Why do Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft Care About Augmented Reality?
When the Google Glass came out in 2014, I remember coming home from school and stumbling across a Marques Brownlee YouTube video and being flabbergasted at the concept of a wearable computer. Naturally, I NEEDED it (as I still need many material things...), so I attempted to convince my boomer father. To which he responded something along the lines of,
"What's the point? I could just use Google Maps on my phone."
He was right, you could just use Google Maps on your phone. It was discontinued shortly after in early-2015 commonly criticized due to high costs, privacy concerns and a lack of public understanding. It's now ten whole years later:
- Apple releases the Apple Vision Pro for the low price of CAD$4,999.
- According to Washington Posts' Geoffrey A. Fowler: the Vision Pro is "a privacy mess waiting to happen."
- In the words of Business Insider's Jordan Hart: "I'm running out of reasons to wear Apple's futuristic headset after a week."
The exact same controversies that resulted the tragic downfall of the Google Glass are resurfacing, and yet instead of veering off the beaten path, all of the tech giants are running towards it. Google's Project Moohan and Android XR, Meta's Ray-Bans Gen 2 and Microsoft's HoloLens represent a secretive nuclear arms race that ties closely into AI arms race and is hidden from public perception.
To illustrate this, let's examine Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook and understand their motivation behind investing in Augmented Reality. Meta is in the advertising business, and they earn revenue by charging advertisers for highly targeted ads that result in conversion. Therefore, Meta must be able to determine and predict highly convertible advertising for their customers. The technical details are beyond the scope of this discussion, but the short answer is that the most valuable commodity for Meta is consumer behaviour data. Understanding what users do, how they feel, and what they buy is the entire foundation of their prediction model.
It's no secret that Meta and other companies like Google and Microsoft excessively collect user data. While we have become accustomed to this blatant privacy violation (and we no longer have any expectation of privacy which is another point for discussion), it is the source of their competitive advantage. Meta shows you ads for two reasons:
- to immediately profit from the advertisers
- to analyze your resulting behavior so they can continuously improve their ad models and profit more from advertisers in the future.
Therefore, it is in Meta's best interest to show you as many ads as humanly possible.
The fundamental challenge for Meta is that attention is a finite resource. If you close Instagram, that attention revenue stream stops. If they show you too many ads, you'll close instagram and if they show too few ads, they won't make enough money (to line shareholders' pockets). Therefore, every feature, every algorithm tweak, and every new product is designed around a single mandate: maximize the user's time spent on Meta, paving the way for "Doom scrolling" to emerge.
The term Doom scrolling was popularized during the Covid-19 pandemic where the vast majority of the populous was confined to their homes. Doom scrolling describes the act of compulsively scrolling on social media, which is why this phenomenon should not sound unfamiliar, even to the reader living under a rock, figuratively. This is the product of the incentive structures imposed by the capitalistic Social Media conglomerates in order to keep us addicted to their platforms via clever algorithms. Again, even still, this attention is finite, and at some point, users will ultimately turn off their phones and resume daily life- that is, unless the computing device is always on...
In August 2024, Meta unveiled their frontier Smart Glasses experiment, Project Orion, a true Augmented Reality experience integrated with Artificial Intelligence (everyone's favourite buzzword). What furthers the Orwellian dystopia, is the enablement of AI to aid in extracting new multi-modal data from naive consumers to power the machinations of the Meta Industrial Complex at a grander scale than before.
Meta was an early adopter and significant contributor to the advancement in the domain of Artificial Intelligence and specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), developing and open-sourcing their own model Llama for public-use. I will caution the savvy reader that their motivations are not ideological altruism, but rather mandating and expediting the adoption of AI in our lives before law or regulation can catch up.
While it is true that Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality have paved the way for live-saving medical breakthroughs, they did so at the expense of introducing doomscrolling, and by increasing the means by which organizations can extract value from ordinary civilians.