Both Meta Platforms and Google are shifting their development focus away from Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality to “Ambient Computing” in the form of smart glasses given the potential that artificial intelligence adds to the form factor. Deepwater Asset Management’s Gene Munster believes that “the annual market for smart glasses will reach hundreds of millions of units over the next decade, leading Apple to refocus its Spatial Computing initiatives to be more in line with Meta and Google wearables.”
Gene Munster for Deepwater Asset Management:
Meta and Google appear to be all in on a next generation of smart glasses that combines fashion, functionality, and generative AI into a compelling form factor. I believe the reason for their optimism is a combination of recognizing consumers gravitate to easy-to-use tech along with greater confidence in what generative AI can add to the equation.
The catalyst here is Generative AI, which has allowed us to retrieve information faster and easier through multi-modal centralized search. GenAI is paving the way toward complex wearable Ambient Computing. In other words, the current goal is making glasses that look and feel like “normal glasses”, but with generative AI access via voice-activation, cameras, and sensors. This means your glasses will understand the physical world around you, ready to provide you any information about it, like “what kind of plant am I looking at?” or “did you see where I left my keys?”.
In short, we’ve gone from completely immersive digital worlds (VR), to adding digital elements to our real world (AR), to blending the digital and physical seamlessly (Spatial Computing), and finally, to making technology so intuitive and integrated that it works in the background to enhance our everyday lives (Ambient Computing).
While I agree that Vision Pro has meaningful opportunity to be a $25-50B annual business, I believe future versions of their Spatial Computing hardware will map to Google and Meta’s smart glasses lineup.
One manifestation of an expanded Spatial Computing product lineup could include future versions of Air Pods with cameras.
As for timing, I expect the next product announcements in the Vision Pro lineup will be a lower priced mixed reality headset, similar to the current product. Over the next 5 years, I expect the company will begin to announce these next generation wearables. My confidence is based on a belief that there is more utility to smart glasses versus a mixed reality headset, and it would be a costly miss for Apple not to enter the market.
MacDailyNews Take: Yup.
Imagine what could be done with AirPods coupled with a pair of Apple Specs. The sky’s the limit! — MacDailyNews, November 17, 2016
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Who’s in the best position to execute on this?
The leader in wearable computing, the leader in AR, or the leader in personalized AI?
Wearable computing.
Augmented reality.
Breakthrough personalized AI.
Are you getting it?
They’re not three different device companies.
They’re one device company!
The 1st company to make regular eye glasses that use self adjusting prescriptions that no longer require eye tests at the optometrist and physical lens updates will make billions.
An industry just waiting to be disrupted by tech.
Why the heck do analysts (or analyst wanna-be Munster) feel the need to come up with ever new terms for the same thing? To re-hype them, I suppose. In this particular case, what’s the difference between “ambient computing smart glasses” and AR glasses? I see none, whatsoever. The “A” in AR stands for ‘augmented’. What your reality is augmented with is just a matter of the state of the art in technology. Analysts’ attempts to hype the smartglasses market with talk of artificial intelligence is simply that – a way to hype/justify companies’ stock prices.
For me, Apple and other companies first need to get the form factor for AR glasses straight: nobody’s going to buy them if they make people look like dorks. Then worry about how much augmentation you can do, given the limits of the form factor!
We need a visionary to do the same thing for AR eyewear that the CEO of Sony did for the Walkman. He gave the engineers a block of wood and told them to make a tape player fitting those dimensions.