AR - Supremacy or Hellscape?
The Coming Supremacy of AR - Allen Pike
Leaving aside whether any company can be entrusted to curate our Augmented Reality experience without it being a “hellscape”, I did think the potential of AR could only be unlocked when John Gruber had his previous question addressed:
Why would people who don’t need glasses want to wear thick glasses all day? And they think it will replace phones in a decade? Do we really want our phone display in front of our eyes all day? I just don’t get it.
However, I share Allen Pike’s optimism that the technology will mature to the point of being useful for consumers:
Apple may be optimistic in thinking that the timeline will be only 10 years long, but it seems clear to me that if physics really do make a good AR headset possible – glasses that can usefully and practically render information interleaved with our natural vision – it will change everything.
And his two dozen potential AR features sure sound compelling.
So, the question is not can we build it, or even will they wear it? Rather, what are the minimum set of features the average user will trade a “hellscape” for?