How big of a deal will AR Glasses be this time around?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Spinning this off from another thread to avoid a hijack.

I dont think they’ll be the death knell of Apple or anything, but there are a few big techs that I think will make AR glasses more significant now than they were in the past. It isn’t that the AR goggles themselves are so much more advanced than the Google Glass was (though the better the experience the easier adoption will be). It’s also the advances in machine learning that have greatly increased what a computer can do in real time.

When people started telecommunicating a lot more during this pandemic, this was a problem for hard of hearing or deaf people. This created demand which new products have started to fill. On Zoom you can now turn on a machine learning developed software that creates closed captions of live conversations. That’s huge. It wasn’t available when Google Glasses were around last time. From a disability perspective, this could be huge – you could basically closed caption real life. Everything from talking to your grandkids to being warned about the sound of approaching vehicles.

I read about a man who suffered inner ear damage and lost the ability to balance. By putting a “level” in his glasses, the man was able to teach himself to balance using sight instead of his inner ear’s innate sense.

That sort of visual feedback to mimic other senses could be used in these glasses too. Think of the red highlights on the side of the screen when you get shot from the side or back in a modern FPS. Different colored overlays could mimic different sounds, with color diffentiating sound type, and intensity of the color marking its intensity – so if a bird is singing to your left you might see a light purple glow on the left side of the glasses, while if someone is screaming behind you you might get a red overlay warning you to turn around. Or you could have icons – when captioning speech it can tell you who is speaking; when telling you a bird is singing it could identify this with a bird icon. Or a car icon, if you’re about to cross the road.

And apparently the same team that created closed captioning is working on translating those captions to a foreign language in real time. Imagine if you are traveling through China, and when looking at a sign in Chinese, a translation overlay appears on your glasses, telling you what the sign says. When people are speaking to you, closed captions in English are provided in real time; and if necessary, hotel workers or other people who come into contact with tourists could have translation glasses of their own.

There is a software called TeamViewer which is commonly used by businesses to allow employees across the world to support each other in software use. It’s fantastic if your machine operator isn’t sure how to configure the machine from a nearby workstation. But what if you need to advise them on a physical machine, showing them which levers to pull or valves to turn? About a year ago TeamViewer released a mobile app with an Augmented Reality feature to do exactly this. Your factory operator in Cleveland can start a video call with the machine’s manufacturer in China and using the same sort of technology that lets Pokémon Go place a Pikachu on the road, allows the manufacturer to place arrows in physical locations on the machine which the factory operator can see when looking through his phone screen.

Now imagine if instead of awkwardly holding up their phone to record the machine, the factory operator was wearing goggles with an AR heads up display that can be manipulated with additional information by the Chinese manufacturer. Hell, most common troubleshooting techniques could be included in the machine’s software, so that if you run a machine diagnostic and it tells you to check a number of valves, you can look through your AR goggles and see those valves highlighted, no call to China needed for support.

When the Google Glass first hit the market many years ago, the technology for the glasses themselves wasn’t quite there; the apps available for use were quite limited; the network we now call “the internet of things” wasn’t there to plug in to; and societal acceptance of this bit of technology you carry around that can do anything just wasn’t there yet. But our culture has changed. It is more and more common for more and more household items to be “smart”. We aren’t scared of the cell phone anymore – we are scared to be without one. And from a practical point of view, what Augmented Reality can offer is becoming more and more appealing.

So… what do you think? 2021 is supposed to be a big year for AR glasses, with a few products announced to hit the market. Will they fizzle out like the Glass did? Or will the new generation of consumer AR devices land in more fertile soil, societally speaking, and thrive?

And what about outside of the consumer market? AR already has a foothold in various industrial and military uses; how far will this go?

2

I agree that there are some niche applications where AR make sense, but in several of your examples replacing ubiquitous general purpose smart phones with expensive AR offers only a small amount of additional convenience.

Closed captioning of real life to help the hard of hearing? Great! Put it on my phone. As a cloud service if it’s too processor intensive to run on the phone.

Putting a level in glasses to compensate for inner ear damage put it on my ph… no, but why not use an actual level?

Tech support. Use the phone and your company doesn’t have to invest in AR glasses.

Real time translation? Smartphone!

AR is going to grow in some specialized markets, but much like VR it’s not going to supplant or destroy existing uses for smartphones, pads, TVs etc.

3

I think most of these “just use a phone” arguments would have been made about smartphones 20 years ago, but they would have been “just use a computer”. Most of the things things we “just use a phone” for you could have done on a desktop. Except it turns out that always having a phone with you and in your pocket is a sea change in how we use technology.

Not having to take a phone out of your pocket likely is too.

I don’t know if AR glasses will be big this time around, because I don’t know if we will have figured out the right mix of power and convenience and ubiquity. But they will be at some point, and up until that point “just use a phone” will seem like it makes a lot of sense. And then someone will sell a few billion pairs of smart glasses and it will look pretty outdated.

4

And they would have been right. None of these uses would have been viable for an early smartphone, or worth sinking money into until smartphones became ubiquitous. But the smartphone offered a significant step up with portability. For the uses in question, what do the AR glasses offer above and beyond the smartphone?

AR has it’s uses, but I predict AR will, baring some yet to be devised killer app, be a 3D TV or VR headset, and not a smartphone. I.e. a niche product, not something everyone has to own.

5

I don’t really know, but I would take the side of the bet that there will be one.

I think this is the wrong way to think about it. That is, there were lots of killer apps for phones, but they were really all predicated on the things that the iPhone got right in hardware: A capacitive touch screen that took up the whole display. Pre-iPhone smart phones were just really bad to use for almost everything (Blackberries were good for a specific text/email heavy workload), and so people didn’t like to use them.

I think the right question to ask is not what the killer app for AR will be, because that’s really hard to tell. It’s whether the glasses are cheap and stylish and light and low-power enough that they’re easy to wear. If they are delightful to use, someone will figure out a really cool thing to do with them.

6

I work in manufacturing. I can think of a hundred uses for this product.

Especially anything having to do with inspection or quality control.

7

Anyone remember Google Glass? That was Google’s attempt at an AR product and it went no where.

8

I have the Alexa Frames and I find them incredibly useful, mostly as a bluetooth headset for a job that requires me to spend hours every day on the phone. If the battery was better I’d probably use some of the features like listening to music or having direction read to me more. When I travel to a new city having my glasses give me walking direction to a restaurant is pretty cool. Of course, this is auditory only and even then, like I said, the battery isn’t great and can deal with maybe 3 hours of use before being completely dead.

I would get an AR headset but I would want the battery technology to be much improved to the point that running visuals along with auditory should last at least 4 hours. Receiving text message and emails without having to pull my phone out of my pocket would be nice, having visual directions or other interactions where it is too loud for the auditory ones. If the glasses were paired with a glove or two to interact with the screen I would be very cool.

9

“Anyone remember the Apple Newton? That was Apple’s attempt at a digital tablet and it went no where.”

The fact that products have failed in the past because they weren’t very good isn’t a very good argument for whether the category will succeed in the future. Technology keeps getting better!

10

I realize that. I was working on virtual reality hardware in the mid 1990s, so I already know just how far VR and AR technology has advanced.

11

The level example was specifically for one person – but meant to show how AR could allow us to feed deaf people lots and lots of information in a visual format – information that our brain is more than capable of adjusting to processing. Information like “there is a car approaching from your right” or “here is what your friend is saying”. And certainly some of this info could be displayed on your phone, but don’t you see the appeal of being able to read what my friend is saying while looking him in the eye, instead of staring at my phone?

12

That, or in assembly processes. In combination with QR codes and a camera on the glasses you could conceivably do your quality inspection at the same time as the assembly process (though you’d probably still need to test a few parts for quality later just to be safe)

13

I would think anyone who read my OP would remember the Google Glass since I mentioned it a few times in my post.

14

Sure, but is it so appealing I want an expensive separate device to do it? No, it isn’t. And that is how I feel about an imaginary AR device that is far beyond where the technology is today.

15

They’re not.

16

Then I agree that they won’t amount to anything yet.

17

Are you deaf/hard of hearing? Because yeah, as someone who can hear perfectly well, dropping a thousand dollars on glasses that will give me subtitles seems wasteful. If I couldn’t hear anything even though I’d already spent thousands on a hearing aid, though? I’d definitely consider it.

Certainly the models currently available haven’t taken the market by storm. The tech companies seem to think they have something worth rolling out next year in this field; you think they are incorrect?

18

I also want to point out that ‘hard of hearing’ doesn’t mean ‘can’t hear anything’. I have hearing loss in one ear, and in a one-on-one conversation have no problem understanding someone. But once you add background noise, and especially lots of people talking, I find it very hard to understand the words in an individual conversation - hanging out with people at a bar or restaurant was draining before I got a hearing aid, and dealing with work meetings was also exhausting. The hearing aid I got works pretty well, but it’s far from perfect, and closed captioning would be amazing even if it’s not 100% accurate. Having the extra data of CC’s guess at what was said would contribute a lot, and a short history of what the person said would be great when I concentrate on understanding the last part of a sentence and forget the first part.

Also, to put it in perspective, that $1000 price tag is less than 1/3 of the cost of my hearing aid (which is currently gathering dust since I don’t hang around crowds during a pandemic). By my reckoning, that’s not even an expensive device compared to what someone hard of hearing has to spend on less effective tech.

19

You sound far more capable in the hearing department than my wife’s grandmother, who at this point struggles to hear normal one on one conversation even with her hearing aid. Which is a bit of a misnomer since she actually (until very recently) had multiple hearing aids, not just one. One for TV, one for conversation, and one for conversation in crowded places.

She recently upgraded to a single hearing aid that can switch modes – a huge aid since they’re a bit of a pain to put in and out.

It was extremely expensive and frankly doesn’t work that well either.

20

I should have been more specific in my last post since you were referring to this specific user group. I think this use falls under what I dubbed “specialized markets”. And I still think the kind of app you mention will be a much bigger thing, mostly for phones, than the glasses themselves.

I think tech companies always say they have something great rolling out next year. I think significant improvements are being made. I think AR glasses will still be an oddity for the next decade.

There is a lot of overlap, so think about where VR is now, compared to where people have thought/hoped it would be at the beginning of each push. It still isn’t thought of as a “must have” anywhere but … well I personally don’t know where it’s considered a must have. With the exception of gaming consoles, but there it’s looking like it’s following the path of 3D technology for TVs. Something all the manufacturers bring to market because they’re afraid to be left behind, and which doesn’t find much of a user base.