Maybe this will be the exception, but in general these seem so consumer focused as to be useless. I just want something that can accept some standardized or ad hoc well-documented protocol to do basic raster images or text or something as a baseline. I want something that application developers (and people like myself) can start to hack on and explore where it can go.
I know, I want to put these in ski goggles and wire up Google's maps for ski resorts, the ski resort's lift line times data, and apres ski events info, and the current and upcoming weather conditions.
Yes. So much this. I really just want a super low level API to paint monochrome vectors onto my retina. That's it. I don't want any cruft. I really really hope someone takes the *nix approach to a glasses-hud. I want the hardware to track where my retina is, paint it with a stream of vectors over bluetooth, and have strong hardware guarantees for my ocular safety. Maybe toss one of those nice Bosch IMUs in it as well.
I think AR is more suited to commercial users than consumers anyway. Google Glass and Microsoft's AR solution seem to be playing out that way.
Anecdotally, the only context I would want information beamed right into my line of sight is in work scenarios. All other scenarios I want technology to be in the background as much as possible.
I don't see the AR applications even being the most interesting part of this. A private facial recognition database coupled with "this person's name and a note to self" would be immensely helpful in a lot of situations -- I have bad facial recognition (not full on face-blindness, but inconvenient) and it would be neat to be able to hack on this a little bit. This would also require a camera of some sort, but I'd rather have that not be integrated.
Possibly even "real-world closed captions".
A tap for clock/calendar function would be handy.
Morse code (or other silent, maybe subvocal?) "telepathy" would be interesting as well.
I don't know how convenient or awful these would be in reality, but if the cost were not exorbitant and you weren't locked into a proprietary app ecosphere then it definitely seems like it would be worth a shot.
Naturally, I worry about all of this facial recognition and data gathering; however, as a k12 teacher, the utility of displaying names/data about my students is immediately apparent. A great deal of time/effort is expended on assessing my students and modifying my interactions with them based on that information.
My main fear here is using any sort of centralized/cloud system for any portion of this. Facial recognition against a small corpus can be done fairly easily off the shelf.
Everyone wants to sell me something at a huge discount because they know that the enhancements to their own database will pay for the difference. I just want the basic version of this for my own personal use, preferably with no online use at all short of maybe encrypted backups (maybe).
I think the current uses are mostly commercial because that where you can get enough money to make a bespoke application and people aren't as sensitive about how things look. For a consumer AR application you need a lot more value to overcome how bad these things currently look and building that data out for the world is expensive.
