Interview
Diana Hu on Augmented Reality and Building a Startup in a New Market
- AR is projected to become a primary media format alongside video, photo, and audio, though this transition is expected to take significant time as the technology remains in its early stages.
- AR development is forecast to move through an initial "installation phase" focused on solving infrastructure challenges, eventually leading to a "deployment phase" characterized by an industry-wide application explosion.
- Programming for AR is anticipated to evolve from requiring specialized expertise to becoming as simple as hosting a website, a shift enabled by current applications that build necessary operating system infrastructure.
- The technology is positioned as the next evolution following desktop and mobile platforms, defining a future space of mixed reality encompassing AR, VR, and further extensions.
- Hardware advancement aims to reach a "single-digit watt range" for power costs, with mobile devices expected to achieve laptop-class compute power at a fraction of that energy consumption based on Moore's Law and Kumi's Law.
- 5G infrastructure is expected to increase wireless connection speeds from current levels of one megabit to a range of 10 gigabits, representing a 10-to-100-fold increase.
- Founders are advised that investing in developer tooling and infrastructure offers a higher probability of success than building end-user applications, though early-stage visions may require investors with a long-term horizon.
- Niantic intends to scale its original Escher Reality vision by leveraging its expanded organization, which saw a 5X employee increase over the previous year, and plans to expand its application ecosystem beyond its own games via a contest for 10 selected developers.
- The speaker suggests that entrepreneurial success will continue to be driven by an "immigrant mentality" and advises founders to maintain constant recommitment to their work to transition companies from the "brittle stage" of seed funding to maturity.