[egd]

The basic problem is that without high fidelity & a wide FOV, there's nothing that sets MagicLeap apart from any of the other companies that have been able to create AR headsets for the last ~decade.

AR right now is stuck because the display technologies aren't up to the task. The "Waveguide" approach has always fallen short - nobody's ever been able to make the viewing angle wide enough to be worthwhile, and the "passthrough" approach isn't really viable for walking down the street.

This is why I'm skeptical about Apple's AR moves - unless they've either got a totally new display technology or they've managed to do something incredibly clever with the waveguide approach, I just don't see consumer goggles working.

The only people I've seen doing something unique in this space is Tilt Five: https://www.tiltfive.com/ - they've basically done what you're suggesting: constrain the use case until you can actually build something for it.

[istorical]

One could argue that Google Glass could have worked if the battery life was better, universal google maps / navigation had been better developed and more omnipresent, and pricepoint had been way lower.

Perhaps enough time has passed for those sorts of problems to be resolved and Apple will do something similar to Apple Watch but for Glasses.

[janekm]

I find that very unlikely. Pedestrian navigation isn't exactly a major use case for most people and is pretty well covered by phones and smartwatches already. Could have been useful for food delivery drivers (cyclists), but then we're right back into specialist markets.

[stripline]

I disagree. You could make the same argument that texting and phone calls are handled by smartphones, so why need the apple watch? I personally hate looking down at my phone to navigate while walking around in an unfamiliar city.

[janekm]

If there was a big demand for pedestrian navigation (walking around an unfamiliar city is not a frequent activity for most people) we would already have better solutions, such as good voice navigation, which would arguably be better than can be done on the low-res Google glass display. Receiving messages and notifications is a very frequent occurrence for most people these days. Personally I suspect I'd find the watch notification preferable to one that appears in my peripheral vision (disrupting attention) for that use case.

[pixelbash]

Personally I feel weird talking at my phone in a public place, but to each their own

[janekm]

Good pedestrian navigation (which needs pedestrian road/pathway networks that haven't been built to the same extent as they have for roads, though in some countries like Japan they are much better) doesn't need constant interaction. You'd just be wearing your regular headset and you'd occasionally hear "at the next intersection, take the traffic light on your left, cross the road and continue down xxx street"

[ben_w]

From the criticisms I saw at the time, it also needed the absence of a camera, and the presence of a fashion expert in the hardware design team.

I don’t understand fashion at all, so I wouldn’t have predicted it in advance, but it was unfashionable.

[xorcist]

That illustrates the parent poster's point pretty well. If you set out to build a killer heads-up display for navigation, it wouldn't look like Glass did. Better to focus on the "killer app" to establish the beachhead. Generality will follow.

[neuronic]

But that is precisely the point the parent is trying to make, no? The tech was in no way ready and able to do these things, so Google Glass had to appeal in a broader, non-focused way which is one of the issues that broke its neck.

[satvikpendem]

Google Glass is still used for enterprise.

https://www.google.com/glass/start/