...eventually, maybe; probably after someone else has first.
The technology backing this is the stuff that the kinect was based on, by PrimeSense; it's for 3d spatial scanning, and it's super cool tech, but it's no more 'AR' than the kinect was or the leap motion was; turns out that even if you have a point cloud, AR is still hard.
The sad thing is that there's no sign that Apple is actually building any kind of meaningful product with it.
Any kind of competitive advantage Apple might have as a company hinges on them actually building something novel and meaningful in this space.
I know they like to be all ninja and secret with their R&D, but you can't just hide in a closet for 6 months with a million dollars and pull out a strong AI; that sort of technological leap just doesn't happen very much any more, and certainly not without a lot of people noticing the massive amount of money it consumes to produce.
Being novel also isn't that important. For example, Apple's white earphones played a major role in getting the public to see that their devices were mainstream, but there was nothing truly novel about them.
I believe parent comments are mostly making the point that we still have another generation before Apple would have anything sufficiently advanced enough that they could do their post-90s "polish and package" magic.
I could see them making a Google Cardboard-like mounting bracket / dock for the iphone I guess, maybe with better cameras and sensors.
Not going to happen (any time soon). That's an insurmountable engineering challenge for the foreseeable future.
It's nobody's ideal, but a clip-on/necklace style power solution might be sellable to the public if the value proposition of the glasses is good enough.
Maybe very thick oversized (by today's standards) frames will come into style and something like that will be on the border of possibility, but it seems like a real stretch within the next 10 years.
We agree that power consumption is a limiting factor no matter what. In my imagined system, only something on the order of 1W would be delivered to the glasses. Delivering 1W over 10cm with large-ish coil area at >50% efficiency using NFMR isn't really a breakthrough, but it's only a way of eliminating the LiPo bulk and nothing more.
The thing is, I don't think we're near the boundary of power efficiency even with today's silicon. The way forward is to push all the feature tracking and other low-level vision tasks down to the ASIC level, while accepting some strict limitations on the rendering side. So a lot of it comes down to scope of features. Its most immediately useful applications are little more than a glorified HUD -- project some GPS data here or an info overlay there. Blit a video source on top of a marker, that sort of thing.
This sort of practical product, by 2027, I'll say yes. Mindblowing, transform-your-world stuff? No. But let's see what happens...
3D sensing is not a new technology and was initially adopted by Microsoft‘s Kinect and Lenovo‘s Tango-enabled Phab2 Pro.
Anyway, my prescription glasses are maybe 25 grams (0.89 ounces). I think the current technology is a long way from giving us something as light as that even if the bulk of it rests in our pocket. I expect to read about the upcoming AR revolution for many years.
Apple's core advantage is that they set the standard for mobile smart devices and consumer will follow them if they're able to gain momentum.
Question at that point swings back to how they'll try to do it, which becomes highly speculative.
If I had to guess, they'll morph the iPhone to a AR device like the morphed the iPod to a phone; meaning the first step is to add AR to the iPhone and gain traction.