The money flowing into Augmented Reality in general isn't so much about 'augmented reality' as a thing today so much as it's a big audacious bet on it being the next wave of technology that replaces mobile phones.
Agreed. A functional heads-up display in normal-looking glasses would render almost every smartphone obsolete. Add a good way to do text input (air typing on an AR-projected keyboard?) and most laptops and desktops can go away too.
If we're still poking at tiny screens in 2025, something has gone very wrong.
Meh, I'm not so convinced. AR is certainly a great way to interact with real time information, but there's a time and a place for that. I don't want to be out at dinner and be interrupted with notifications while I'm having a conversation. Laptops and Mobile phones have one huge advantage that AR and even desktops don't have: they're easy to put away. Close the laptop, put the phone in your pocket or in a drawer and it's gone. I suppose you could do the same with glasses, but they're still more intrusive.
All evidence points to the contrary. There's been a pendulum swing in the younger generations away from omnipresent technology such as mobile phones and facebook. It's a mistake to think all subsequent generations will march toward your definition of progress. For all we know, those generations' definition of progress will be a focus on the physical world over the digital one.
are you joking? In which world does the younger generation swing away from technology such as mobile phones? Facebook is simply replaced by Snapchat and other social apps among the youth.
Yep, imagine a phone UI you don't have to hold in front of you as you walk across the street, and never have to pull out of your pocket.
Then imagine it putting annotations into the real world - review scores of wines floating next to the bottles as you browse the wine aisle, or yelp stars floating next to the restaurants, GPS arrows floating in space, etc. etc.
All assuming they solve the ridiculously hard power, miniaturization, object recognition, latency, etc problems. Even if you have to be tethered to a PC, though, it has a lot of potentially revolutionary uses.
