The announcement of the IKEA app that let you try out their furniture in your house by showing it in AR is amazing to me. That would've been SO helpful.

It seems like it be a lot of possibilities for games, some of the things I've seen posted to Twitter have included people making virtual ruler that's accurate to within an inch or so. That alone would be a pretty useful app just for rough calculations of space sizes.

But more than anything… There's probably some pretty cool stuff none of us are going to be able to think of until it shows up in the next six months. And that's what I really want to see.

The former needs to visualise interior design changes, factory layouts or even just overlay navigational information for leisure boat and/or plane piloting. I would love an underwater AR that tells me what fish I'm looking at, or a cosmology one that lets me pinch-and-zoom the night sky. I agree that the middle-income consumer won't see anything grand for a few years. But that's not the point.

- an app to prototype a showroom “on the fly”, there is value in that for retail right?

- Public spaces to play games socially, silly but can be addictive

- Use AR face mask to see what you look like before Botox or plastic surgery

- turn your classroom into a history/science lesson, subtle advertising for the history channel lol

- AR to enhance shopping online (I think this one is the coolest)

- Bring Disney world in your living room!

There, 6! Lol, I would love to hear what anyone thinks of these ideas!

It wasn't easy to come up with that list, was it?

My point is - AR and VR is way overhyped. As if a lot of people were trying to find the next big thing and that's the best they could come up with. As an additional layer to smartphone apps, I agree. But the next big thing - a huge NO.

I think in all seriousness, it will be a big thing for media and entertainment, idk how big though. I’ve been sucked into the AR hype since 2011 and I probably will never get out of it :).

Oh and instead of being limited to a small, 2d image your screen can change to be any size, can warp into any shape, isn't flat anymore but instead 3d, and you can directly see anything in the world that can be described and existing in 3d space. Your screen isn't a screen anymore, it's a person, and the next moment it's some piece of information, and the next moment it's instructions showing you the proper hand gesture you need to follow to handtoss pizza dough, and the next moment it's a map pointing you in the right direction to get to a bar you're meeting your friends at. And it follows you around.

...

Does that not seem like a large improvement over all existing visualization devices we have currently?

For consumers, using an iPhone/iPad, not really. For industrial use in civil engineering, GIS/surveying, petrochemical industries etc. I can think of dozens of ideas.

Better ergonomics for workstations

Conferencing (of which there are numbers sub-functions that AR can render better)

Better, safer driving ui's (HUDs have been shown better for years)

Remote controlled device management

Gaming, of a lot of types

There. 6. But this is kind of a silly demand.