ST Sees AR Glasses Replacing Smartphones

One commonality between mouse+keyboard and smartphone is that small movements mostly in fingers and wrists are all that's needed for input. Contrast with Xbox Kinect - hype then disappeared, Nintendo Wii - hype then disappeared, and now some VR input...in all of these systems many of the experiences are designed around large body movements that go against the ingrained human instinct to be lazy. See "gorilla arms".

AR/VR needs micro-gesture input. Logitech K830 keyboard is tracked in VR with Oculus Quest 2 which is a step in the right direction. FB acquired CTRL-Labs whose CTRL-kit allows for some elementary BCI and Valve is investing heavily in BCI, Gabe Newell can't stop talking about how excited he is about it. And I'm sure Google and MS are trying as well.

But AR will need low-effort input before it replaces smartphones (unless it focuses only on high read / low write use case as its killer apps). Hopefully Apple has an input system for its AR product that doesn't require gorilla arms. AR + smartphone where the smartphone touchscreen acts as a trackpad or controller would likely be a better system than any hand wave-y / hand tracking.

I don't really want/need AR. I don't want a camera, I don't need object tracking, I do not need to augment what is in front of me.

What I would buy today is glasses that allowed an overlay. Give me a screen and an API and let me tether it to my phone and push pixels and I'd buy that immediately.

I feel very septic about this assertion. Today the "Smart-overlay" display market is only enterprise : -> helping people understanding a complex machine with an overlay explanation.

Doesn't this mean people use it only when the are "forced" to do it ?

Literally everybody believes that if AR glasses are possible, they will replace smart phones. However, the display technology to actually make them useful is absent as is the input system. Is there anything on the horizon that actually fixes these two things?

One social drawback of the smartphone is that I usually feel guilty to check notifications while I'm having a conversation with someone. Ever-so-occasionally I'll miss an important contact and not get back to someone in a timely manner because I'm having a real face-to-face conversation.

Smart-glasses (not even AR) could allow me the guilty pleasure of checking that notification without leaving the conversation. Though I suspect that someone could notice my gaze even briefly leaving eye contact.

But wasn't that among the very things that gave people the creeps about Google Glass? "Are you recording me?" "Are you engaging with a social network while we are spending time together?"

> “We see a decline in phone innovation”

This definitely feels true (though an attempt at quantifying this statement would an intersting read) but it is not specifically supportive of the case for AR as a successor platform. In fact understanding the causes of this "lack of innovation" would serve AR enthousiasts well.

Imho, the mobile platform suffers a prolonged stagnation not because it has exhausted its intrinsic potential but due to prevailing business models: i) the user as data product and not a client - with the associated collapse of trust and limited options for value creation ii) the oligolistic market structure that motivates defensive choices (preserve existing "cash cows" rather than expand the market with the associated risk of new entrants)

The range of high value applications one could envisage running on these billions of interconnected, portable "supercomputers" is stunning. The fact they are not happening is one of the biggest market failures ever. As we push beyond sustainability boundaries and desperately need information technology to help reshape our behaviors towards more balanced, just and sustainable societies it may turn out that it is also one of the gravest political and social failures.

Who knows what incredible AR platforms could emerge in a moderately remote future. But in the near future the toxic digital swamp of mobile "cr-apps" does not leave much room for new growth

In my experience, using a smartphone is cumbersome or unwise when I shouldn't be looking at the screen in the first place. Like when driving, for example. And in cases where I could maybe put the phone somewhere, my hands may be covered in dough, and I can't touch the thing. So I'm not convinced seeing the output is the problem that needs solving.

Now, a good audio interface would be great IMO. Most of the stuff I want on the web is text, really, so if I could just ask the phone to read me articles, expand on topics I want to know more about, make reservations etc. etc., that'd be much more useful to me than having a screen mounted to my glasses. Yea, we have some voice controls now, but in my experience, they're not useful enough to bother with.

Edit: some gesture recognition with a device like the Myo would probably augment an audio interface nicely.

I have high expectations for advanced AR glasses in the coming years, even as far as being able to replace the heavy VR headsets potentially.

But I feel like as far as getting rid of smartphones, you need and input mechanism. Maybe it can be done with hand tracking or light weight tracking gloves.

I suspect they will replace monitors first. You can still use keyboard and mouse for input, get a lot of screen real estate without clunky monitors or being tied to a desk / chair, and have to worry less about portability and battery life.

AR-glasses indeed will soon reach the masses but I don't look forward to it. Millions of people walking around with glasses that can facially identify passers-by... it's going to be the privacy-abuse singularity.

I'm extremely bullish on AR/VR, neurotech, and smart wearables over the next decade or two, but this article seems oddly focused on AR glasses replacing phones. We're definitely seeing the phone separate into pieces closer to the body (wireless earbuds and watches), with the phone serving as a hub. The Apple Watch is almost where the original iPhone was in terms of technical capability (and has already passed some of the iPods, minus a headphone jack), but it lacks the large screen, large battery, and large compute power of modern phones. This should sound familiar: this was the main difference between the iphone and laptops at the time. Compute power and battery sizes can maybe reach good enough levels to replace the phone's role as a hub for most people within the next decade, but it's not clear anything can be done about the screen without expanding along or beyond the wrist. This, to me, is the value proposition of an AR HUD (which, maybe, absorbs or emerges from the growing smart earbud/headphone category). When looking at it as a compute element, I don't know if putting the brains on one's head (ironically) will be compelling vs the flexibility of storing it in a pocket or purse or strapped to some other body part with better ability to bear the extra load. I doubt AR glasses will gain brains fast enough to displace phones before something else takes its place. Strictly viewed as a device for viewing/hearing things controlled by some other device the user owns, the biggest challenge for glasses replacing the phone screen will be competition from all the other displays we're putting everywhere we look (living rooms, cars, pockets, etc...) It's possible AR wins by some benefit of economics (fewer screens!), but it's also possible that it loses because of inertia.

I have a lot more to say on this, but half a century from now, I think we'll certainly look back at the phone as a weird transitional device with a lot of odd UX compromises, but as it was (and still is) for laptops, desktops, and mainframes before them, the phone will probably not go away in some niches for decades (if ever). It's still a huge question to me whether over-eye AR will be the leading form factor that replaces them, and I'm unconvinced that the mass market future is AR glasses alone.

Inclined to agree, though I have no clue about the timeline. As others here have said, need low effort input in addition to the AR. Something that tracks finger movements would be good.

Anyone have a good forum or other source for tracking AR developments?