists on packages).
If you are someone with allergies it can warn you if their are ingreients that might cause you a problem. Perhaps even indicate a similar item that does not have something you are allergic to.

As you scan the isles looking for something, the system notices you are searching - prompting you to indicate what you are looking for. You say 'cheese', and a pop up on the display shows 'isle 14' with an arrow indicating the direction to head in.

All pricing labels, paper notices, stickers etc will all dissappear.
As a store owner - when there is need to change the price of something - change it in the system and you are done. No meed to update signs or anything - customers see the new proce via their AR immediately.
Add a new product to shelves, same story.

Repairing something - HUD shows which screws to remove next, their type and size by highlighting them on the item you are looking at using AR. Complete a step and it shows you the next step.
Diagnosing a hardware problem, status shows on the HUD.

It goes on and on, and it is all AR. VR might be 'cool' or useful in training, but I really think AR is where it is at.

The biggest issue is to have a data interchange format that all AR devices support, image recognition that works, and the ability for people to easily create AR resources such as a repair guide for a peice of hardware, or a map of a store and where items are on shelves. The likelyhood that AR itself could be used as a tool for inputting this data in the first place is immesly high. Walk around your store amd it creats a map, look at shelves and it picks up on products and where they are located. No need to type all this data in, making it easy for people to start using in the first place.

I still wonder what the use case will be? B2B? Industry? Hospitals? Apple can barely fill the gaming sector on Arcade.

So far AR, VR or whatever only seems to fill a need that wasn't even there in the first place.

Personally I have yet to use LiDAR on my iPhone

AR has helped us massively in the pandemic - we can avoid weeks of downtime on equipment due to inability to fly a specialist to site.

Instead, we've been using HoloLens and remote assistance to guide the on site fitter/mechanic.

When your machine costs 10-100k per hour it is down, getting a diagnosis or fix hours, days or weeks earlier is a MASSIVE win.

Just because YOU have no application for it, doesn't mean there are no applications for this tech. People are using it TODAY to solve real problems.

I can't wait to see what Apple do with this. because even in the janky, half-assed state that Microsoft's offering is, it is useful already.

I'm sure Apple's implementation, when it finally drops, will be far better.

Sounds like something out of this world. Let's get to it.

Interesting comments here calling for a "killer app".

An anecdote: I was watching a presentation at a large mobile phone conference (GSM World, maybe) just when mobile internet was becoming available. Everyone was looking for the "killer app" that would make it take off. The presenter said "You're all looking for the killer app, but the killer app for mobile phones is voice!" The entire audience, many hundreds of mobile professionals, gave a standing ovation at that comment.

That was the view of professionals back then, and they completely failed to understand the usefulness of data on the phone. They couldn't envision anything beyond incremental progress. Look at what we have now, and realize that there is no single "killer app" for VR/AR. Entire industries will be created, and we have no idea what they will be from our perspective of today. Don't make the mistake of the phone people.

We all know how buggy iOS and Mac os is currently.

World class hardware with just working level software!
Hardware is ready & only few months left for launch and now they’re focusing on software.

People are going to look back at our talk of phone, internet addiction and screen time talk and think about how cute that concept was.

This is going to unleash addiction and associated social mayhem on a level you would never imagine.

Looking back, 2016-2021 are going to seem like periods of calm and normalcy compared to the insanity we are going to have to deal with.

**** all these ****** immoral nerds who come up with newer and better ways to addict the mass of idiots out there