Noble Ackerson and I met at the Google Glass Foundry Hackathon in NYC 13 years ago, and we hit it off immediately.
And while both of us have been fairly passionate about head-mounted wearables, we've also been in a debate about it for nearly that long.
Without putting too many words in his mouth, he tends to believe the future involves AR/VR, while I tend to lean into the "there when you need it, out of the way when you don't" mantra of Glass. As Glass was sunset, he moved towards the mobile AR technologies, while I moved towards the ambient nature of Google Assistant. And we would frequently, and often publicly, renew our debate.
My argument has long been that I agree that AR and VR are cool. Very amazing technologies with some really fun applications. But most of the applications are just "fun" or "cool" and not actually practical or a day-to-day driver. While I argue that ubiquitous and Voice First applications have demonstrated daily applications, with more coming as technology continues to evolve.
I feel like this debate is being echoed in the XR community today. I've been hearing a lot of it coming out of the AWE summit a couple of weeks ago. On one side, we're hearing people talking about how "AI Glasses" are solving all the problems that existed in Google Glass and will finally replace phones as our primary device, solving all the problems that were inherent in both. On the other side, the Immersive AI team are insisting that an augmented future is really the only thing worth pursuing.
Noble recently posted about his Invisible City project - a set of agents that allow for real-time context processing. His project describes a series of ambient agents that work together to provide the physical world as the context for everything it does. In his case, what it does is track where the water drain system is and adds kittens crawling out of those drains.
I feel like this is taking a step towards my position in the argument. His primary agent's main responsibility is to understand the physical context of the world around it at that moment. What happens with that context is the responsibility of other agents - so they can work with cats, or utility lines, or anything else that is relevant to the human. But this is independent of what comes next. Will it show something visually? Add it to a record to be reported on later? Generate an audible warning? That isn't the important part.
When I spoke at AWE NY in 2014, I was trying to make the case for Glass. Or at least Glass as I saw it evolving into at the time. I said that Glass wasn't AR, but there were similar goals between the two and that we had much that we needed to learn from each other. I did not get a good reception from those in attendance, but I still think this is true. And I think Noble's project has reinforced this in my mind - because while he has gotten closer to what I envision, I can also better understand how the augmentation is important in some cases. And however it is presented should be what is best suited to us, not what is best suited to the agent acting on our behalf.
The argument shouldn't be about "glasses are replacing phones" or "AR layers are essential for wearables". It should be about finding, and building, the right tools for the right jobs that help real people every day. Finding and building the agents that do this in a device-independent way, so that we use the right tool for the right tasks. Focusing on what people need and will use to make their lives better.
I still think that leans more towards ambient wearables instead of immersive ones, but that immersive ones have their place. And Noble is reminding me that we still have much to learn from each other.
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