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I actually think industrial applications might be the hidden killer app for augmented reality. Imagine walking around a power plant and seeing your environment annotated: last inspection time for each inspection point, what is flowing through each pipe and its current pressure, etc. Construction sites could be truly amazing.

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Call it a professional environment and I think that's where we will see the first true impact of wearable computing. Your examples are two good ones. And of course people have mentioned hospitals. Just consider every profession where a desk jockey is not the norm. That's police, firemen, first responders, military, teachers, etc. Heck, why not cashiers and even bar tenders?

Then again, I'm biased. We're building and selling our own version of wearable computing, but driven by your biological rhythms.

Also consider that in professional environs, various pros get away with all sorts of silly attire and add-ons - from scrubs and stethoscopes to other uniforms and utility belts. You look ridiculous, but you have a job to do.

Exactly, pros do it all the time. Eventually it becomes cool. I never buy into the hype about it looking bad for a few reasons:

I wear glasses. Years ago people thought all glasses looked silly. And they were, with giant thick lenses. Now people buy non-RX glasses to look cool, even.

I saw an animated sci-fi show from around 10 years ago (Denno Coil, Japanese anime) where in order to see the AR/VR world, you wore glasses. Every single kid wore glasses. You had to in order to see the VR/AR. Once something is common, the look factor doesn't matter.

I think we're just seeing people being disappointed that Reality is still decades/centuries/possibly impossible behind Fiction, and Fiction is only pulling further away as Reality gets better computers to render Fiction with.

Yup - all the cool kids are wearing stethoscopes!

And steel toed boots. And hard hats are the latest rage

I think it even has potential for a desk job. Having your workflow preserved as what you actually see instead of what you happen to save would be a huge time saver for forgetful people like me.

Especially for artists, designers, and maybe even engineers. I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to see what I was doing when I started to screw something up.

Definitely utility there, but I assume there's always room for bigger and conformable screens, gestural UIs, etc.

When you're walking around all the time, not having to hold something is a pretty huge selling point.

Glass is not an augmented reality device.

This was my experience when I tried Glass - despite knowing it wasn't AR, I still expected it to somehow enhance my experience. This isn't the case - it's merely replacing the screen in your pocket with a screen above-and-to-the-left-of-vision. I'm hoping the Glass team (or someone else) will take notice and create an AR device that can grant this experience that seems to be widely desired.

Why not?

(I'm playing with it as an augmented reality device and have written a calibration library to get the display aligned with the camera - see https://github.com/matt-williams/Optometrist. I've been working on hooking this into OpenCV which I'm hoping to upload in the next few days.)

One valid answer to "why not" might be power/heat - if you run it for a long period of time, your battery dies and your hair sets on fire. ;)

For one, the positioning of the display and camera. The display is elevated so you don't see it directly in front of you. You have to actively look at it. The camera isn't centered in your face so it doesn't line up with your vision.

I agree the display is only part of your vision. That's suboptimal but I'm not sure it's a showstopper.

The camera not being centered on your face is not insurmountable. (In fact, you'd want it to be centered on your right eye, not your face.) The project I linked to above aligns the camera with your vision. It doesn't currently work for different depths of field, but I'm working on that - this relies on your image recognition being able to determine the depth of the recognized object, e.g. by knowing its physical size.

Totally. I kind of want to start every comment on every thread on HN with "Glass is not an augmented reality device."

I've worn one (very briefly) now, and let me be very clear: you can not superimpose labels or images on anything you see in daily life with Glass. This is a physical limitation of the hardware, and it is absolute. This hardware will never, ever, ever be able to do that.

And it's unclear to me if the hardware for Rainbows End/Halting State augmented reality will ever (or at least in this generation) exist if Glass-like heads-up-display hardware can not be successful in its own right.

Not really true, I have one that I wear regularly, and it could be used as one in limited fashion.

There's also a little Easter Egg in it that lets you see the entire Glass team, and look around at them, up, down, etc. and it's pretty engrossing, so you can use it as limited VR as well.

A little late but relevant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzQCSis4kKs

Can't we consider a fighter pilot's HUD augmented reality? That's not exactly new.

Darn. That's the only reason I would want one...

Why would anyone want to wear glasses to see text-messages instantly?

I use to be a glass enthusiast, but this single limitation is discouraging.

While those are novel applications and would probably work well in a repair situation, those things would be better managed by software that alerted you when things like "inspection time had been exceeded" or if "pressures were out of range". Having to look at every pipe and piece manually to check it's stats is error prone at best.

"You mean we have all this stuff recorded and in a database, but I have to go look at it to get the info?"

You're confusing the use case. If course you can already look up the data and get alerts, and every modern plant already does. But getting hands on data when you're at the plant isn't just helpful for repairs or inspections, it's helpful for lots of things including debugging problems, helping new employees learn about the plant and "map" the processes to the physical layout of the pipes. Nowadays people lug around papers or tablets, so this would just be an extension of that.

Aren't there already HUDs in limited / experimental use in such applications?

yes, going the way of the Segway, this is exactly how people rationalized their use too.

Medical, construction, engineering all provide a great opportunity for glass.

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