Apple Is The Fruit, Google Is The Tree

This whole “apple” name thing, with the bite in that logo, you know it is about the biblical genesis, right?

Yeah, I know you did, I was just making sure.

If I was the biblical snake today, that’s how I’d make sure everyone takes a bite out of the fruit of knowledge: I’d make it accessible through augmented reality.

Augmented Reality is the way to have technology really permeate every aspect of our world and society. I know, I heard it too, people complaining about too much technology. I think these people don’t know what they’re talking about. We haven’t even started bringing tech into living yet.

When tech will truly permeate life, it will be invisible.

Augmented reality is an excellent way to make it invisible. Yet augmented reality needs fast, realiable and huge visual machine learning models to be magic. Also, augmented reality needs huge databases of knowledge to be useful. Once it becomes magic and useful, it’s helpful.

Google has them both: huge visual ML models and huge databases of knowledge. I mean, Google is THE knowledge company. Ahem. I mean Alphabet.

Apple has the devices and the platform to make Alphabet accessible.

We need this partnership back.

Apple and Google are a match made in heaven for AR. Whose ego and world domination dreams, I wonder, holds this partnership in the current mess it is in?

Why isn’t Facebook all over this thing? They know people, literally everybody, and have the money to start gathering data.

Does Facebook also want to build iPhone copies like Google keeps trying?

We don’t want a zillion things to think about when using AR. That’s the whole thing about AR, it’s seamless, it facilitates a better living experience, it makes this universe even friendlier to humans. It has to just be there.

Marketable AR is a systems problem. It requires a special kind of support infrastructure for adoption to take off.

That means iOS needs access to “things”, and Apple does not own these things. More so, they (Apple) don’t know how to make them and they can’t buy them. Of course, money is not the problem here. These things, they’re not for sale, as they’re priceless.

But Alphabet, or Facebook one day, already has the things and they play “let’s have fun at R&D” instead of supplying Apple with the branches to bring that fruit close to consumers.

Google is an information company which should become a knowledge provider for the best device company around. Apple devices and Google datasets. And if that’s impossible, because of whatever board members not getting along, then Apple needs to start a bid for what Google has.

I want to point my phone at something and instantly find out things about it.

What kind of rose is this? When will train X arrive? How do I cook this dish? Where to buy this awesome trinket?

I want to point at something and instantly know what it is. That is real search: context is great if it goes unnoticed.

We need powerful models to recognize reality, before reality can be augmented.

I’d want to shoot a panoramic, maybe even 3D scan, of my rooms and then, in the store, I want to point at some object and have it placed in my 3D space.

I want to browse an online store and see a sort of QR code, which, once scanned, downloads the product(s) so I can see them placed neatly in my real life space.

I want to point at a plant and see the Wikipedia article about it.

I want to point at a car and get details about the car on top of it.

I want an AR app that looks at my face and tells me stuff, like humans can. Am I tired, sick, interested?

I want AR to cut some useless actions away for good. Questions such as “where are you?”, I’d like to just see where you are, if you let me.

Google knows a lot of things. Their Ai is probably the best Ai in the world, and their databases are definitely the best databases. It’s not only the data, it is also the intuitions their systems can make, and intuitive AR “just works”, you know like Apple’s devices.

Sensible defaults without commercial disagreements hindering progress is what emerging technology has always benefited from. Like that Firefox Google powered search box. It just worked.

Maybe the mountain of data hoarded by google would be put to some use by Apple on the best gateways the make, gateways into this new world we’re so eagerly waiting for, the world of accessible knowledge.

Devices are not browsers. You don’t just compile a new device, out of a fork. Why does everyone want to be a hardware company?

Did the last century’s winning TV stations start making TV sets?

I’m not saying it’s impossible for Google to bore a fruit one day, some Glass or soft silicone AR headset, which, who knows, could even be fashionable, geek fashionable at least, but why must we wait?

If I was the snake, I’d make Amazon a good AR player, but they’re going to sell “whole” apples soon, so I guess they’d say no to me anyway.