Introducing Snapring
The case for our humble Augmented Reality beginnings
I. Setting the Stage
Why do we want Spectacles? “Because they’re fun. They look cooool. I love the unique perspective. The marketing is amazing.” If you go beyond the gadget reviews, fans, super fan girls, and people who don’t get it because …. they’re obviously dinosaurs trying to live in the age of mammals (Adapt or die), you’ll see a compelling strategy.
Hopefully, I can walk with you gracefully to the same conclusion.
First off, Snapchat’s Spectacles are an AR (Augmented Reality) play. Early bird. Long-term. Light hearted. Disruptive in the sense that their approach will be very difficult to copy by other makers and companies with the same level of flare. I think that AR is going to be ubiquitous before VR (Virtual Reality) because it is less bulky and more socially acceptable to wear. But in either case there is a fundamental problem that AR/VR has to solve. Can you guess it?
You’re probably thinking: Latency, Streaming Rates, Portability, Resolution, Focus distance, Eye-tracking, Gestures, User Interfaces, Battery life, The Tether, Fine Finger tracking and blah blah blah .
Or you’re not because you’re not waist deep into this, yet. The answer is none of the above.
II. VR Controllers Today
Actually now that I think about it, it’s not a fundamental problem until you get into the realities of everyday AR/VR use. When in VR/AR you need a way to control your environment. Hence the controllers. We know the VR contenders.
These controllers are great feats of engineering. They’re also pretty ugly if you think about them in the grand scheme of beautiful products. Also I’d never want to carry them around with me. Actually Google’s Daydream controller is quite different. We’ll come back to that. If we ignore VR we can see MR (Mixed Reality)/AR controllers are very different.
Do you notice anything similar among these instances? AR’s potential is maximized when you can use your hands to manipulate the views. However your hands have to be directly in line-sight of the camera’s field of view. We’re talk 50–98 degrees max, for now.
Herein lies the problem. Long term usage of either AR / VR can be tiring. Put in a different perspective by Lucas Matney , “Even if the Meta 2 had the form factor of a pair of Wayfarers, I still wouldn’t be caught dead reaching my arms out and grabbing shit out of the sky in public.”
Actually the more I think about it, I realize we might be wrong. If you are using AR or VR for a long time, you’ll probably be in an environment in which you can and want to use controllers or won’t care about your hands.
Okay, maybe the controllers aren’t unwieldy, but they’re not cute. What I’m trying to argue is that a continuum of experiences ranging from close-to-reality-AR to fully-immersive, i-can-see-my-body-VR requires a continuum of controllers that make justice for each modality.
I think the way VR will explode is unlike we’ve seen before. Over the next years many devices that we never could have imagined will be placed in front of us. It will be akin to the creation of the smartphone, tablet, and the touchscreen all in one desktop all at the same time. There is no way we are prepared to deal with the plethora of options. That brings me to why Snap’s play is so brilliant. Just to be clear, what they’re doing is not necessarily new. See Vue’s kickstarter. It’s how they’re doing it.
They are reaching for the minimal product required to entice their user base rather than trying to promise the entire farm, which we know is years away.
III. A Comparison
Let’s take a look at the smartphone and see how it used today. Smartphones are used right when you wake up, on your way to work, in the line at Starbucks, in the car/train/bus on your commute, while chilling in the office, during your break, on the commute home, and on your downtime when back at home. I believe this is the experience of the average American with added or removed amenities depending on your economic standing. In the long term the majority of people will not be using VR/ AR for creating the next 3D world. See Facebook. Similarly, we have a distribution of use cases for Laptops and PC’s. Chromebooks are huge. Gamers are cool. But the volume of non-gamers is formidable, bigly.
If we think about VR/AR as “next up” it becomes obvious that in order for it to reach mass adoption it will need to fit into all of the above situations and be simple to use. This situation has already been played out by people with way more thought as seen in Black Mirror episodes “Nose Dive” and “The Entire History of You”.
AR/MR will turn into embeddable contact lenses in the long term (~10 yrs). What struck me as weird in the episodes was the fact that the display becomes a part of the user while the controller is still a smartphone? a separate controller? Really Black Mirror!? This is where Google’s Daydream controller seems to be the best analog. However, I don’t believe either Google or Black Mirror go far enough with the controller.
Google has an excuse. It is focused on VR, consumer AR has yet to be introduced, and the use case for VR will not be on a continuous basis. However when AR becomes inconspicuous and embedded into our lives, will we want to lug around a smartphone and an AR controller? Will we even need a smartphone? I doubt it. So the question becomes how do we bring the controller closer to the user?
I think therefore I am — Rene Descartes
What would it look like if the controller was as close to the user as possible? We’d be talking about brain-machine interfaces of course. That’s way out there. But people are working on it. Neural laces, Neuro chips, brain simulation. They are trying to understand our intent before even you or I can. If we make it a little more concrete. We have brain monitoring. Here we’re talking EEGs like Emotive that monitor your brain and translate neuron signals into actions. That is also pretty out there and probably won’t come integrated in a VR headset for a while. Let’s look at the minimum requirement. The action is what we want to monitor. This means directly following the hand, the actor of most of our actions.
Other requirements for the controller include always on, easily accessible, and independence from your direct field of view. This would mean it would need to be embeddable or wearable. In any scenario you could activate your interface just by moving your fingers!
Finally if we look at what sensors are available we’ll see that monitoring your hand from your hand is feasible now. It currently requires “simple” IR sensors, and maybe a camera like Leap Motion. Totally doable, and not really fantastical. The innovation will be in the software. It is amazing the level of fine motor movements your digits, especially your thumb can make. A hand mounted controller will be able to magnify your subtle actions.
IV. The Proof
But wait. I forgot to give you hard evidence that I’m not crazy. Surely I didn’t come to this conclusion all on my own. I’m not early, unique, or new. Where is your text evidence!? Apple, Microsoft, Samsung have all created patents for their own rings.
They’re thinking about it. You should be too. Another game changer in my opinion is Project Soli. They are the new input sensor that may enable the ability for the use of rings to reach the masses. I’m skeptical about the initial pricing but bullish about its long term adoption into all products despite its computational requirements. Basically it’s like Leap Motion on a chip.
Snapring is version 0.0001 of that. It has one button. One purpose: To accompany your Spectacles experience and allow you to take video seamlessly. Snap on Tap. This is not impressive in the same way that Spectacles are not really a feat of great innovation. These products break down a new idea and way of experiencing the world into a format that can be used now while inspiring individuals to believe in a future where the possibilities will be much greater.
When people buy the Spectacles on the surface they’re buying it for a fashion statement, to have fun, and to capitalize on the marketing and branding opportunity of the new medium. What they are really buying is the future. They believe Snap will create new things that will be dope. Snapring is similar in that it is a bare bones example of what that future will look like. And that’s exciting.
If interested, you can check snapring out at snapring.co . Thanks for reading!
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