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Comment by degenerate | Hacker News Reader

Wow they nailed it 100%.

I can think of two "useful" applications of this tech... 1) see what you look like with cosmetic surgery / tattoo / etc before permanently modifying your body. 2) Try on clothes before shopping online.

But both still don't solve the underlying issue I have with this tech. Even the "useful" ideas for it boil down to satisfying people's vanity. It solves no problem, it provides no useful benefit to humanity. It's the same with Valve making hats for TF2 and skins for CS:Go instead of focusing on making great new games with story and content and adventure. This AR tech is the equivalent of serving a poopie diaper in a 5-star restaurant and calling it "Powerful Foods to inspire the imagination." And people are eating it all up.

Is this what we are moving toward?

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If you consider an AR future where the tech is small and integrated into your visual field via something like a contact lense then there are more applications.

- Look at items and see metadata around the item itself (or ability to pull that data up, like someone's name)

- Interact with objects across the room by looking at them

- See things like GPS way points in real space

I think an AR like this could solve real problems by merging the information available via the internet and what exists in our real world space, but the tech necessary to do it well isn't here yet (and there are still some unsolved problems: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-...)

I've seen Dr Ken Perlin give some very convincing arguments for how networked AR has the potential to completely change human language. When the fundamental nature of what we see is completely arbitrary, and we can elect to share that with other people in situ, then we basically become magicians.

Looking at the ubiquity of emoji, info graphics, photo filters and gifs it's pretty clear the answer is yes.

>> But both still don't solve the underlying issue I have with this tech. Even the "useful" ideas for it boil down to satisfying people's vanity. It solves no problem, it provides no useful benefit to humanity.

The same was said when myspace came up.

The same was said when facebook came up.

The same was said when twitter came up.

The same was said when instagram came up.

The same was said when snapchat came up.

Here's a dirty secret about American style consumerism. Crap sells!

I think we've been moving that way for a long time.

However, I can think of some useful AR applications that could be useful for surgery.

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