[newscracker]

I'm hoping that in 10-15 years, existing smartphones with giant screens will seem like a thing of the past, and that we'd have tiny devices that look "dumb" for a third person from 2017, but are much smarter and have AR capabilities just like we've seen in Sci-Fi movies and video games for a long time.

We don't need large screens to consume more content - we need content to look larger and more content to be seen in our eyes. I see wearables (watches, combined with earphones, and eyewear of some kind) becoming independent of a smartphone as one step forward in this evolution.

[fredley]

All this is possible now, the big thing holding back this sort of approach, and many other tech advances is batteries. Once we can get batteries with 10x current energy density, the game really will change. Smart Eyewear becomes actually feasible, as do many other form factors. I'm interested in this potential Apple device, but given the current model only really lasts a day, I'm not not sure how they plan to integrate radios and maintain that, and the form factor.

[newscracker]

In my observation, promises of battery energy density exploding way beyond current designs still seem a long way away for mass produced gadgets. The "attack", if you will, has to be from both sides - higher energy density of batteries (allowing them to be smaller), as well as lower energy consumption by the gadgets. The latter gets easier when you don't have to power a large screen and (comparatively) large speakers. I have a stronger belief in the latter than in the former for the next two decades.

Another possibility for low energy devices is to have them use energy from outside the physical batteries in them. They could be light powered and use ambient light (for powering the gadget and recharging batteries), kind of like "solar powered" calculators that we've had for decades (that could be used for hours and still work with very less ambient light). The batteries would then act more like stand-in backups when ambient light isn't enough. This would require great gains in low energy processing (so I'm not comparing a calculator with a smartphone here). But I'm guessing this will also be an approach that'd be tried while we're on the way to getting significantly higher battery energy densities.

Whoever gets to do eyewear with AR without it looking dorky and without it being bulky will be the pioneer in making it widespread. These cannot be like how the Apple Watch is today, requiring an almost daily recharge when the device is no longer worn. The bigger challenge for Apple, as the devices become more feature rich, would be to continue keeping as much computation as possible on-device for enhancing privacy (and using differential privacy wherever apt), instead of offloading it to the cloud like its competitors look at things.

[yladiz]

How long does a charge for a Google Glass last? I think energy density is a factor but I think getting it to fit into the shape of a normal-ish glasses frame is the bigger challenge, along with the camera tech and the tech to project onto a lens in a discrete manner.

[jrs95]

And batteries are definitely one of Apple's strengths. I always thought that may have been what was drawing them to a potential electric car project.

[TeMPOraL]

In the book Change Agent by Daniel Suarez, the society of near-future was widely using projectors that beamed images directly into your eyes in lieu of physical screens. The concept has potential issues (some explored by the book, too), but I found it a very interesting idea.

[msh]

Maybe like what's portrayed in the movie her minus the true AI.

A semi intelligent seeming voice interface that handles most and then a secondary backup display only for purely visual things.