Two Possible Paths into the Future of Wearable Computing: Part 1 – VR

If nothing else, VR can pave the way for AR by making head mounted displays unexceptional. People may be more comfortable with the idea of wearing AR glasses around in public if VR gaming headsets become as ubiquitous in the home as game consoles are now.

As a backer of the Rift and creator of my own AR Dev Platform (gluing a Galaxy Nexus to a Baseball Cap sounds less professional...) i'm excited about the serious talk in this field.

For AR, Samsungs transparent flexible AMOLED Screens could become an interesting proposition in the near future if they spend some R&D on the optics to use this very close to the eye, on normal glasses for example.

I love this. The fact that big guns like Valve are writing about this stuff, helps me make a business case for the company I work for to invest in this kind of tech too.

"Real mass-market VR is just around the corner" is something I've been hearing since I was a little kid (I'm 30). I'll be super happy when/if it does happen, but won't hold my breath until it does.

Consider TrackIR, a phenomenal gaming technology that has been around for years and significantly increases immersion and "natural" input/control yet has failed to find meaningful traction with developers outside of simulators and a few other niche titles like Arma. Or 3D, which is still little more than a quickly-tiring gimmick despite a much wider range of titles being developed with support for it. Or Kinect, which, after the initial rush, has proved to still mostly be a solution in search of a problem.

Even if VR hardware has finally reached feasibility for mass-market production and pricing, without a large developer commitment it won't take off. It faces the same catch-22 as every add-on technology, requiring large developer time investment to support yet not having the market share to warrant such an investment, and the market share never getting large enough to warrant it because the investment is never made. The announced "launch titles" for the Rift don't really indicate that this hurdle is anywhere close to being surpassed.

It's cool to think about these things but "the future is now!" is inevitably premature. The article frames the entire thing as hypothetical to try to avoid this, but is still pretty gushing to the point of walking past these obvious and serious challenges.