This week we seem to have lots of stories about VR and with more to come, as I was at Laval Virtual this week. We’ll have our report next week, mainly in MDM.
In general, our Display Daily writers have ‘free rein’ to choose their own topics. As they all have very individual points of view, this usually works to provide a wide variety, but this week, almost all of them wrote about VR. One of the reasons for this is that pretty well every analyst that I know thinks that, eventually, augmented reality, in the shape of something that looks surprisingly like ‘ordinary’ glasses, will be as ubiquitous as smartphones are today. (although our friend, Dr. Jon Peddie thinks that by 2025, clever contact lenses will dominate. I’m not so sure).
Now, when something gets that widely adopted, the prize for the market winners could be as huge as the win that Apple got with its iPhone. Its great job with the iPhone has continued to make Apple massively successful and every company would like to be Apple. As we show in the front page story in MDM this week, Apple still has the best selling handset in the iPhone 6.
Apple is widely believed to be seriously interested in augmented reality, but is waiting until it can really deliver a great experience before it jumps into the market. Apple followed this strategy when it established the iPad. One of the analysts that worked for Meko, the publisher of LDM & MDM, when Apple launched the iPad had been a product manager for tablets when he worked at Fujitsu. As a result of his experiences, he was very negative about the prospects for Apple. Although I pointed out that some of the display and power issues that had caused so much trouble for his products at Fujitsu had gone away or been significantly improved, he wrote that Apple was making a big mistake.
Nevertheless, the rule at Meko is that analysts are allowed their opinions, so we published his negative comments. It’s probably the least correct analyst comment we have ever printed! As it turned out, Apple had judged the timing perfectly. After years of attempts, everything was ready for a product that was really good. In fact, it was so good and set the bar so high, that tablet development has barely progressed since.
Now, we’re still at the early stages of AR and there is a lot still to do. Much of the development is in the area of optics and a problem with optics is that, despite the improvements in recent years, development cannot take advantage of a technology accelerator like Moore’s Law. So it could take a while for a really great product to appear. However, because of Tim Cook’s comments, we know that Apple is very interested in AR, so we can assume that it has lots going on in the back rooms of Cupertino.
I tend to agree with a comment made by Jon Peddie in his talk at Laval Virtual this week, that AR glasses are likely to be an add-on to a smartphone, simply because they have so much computing (and battery) power, compared to something that would otherwise be head-mounted. There are plenty of rumours around that Apple will launch an AR add on for its iPhones from credible analysts and industry insiders. That might make sense as Apple will really lose any remaining advantage it has had in smartphone displays as it is going to be a Samsung client going forward and it will want to differentiate itself.
Equally, the company might well decide to simply wait until it can do what it wants with the quality that it wants and simply do something to enable better AR using the regular iPhone display (probably about ‘Simultaneous Localization and Mapping’ or SLAM, a key technology, according to Jon, and one where Apple has bought a lot of expertise).
Anyway, all of this speculation is one of the main reasons that all our analysts are so intrigued by the prospects for VR and AR. It’s not the last week that AR and VR are going to be strong topics.
Bob
