[brcha]

Well, imagine being able to project your "laptop" where ever you want using AR? Then you could use it as your home desktop-laptop and carry it everywhere with you.

Tablets are cool and you can carry them everywhere, but you can't really work important stuff on them since they are still too small.

On the other hand, even if laptops had very good battery life (which usually is not the case), they are still too big and heavy to carry around unless really needed (ie. for a meeting or something like that).

But an augmented reality laptop that lives in your phone is something people might want to use. Not for gaming, but for normal office work, be it programming or using spreadsheets.

And, at that point, regular users might think about obsoleting desktop PCs and laptops.

[nradov]

A projected AR display would only be useful for creative and business work if it can completely occlude the background. I won't be able to see the spreadsheet clearly if light leaks through it through from the window in front of me. Due to limits imposed by optics, complete background light blockage is always going to require a bulky, awkward head-mounted display. No one has proposed any way to get around this issue even in theory.

[brcha]

Well, you can always project the virtual laptop's screen on a pizza box or a wall or something like that. But I agree in general. I'd prefer a foldable laptop, but I doubt the technology for something like that is anywhere near, while this AR laptop could be made tomorrow. There already are virtual machines made for mobile phones, all that is left is connecting them to AR glasses and voila.

[nradov]

Walls and pizza boxes aren't sufficiently smooth or reflective to use as projection screens for real work. An AR laptop couldn't be made tomorrow because the glasses exist only in limited prototype form with poor display quality.