[detaro]

There is little reason to believe that humans are so good at matching from screens to reality that proper located AR information isn't better (in domains like mapping it's quite well studied how error-prone humans are/how hard it is to communicate the right subset of details, while VR research has demonstrated how well real-world representations work).

Regarding distractions, attention management is extremely important for AR, but has also been researched a lot. As long as we keep advertisers out of AR applications we'll be fine.

Not surprisingly, the military already uses it, and I doubt they'd give figher pilots AR helmets if a screen would be more efficient.

[pinkrooftop]

It adds efficiency for military grade targeting but the everyday applications are more novelty than explosive technology. A field technician will have minimal benefit from a heads up targeting display.

[jotux]

>A field technician will have minimal benefit from a heads up targeting display.

I can think of a lot of scenarios where AR would be a great benefit. For example, imagine an electrician running wires through a commercial building and having the wiring path displayed for him. No digging through documentation, measuring, and marking necessary to get the job done. Or imagine fire fighters with AR heads-up displays getting routing information inside building that is smoky and difficult to traverse.

[taylodl]

In fact my company is exploring doing that for underground wiring. We're also looking into technicians going into a transmission substation and when looking at the equipment it's overlayed with voltage and temperature gauges with a link to access service manuals.

[detaro]

I'm not sure about novelty-only, I believe it has very interesting use cases, but I sort of agree on it not being "explosive technology".

To really make an impact in daily life it has to become usable in public, and the chances of the tech industry getting the tech, the applications and the dorkyness-factor of HMDs solved are pretty slim.

I only see it used in professional contexts for quite some time (e.g. Lockheeds and GEs ideas for airplane maintenance workers seem sensible to me even with relatively high cost attached, if it gets really cheap I could see warehouse workers, building maintenance, ...)