[nine_k]

Remember the PC revolution.

Altair was a toy. Atari 2600 was a toy. TRS-80, Sinclair Spectrum, Apple II — all toys. Amiga was almost not a toy, and Aople Macintosh and IBM PC were mostly not toys anymore.

From there on, businesses started to use massive amounts of PCs, thanks to killer apps like word processors and spreadsheets.

Prices fell, home users took note, and a real explosion began.

It took mere 20 years, say, from 1980 to 2000.

[ianai]

In that 20 years the hardware and software exponentially grew in capacity and decreased greatly in cost. Computers turned into something you’d want in your pocket once they could be unobtrusive enough to be tolerable with you all day.

On that note, who knows what would AR require in order to take off. It probably needs to be something you can get 80% of the killer features without wearing glasses. It also needs to support whatever frames glass wearers want to wear. It might require actual visual implants as I don’t think there’s a way to turn a contact lens into a display.

[nine_k]

I've read about contact lenses that used super—tiny LEDs to produce a focused overlay image in the eye.

It of course had a large external induction coil to power it, and very low resolution.