Augmented Reality will give us Superpowers
bigthink.com
bigthink.com
Article seems to use AR as shorthand for a suite of technologies/products which basically rewrite the moment to the moment experience of a person to eliminate all friction.
I think AR is necessary but not sufficient, and the article doesn't really make that case clearly imo.
example from the article: squint at a something and get information. So we have object recognition, gesture recognition, information retrival, etc. AR is just the presentation layer, no? Isn't the most interesting part of the problem how the machine would know what question I was asking at all about the something?
Suppose I'm watching a pickup basketball game in person. What should this system show me? A score hud, in game stats, real time velocities, predicitive player trails? What? AR isn't the interesting part of the annotation problem.
another example superhuman recall. You run into someone you have met before. It's easy to sleepwalk into the use case of names, birthdays, etc. That's just a rolodex. AR didn't do anything for that.
What about someone you've never met. Do you want to see a google search of them floating around? You want that for everyone else? You meet a man/woman at a bar and you see he/she has 5 profiles on different dating apps and a DUI conviction from 3 years ago. Or she sees your LinkedIn profile and she knows she makes 3x what you do?
AR is the wallpaper of a complex environment that AI algorithms will paint with vast ocean of data as direct transparent experience. You won't scan around and have perfect recall. You will simply be placed in a more complex environment designed by AI to extract information from you while simultaneously creating an addictive enhanced reality experience.
It'll start out as words "sex offender", but eventually it'll just be a miasma painted around those you should avoid. Those down for casual sex will see waypoint markers beckoning them towards a hookup within their radius and parameters.
It's kind of like the rush a highway robber might get from realizing that people do what he wants when he points his weapon at them.
The device could emit a simple API and UI description in some standard format and the headset would take care of the rest - basically the Horizon: Zero Dawn approach.
The more powerful appliances the more complex methods of interaction could be exchanged between it and the headset.
No electrical appliance would be limited anymore by having a terribly designed touchscreen LCD or press button menu system.