While this particular AR may be overhyped, I do expect AR to become a multi-billion-US$ industry before 2025. Even if it’s just two apps, Sunglasses.app and Google Maps pasted onto your view with no careful design, that’s still worth $30 and could run on that year’s version of the Raspberry Pi Zero. 30 million units per billion dollars, doesn’t feel unreasonable.

I can certainly construct scenarios where magic AR tech could be a breakout product category. Glasses that look approximately like other glasses. No social stigma. Able to automagically project directions, identify people, display information about places/objects. Unobtrusive control through a watch, vocal commands, or other means. Etc.

But that's asking a lot. I'd probably be willing to stipulate it will happen at some point, for at least some use cases (e.g. industrial). But Not sure that 5-ish years will do it.

Is sunglasses.app just slightly darkening the lenses so they work as sunglasses?

Pretty much. People already pay a premium for photochromic lenses that take minutes to adjust, LCD can do the same in milliseconds.

I just want the Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses

Oh come on, let me have just a little bit of peril?

Here's a couple fun to think about ideas for AR.

- Take a tour of the Colosseum during its peak years.

- Architects might find that they can save money on design by building bland looking buildings with facades that enable easy AR projection onto them.

- AR could potentially replace smartphones if they can provide a better user experience.

Remember that even the first serious cinematographers, like Lumiere brothers considered cinema just a "toy" with no practical applications.

From my perspective AR applications in the future will be huge in all areas as it means a new way to interface with 3d editing on real time.

But having said that, I do not believe Magic Leap will be the one who bring this to the table. I see magic Leap as the Altavista or pets.com of the Internet, burning investor money like crazy and trowing things to the wall expecting something to stick.

> the Altavista or pets.com of the Internet, burning investor money

I'm not sure it's fair to lump Altavista with pets.com.

The latter burned through something like 300 megabucks in just over 2 years.

The former was the first full-text search engine for the web and generated tens of megabucks of revenue, though they couldn't come up with a business model to keep it going (and eventualy lost out to Google on search quality [1], IIRC). I'm not sure we'll ever know how much it cost DEC to build and run it, but it seems credible that they at least came close to breaking even.

[1] Though I still miss their richer query language, incuding the NEAR keyword.