I don't know what the "killer app" for AR is really going to be. CityLens and comparable apps like Yelp Monocle on smartphones clearly haven't cut it. (Show of hands: how many people remembered Yelp had an augmented reality mode? I don't think it's there anymore.) I think the big challenge now is thinking of applications that aren't games where using goggles/glasses give you more than incremental improvements over putting the UI on your wrist or in your ear(s).
I wonder if it really is a navigation HUD. For example, i’d love this, with some auditory interface, for things like cycling and motorcycling and also probably normal driving too. Safely presenting salient information in the same depth of focus as the road, and giving me tools to interact with it with voice, would be good AR in those situations, and i’m in them pretty frequently.
Is that a big enough market? Will it inevitably descend into the inverse of They Live?
we’ve given the hardware a shot at least a few times now and wearable glasses tech has not yet been useful. But i can’t think of anything else.
- Low latency, ideally imperceptibly low
- "Delta-zero", meaning the overlaid virtual reality should never drift from reality itself. This is probably theoretically impossible, so let's just be imperceptible here too.
This should boil down to a completely continuous interface over the sensory domains of all humans (other animals?)
For now I assume we are only talking about the visual and audio senses.
All eyes and ears.