[wlesieutre]

You don't need customers to "use AR to its full capacity" though. You need them to use one or two pieces of it enough to justify the device.

Sure, the early iterations might be more like Blackberry popularizing email-on-the-go for a small segment of the market. Not everybody needed that. But by now pretty much everyone has found at least one aspect of smartphones that they've come to depend on.

Does my mom use her smartphone to its full capacity? Certainly not! There are thousands of apps she's never even seen, some of which can do pretty great stuff! But she checks her email, organizes recipes, and takes pictures of her dog, and that's what she has the phone for.

Heck, I don't either. If anything I'm trying to use my phone for less stuff, but I'm still glad I have it.

[stagbeetle]

Then this goes back to the "what does AR offer that a smartphone doesn't already?"

"Are these features enough to get people to switch to AR?"

From the sound of it, AR is just a mobile OS port.

[wlesieutre]

And mobile OS is just a Linux port. The most fundamental difference is how available the device is. Computers are something you have to sit down and use, smartphones are something you have to take out and look at, and AR could be something that's immediately present whenever you need it.

Beyond being just a more available HUD, the AR aspect should make for more direct interactions with the real world. Lighting controls come to mind since that's the space I work in. What if instead of having light switches built into your house, they became a purely virtual construct that each user places into the world?

Right now, IoT lighting feels clunky because you walk into a room, take out your phone, open an app, pick a light, and move some sliders. What if you could just drop an imaginary button on the wall by the door for each preset, or a virtual knob for dimming? It's the exact same functionality, but putting it into the relevant physical space makes it a lot more useful without requiring additional hardware for every room. And if your guests have AR glasses too, then you have a default "guest layout" for your house that's automatically available to anyone on your wifi. They get access to the light switches, but they can't unlock the front door.

Plus you don't have to worry about replacing switches in every room if you replace the lighting system. Just the one HomeKit hub (or whatever it is) and the switches are completely imaginary.

I haven't spent a lot of time imagining where AR will go, that's just one thought off the top of my head.

[stagbeetle]

It's one idea, but how will it push consumers over the threshold to switch? The answer is it won't, less than 10% of the US population uses the IoT.[0]

I'll restate this again. We can keep going on and on about the cool things AR can do and features it'll have, but none of that matters if there's no consumer adoption. There is absolutely no way people are going to ditch their perfectly fine smartphones for a mildly more utilitarian device.

What is AR's unique selling proposition? How will it push consumers to switch?

Until this question is answered, all speculations on the future scope of AR use are moot.

[0] http://www.economist.com/news/business/21700380-connected-ho...

[larkery]

I have to agree - I think the benefits described for all these AR scenarios really don't sound worth the cost, at least to me.

In exchange for replacing all the plain simple switches in my house with a complex tower of software, hardware, and internet services I gain: the ability to turn the lights on and off without getting up, and in this scenario I lose: the ability to find the lightswitch when my AR glasses are broken / flat battery / in another room / running a firmware update.

This trade really is marginal in comparison to the things which have driven other technology adoptions, like shopping without going to the shops, or sending letters without walking to a postbox, or allowing one person to do the work of several others in the same time.

There may be other AR / VR functions which are more compelling, but so long as they are all "use this complicated and expensive new system to get this marginal benefit over something already honed to its niche" it ain't gonna fly.

[wlesieutre]

I agree with you, light switches on their own aren't a compelling case for AR (though side-note: it's the RGB or tunable color temperature adjustment that tends to make IoT lighting worth considering, line voltage switches and bulbs don't do that). It's just one application of many, which I think are eventually going to be enough that it'll gain widespread adoption.

Beyond interactivity with connected objects, the other big opening seems like "contextual information on real-world objects." Some cases for that are industrial (say a factory where a floor manager can see sensor information overlaid on the production line), and will have a much easier time getting adoption because the cost and benefit are more drastic.

Other cases are consumer oriented: better interfaces for mapping/directions, personal tour guides (for museums or cities, and maybe on rental hardware before it hits wide adoption), more immersive AR games like Pokemon Go and Ingress, AR fitness trainers where you can see your personal "best time" ghost running in front of you, video conferencing where instead of putting somebody on a screen they can sort-of exist in the same space with you, etc.

I don't think any one of those is the single application where 90% of people say "I need one of these," but the combined weight of them together is something I'd want.

Heck, you can even keep your smartphone if we need it as an input, networking, and computational device, but wearing AR glasses can effectively make its screen larger so that maps and the like display past the edge of the hardware. Or maybe instead of covering the screen contents, your notification banners pop up above/below the physical device (I don't want literally everything popping up on a HUD, most notifications aren't that important). Or if you have a large scrolling list of open apps, instead of flipping through them on the phone screen, you can just reach out in space and grab the one 5-screens to the left. Even if the pixel density isn't as high as a modern cell phone, having AR on gives you interesting options for extending the device. Maybe it even reigns in the screen size back to 4" phones, and the $200 you can knock off the phone hardware helps cover the AR costs.

I don't claim to know exactly where we're headed, but I don't think there's a shortage of interesting uses. And maybe the runaway feature is something none of us have conceived of yet.

[disantlor]

what if light bulbs move to infrared and the VR shifts the light down into the visible range in different intensities per user. that way, everyone walks around in total darkness (in the real world) but with their own lighting preference in AR.

not sure on the physics of that but seems like a funny idea