Neal Stephenson: preference

Transcript context

…Augmented reality — it’s gotten a lot of attention lately. There’s Meta’s Orion product, which is forthcoming at some pace, Apple Vision Pro with the second version on the way. What do you think of these? Are we getting somewhere, or is it still stuck? I think we got somewhere with Magic Leap a few years ago. I think these products are all doing similar things. The only thing I am interested in hearing about is how many billions of dollars these companies are putting into the development of content to run on these devices, because nobody’s going to use them or want them unless there’s a reason to put them on, a reason to use them. Making content for an augmented reality device is very difficult. You take ordinary game development — that’s no picnic in and of itself. That requires a lot of smart people with specialized skill sets. VR is a whole step above that in terms of its level of difficulty, and AR is way beyond VR because there are so many other factors that you have to take into account in order to make content that actually takes advantage of what AR can do. My general sense is that the kinds of people who invest in building this hardware — they’re very comfortable building hardware. They’re not comfortable investing in content plays, and they have this mentality of, if we build it, they will come. If we provide the hardware, then creators are just going to somehow jump out of the woodwork and build cool applications that run on this hardware. I think that Magic Leap did a really good job of supporting a bunch of different creative teams making content for that device, but they still could have used more. So far, both of those companies have got programs to try to encourage people to build content, but I think they’re still relying on other investors too much to somehow come in and start writing checks and supporting developers. It takes years and millions and millions of dollars to make anything at all that’s worth seeing on one of these. So, where do you find the investors willing to write those checks? What do you think of the daily uses of AR? Let’s say I don’t want to watch a movie on Apple Vision Pro, but I want to walk around at a party, and it will tell me the names of all these people I’ve met before, but I don’t remember their names, and it tells me who they are. Now, this might violate privacy for some people, but will that be popular? Will there be, oh, I take it into Whole Foods, and it just points me to what’s on sale or what’s good that day — is that going to work?…

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