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AR or MR is the endgame. Once the technology is capable of blocking out the world then you have VR in MR. Similar attempts have been made with passthrough video with VR[1]; the tech will converge at some point, it's inevitable.

So while you may not be the only one who doesn't want this tech to come about you and anyone else who shares your sentiments are wishing for something that absolutely won't happen. As for your usability concerns, those always come later as the tech matures.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxM4vN_4jJY

It will happen in the sense that AR technology will become viable and cost-effective. I think it's far from set in stone how much it will be used outside of niche applications. Smartphones are an enormously powerful technology but they have a social limit. For instance, if you're building an app which requires people to use their phones while in conversation, and overlay information on top, that is clearly going to come up against social barriers. Just because you can build something, it doesn't mean people will use it.

It is almost undoubtedly going to be very useful in particular professional contexts, how much it goes beyond that is anyone's guess.

There's been loads of fantasy AR interfaces designed and kicked around for ages, but before anyone can start making them though you have to get to the point that the technology is available to test on. VR was stuck in the same place that you bemoan about for AR for ages before things like the Rift started showing up and available for people to actually experiment with. Heck we're still in the crummy interface stage of VR and most of the games that have come out aren't that deep or engaging coma

> "I am in a different space and not here with you", but with AR you are socially signaling "I'm here but I'm projecting a mustache on you for my own amusement and partially ignoring you while I watch funny youtube clips" which will make people uncomfortable the same way Google Glasses did.

I don't think the difference here is as big as you make it out to be and what most people didn't like about Glass was the camera not the screen. Neither of those messages are particularly acceptable when a person wants to talk to you. If AR is actually useful social etiquette will adapt like it has for every distraction machine that has come along.

The problem, like you state, is not AR itself, it's that " no one is really thinking usability, interfaces, social exceptions, and realistic applications".

There is a movement that tries to move the world in a different direction, and I hope many more people will invest some serious time reading about the subject.

http://livable.media/

Here's a great place to start if you're interested:

http://nxhx.org/dfa/

> "no one is really thinking usability, interfaces, social exceptions, and realistic applications"

How true is that? It seems to me that the usability and interface concerns are actually trivial.

I'm pretty sure the bottleneck has always been a technical one, not a creative one.

You're not the only one. I personally am not a fan of VR either.

BUT... There is one use case where I would totally adopt AR/VR for, that I don't see a lot of people talking about.

If someone could make an VR/AR app that simply gives me a floor to ceiling monitor and used eye tracking, I'd be thrilled.

I currently use a pair of 4K monitors (@ 1:1) for work, and I still feel like I could use more real estate. I would guess that a pair of goggles would cost less than having more monitors, and take up less space.

The biggest issue preventing that is that to do better than your dual 4k monitors the VR goggles will have to have many more pixels on the much smaller screens, which is hard to do reliably from a manufacturing standpoint and would require an enormous amount of processing power to render at the 90FPS that VR requires to be comfortable.

Would it need more pixels if all it is doing is scrolling up and down a virtual monitor though?

If you want to see more on the screen at any one time than your current 4k screen it's going to require more pixels no matter how you arrange everything else. If you want to put it 'deeper' into the VR world than just placing the exact same screen data onto the VR screens will require multiple real pixels per fake VR screen pixels.

Also don't forget you have to have 2x panels with the increased resolution at smaller sizes than the existing monitors.

Finally if you are just scrolling through a virtual screen there's no reason that can't be done on today's monitors and we already have eye tracking tech available without having to jam that tracking into already crowded glasses.

I am willing to accept tradeoffs in resolution for more working area.

I basically have the equivalent of 8 1080p monitors, but if I can get the equivalent of more 1080p monitors over a larger area but at a lower pixel density (downscaling is ok provided I can zoom in and out), I'd be totally good with that.

Almost every article and demo I've read and watched about AR in the last couple of years mentions huge virtual screens everywhere. It's in all the Hololens demos, for example.

I haven't seen any examples where the entire field of view is basically a giant Windows or Mac desktop, which is what I'm talking about. Most of the stuff I've seen are just like the video linked in the parent thread.