Is this kind of plastic phone holder always the first step for something breaks into the market? VR had that everywhere after the Oculus Rift dev came out and things were hyped up; I picked some up at the airport because there were huge stacks of them next to the cash register. It was very fiddly to get your phone in without pressing all buttons and messing it up so you had to take it out because you cannot configure it while in the holder.
Which brings me to the biggest issue; input. Speech is often awful as input, especially when in public or noisy environments (no, airpods pro don't filter out noise nearly well enough). It's ok for casual things like checking the weather or replying 'yeah thanks' to an email, but for actual work, speech sucks. Now most people won't be doing that anyway, so who cares? I care and I know many other people I know do; even as the input for phones, so that's a large enough group to warrant experimentation. I experimented with a one hand chording keyboard and it works well; it doesn't take a lot of time to learn, it is quite fast, especially mixed with speech input (create long text with speech and fix it with the chording keyboard for instance) and it seems perfect for AR; if only the the little joystick and a few buttons makes a massive difference over the clunky speech/pointing interfaces. I just wish there were more options; the one that's there (Twiddler) is too expensive.
I'm now trying to work with a split keyboard as input, but the problem really is that those have no pointer. Otherwise it's really quite great (if you don't care how it looks of course, but it's early days), because if you touch type, it's not slower than when you are sat down, almost immediately after trying it (they are qwerty).
While there are many companies experimenting with input for AR/VR, and I have tried all publicly available demos/releases of such input, it's all clunky and slow. Touchscreen and speech are faster, but nothing beats a keyboard and a mouse; I think a lot more research could be spent on that, but as most people will be using devices (including computers with keyboards and mice) for consumption only, there is no financial incentive?
Which brings me to the biggest issue; input. Speech is often awful as input, especially when in public or noisy environments (no, airpods pro don't filter out noise nearly well enough). It's ok for casual things like checking the weather or replying 'yeah thanks' to an email, but for actual work, speech sucks. Now most people won't be doing that anyway, so who cares? I care and I know many other people I know do; even as the input for phones, so that's a large enough group to warrant experimentation. I experimented with a one hand chording keyboard and it works well; it doesn't take a lot of time to learn, it is quite fast, especially mixed with speech input (create long text with speech and fix it with the chording keyboard for instance) and it seems perfect for AR; if only the the little joystick and a few buttons makes a massive difference over the clunky speech/pointing interfaces. I just wish there were more options; the one that's there (Twiddler) is too expensive.
I'm now trying to work with a split keyboard as input, but the problem really is that those have no pointer. Otherwise it's really quite great (if you don't care how it looks of course, but it's early days), because if you touch type, it's not slower than when you are sat down, almost immediately after trying it (they are qwerty).
While there are many companies experimenting with input for AR/VR, and I have tried all publicly available demos/releases of such input, it's all clunky and slow. Touchscreen and speech are faster, but nothing beats a keyboard and a mouse; I think a lot more research could be spent on that, but as most people will be using devices (including computers with keyboards and mice) for consumption only, there is no financial incentive?