It makes me wonder what got mobile phones to gain critical mass when they were still whale phones. I guess it was a case of a device further reducing the friction of an existing killer feature (voice calls).
Sometimes I think the killer app of AR will not be a fancy high end headset, but rather a more fashion friendly device than Google Glass was (which I'll bet Apple will attempt), but with the similar limited functionality that reduced friction around existing smart phone killer apps (text, calling, photos, maps).
There was already a market for mobile phones—car phones, suitcase phones, etc preceded the pocket sized mobile. So it was a natural progression to just making them smaller. Even phones themselves were improvements on other prior forms of communication.
Every new invention builds upon what came before it in some way, right? Like, perhaps when Daguerre was developing his earliest cameras, people wondered why we would want to capture pictures like that. I think not, though, because there was already analogs in the form of paintings and things.
This is completely new territory, and it feels a bit like a solution looking for a problem. There really isn’t a prior analog that I can think of! But maybe there is, and I just am missing it. But I could imagine it being transformational, if it is eventually found.
An obvious one is, "bring your TV / computer screen with you". A video of me watching TV, I turn my head, the TV turns out to be just a VR projection.
More fantastic, we need to be inspired by Sci-Fi. Holograms/holoprojections become possible with good-enough AR. The Expanse series is full of them.
Or some form of "structure projection" onto reality. Where does this road go? What's behind this building? Where is the patient's bone broken? What does the full puzzle look like?
Bottom line is, this is either a very amateur team, or a Theranos-level product.
It sounds like they aren't ready to mass produce these for the masses yet, in which case it's kind of a waste to advertise to you at all
If you want to know what they're like, imagine wearing a motorcycle helmet and seeing phone/computer-style windows popping up in the real world. So far as I know, nobody has made anything super useful out of this tech yet, but it theoretically could be awesome
I think the most practical use in consumer cases would be a portable replacement for desktop and mobile displays. Using everyday apps for desktop and mobile that are already established, as well as interesting AR apps for entertainment and productivity.
As with a lot of cutting-edge tech, it seems the most immediately useful application is beyond consumer tech in the world of military tech. Being able to send critical information to soldiers in the field and integrate with weapons technology has been a major focus of AR since its early inception. Early HUDs have their roots in fighter jets.
If you think about it, a lot of things we credit to the high tech industry had their beginnings in low-key and often confidential military research, from the internet to computers themselves. Although, an app for motorcyclists that displays speed, engine, and navigation data in your field of view would be seriously bad*ss and successful if it worked in a clean and functional way.
As with a lot of emerging tech, its usefulness often depends on the ingenuity of early pioneers. People thought the internet was a useless, passing trend as late as the 1990s.
Imagine silently controlling a fully-featured AR displayed system with a brain-to-computer interface and zero peripherals like some Ghost in the Shell futuristic tech. That would be pretty awesome and legitimately useful.
