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I agree this is highly unlikely to be a common use case. I might use it, because I try to do most things myself, and I could often use some expert advice. And I know the people who would help me, but it'd be inconvenient to have them come all the way out here. But overall, this is a one-in-a-thousand use case.

But:

> Tools are still needed -- is there actually a big market for the kind of repairs you can do with the tools that everyone has lying around at home but which is complicated enough to need hand-coaching by an expert?

Almost all repairs on appliances, cars, houses, and so on can be done with tools you have laying around the house; they don't require anything more than a hammer, drill, screwdrivers, wrench sets, etc. The only thing you're typically not going to have on hand is replacement parts, which are usually not too difficult to get your hands on and which you would have to pay for anyway.

When people do this, it's not going to be an "expert", it's going to be something along the lines of "hey dad, look at this real quick."

> But then you also need the person to buy the AR goggles.

The Ars reporting showed someone using a Surface to view and annotate the HoloLens-user's view, not another set of HoloLens. So the barrier is much lower, any Windows 10 PC should be godo enough.

Have you ever worked on a car? Tons of specialized tools can be needed for some tasks. Do you have a set of triple square bits? General purpose puller? Bearing extraction tool? How about half inch drive Tor-X sockets? 200 ft lb torque wrench? When you work on a car for fun, you find that your collection of tools balloons just for all the things on the car that require one specific tool. If you think you can do everything on the car with just a simple socket set, you'll wind up stuck and having to buy a new tool for every task.

Yes, although granted when I said "almost all repairs" I did not have in mind major automotive work, but more along the lines of general maintenance and little things going wrong. Of course if you're doing something like rebuilding the transmission you'll need more tools than the average bear.

Fair enough, but my point was that for things where you'd benefit from a mechanic walking you through a task, you'll probably need some specialty tools to do the job.

Also, apologies for my brusqueness.

Training. Emergency assistance. Military applications. Don't trap yourself by thinking that the item needs to be the be-all for the Joneses.

Yeah this could make putting Ikea furniture together alot easier.

Like that's every going to happen.

Online training though - a whole other thing. Imagine math and physics with interactive 3D visualisations.

Or for kids, a virtual version of one of those 30-in-1 electronics teaching kits.

And so on.

If this works it could be a game changer, and it could also create a whole new app industry.

I just hope the technology is non-crappy, and it doesn't get managementised into uselessness.

None of those things require the augmented reality aspect of this: you don't need to place math and physics lessons into your local environment. They'd do just as well with VR, and indeed it doesn't sound to me like they'd do MUCH worse with just a plain old screen. What is it that you're imagining we couldn't do with a tablet that has swipe gestures to rotate the demo around all axes?

An electronics teaching kit might not work on a tablet (but would in VR), and note that any kind of really fluid manipulation of a virtual environment is going to involve a whole additional technology that gives precise locations of your hands (at least). The HoloLens allows a few simple gestures, not the ability to handle virtual objects in many degrees of freedom.

I'd approach this problem differently. Not from a service industry angle but from a product vendor angle. Imagine a world where AR-glasses are widespread. I'd be pretty interested in buying the kitchen sink that comes with an AR repair guide or the furniture that comes with AR assembly instructions.

So I think the interesting market is in building the infrastructure/app that makes it easy for vendors to create the content and ship it as a (free) addon for their products.

You could draw on a much bigger pool than professionals. There are plenty of people who know a skill and don't professionally sell their services but could spare a few minutes occasionally to help someone with a problem. If you combine skill tracking with instant global availability of services, you have a lot of room for development.

At any given time there are probably thousands of car mechanic experts sitting idle