Sorry if this is a dumb question, but does anyone else feel like technology - specifically consumer tech - kinda peaked over a decade ago? I’m 37, and I remember being awed between like 2011 and 2014 with phones, voice assistants, smart home devices, and what websites were capable of. Now it seems like much of this stuff either hasn’t improved all that much, or is straight up worse than it used to be. Am I crazy? Have I just been out of the market for this stuff for too long?
I work in VR and AR. I traveled to a conference this week to showcase demos of my work.
I have in my backpack a headset that’s costing few hundred bucks and can spawn in front if your eyes 3D models you can directly manipulate with your hands or a pen.
It just works.
I even use it offline while flying.
This didn’t exist 10years ago. It’s amazing.
It always amazes me how much professional uses VR/AR has, and what kind of stuff has been created for it by all sorts of industries. Some see it as a failure because the consumer variants have not seen revolutionairy improvements over the past years, but the industry around it is quickly growing. So many companies use it, that the technology doesn’t need games to survive.
They probably haven’t tried a Quest 3 (overall trade off) or a Vision Pro (resolution and eye tracking, arguably not for consumers though based on the price… but compared to gaming PC + VR kit few years ago I’d say it is comparable) because even though IMHO the biggest revolution has been going from 3DoF to 6DoF recently, just the improvements (resolution, inside-out tracking, hand tracking, BT support with a ton of peripherals, etc) is actually providing an experience different enough that people who had doubt few years ago, say on a Valve Index, are reconsidering “just” based on form factor and thus convenience.