BREAKING: "Spatial Computing" is still bullshit. Surprise.

I first encountered the term "spatial computing" in a Reddit thread on the topic of VR. My post touched on a theme which should be familiar to anyone who's read any of the other posts on this blog about the subejc: that VR is only good for qualitatively enhancing a limited subset of existing experiences, without enabling anything quantitatively new. In other words, it lacked a strong use case, and would never see widespread consumer adoption until that changed. To quote Palmer Luckey, "No existing or imminent VR hardware is good enough to go truly mainstream, even at a price of $0.00."

One VR defender fired right back, though, declaring my statement to be "simply not true," before going on to list of a bunch of qualitative enhancements to existing experiences like telepresence, social media, and spatial computing, which is defined as "human interaction with a machine in which the machine retains and manipulates referents to real objects and spaces." In VR, specifically, that equates to the use of physical actions in place of other input schemes, i.e. motion controls, which also didn't require VR, and which have stubbornly not replaced other input methods because motions controls suck.