Re:Inventing the Future
by cocktailpeanuts on Thursday October 12, 2017 @05:19PM
(#15461412)
AR and HUD are two completely different things.
AR is way more technically challenging but the payoff IF you pull it off is not even comparable to HUDs like google glass and the examples you mentioned.
AR actually "augments" your reality, for example it makes you believe some "thing" that's not actually there IS at that spot.
HUD is just information display and it doesn't have to fix whatever it's displaying at a certain point.
The likes of Upskill[1] and Realwear[2] have been selling AR to industrial customers for ages. They have clients like Boeing who use it to enable their engineers to access data in context in the field. It's not quite 'project a realistic 3D image in space' AR, but it's more AR in the 'Google Glass' sense. It's very much real, and there definitely are use cases that people will pay decent money for.
That doesn't mean it's going to be a huge industry and we'll all be wearing headsets in a few years, but it definitely means there is a use for it. And perhaps someone will invent a killer application that does mean everyone will want it. You never know. It happened with smart phones.
[1] https://upskill.io/ [2] https://realwear.com/products/hmt-1/