MIXED reader questions: When will AR glasses be commonplace?
MIXED reader Sebastian Kurz asked us when people wearing AR glasses will be a common sight. Here is our answer.
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Question from Sebastian Kurz: When will AR glasses be commonplace?
"Hi Sebastian
You asked us when people wearing augmented reality glasses will be a common sight. Since I can't see into the future, I can only speculate at this point and give you my opinion.
We have been promised stylish yet powerful AR glasses for more than ten years. I remember the excitement with which the industry awaited the unveiling of Magic Leap's first AR glasses. Instead of a technological breakthrough, we got more of the same.
Since then, many more AR headsets and glasses have been unveiled, and disappointment has followed disappointment. Some of the devices have pushed the boundaries of what was previously possible, but on the whole they have fallen far short of what consumers would expect from such a product.
The form factor is still more headset than eyewear, the display often has a narrow field of view, visual artifacts, or is not bright enough to wear in sunlight. There are also issues with heat dissipation and short battery life.
Meta's Orion product prototype, which cost tens of billions to develop, does not solve these problems either, but only mitigates them. And it is too expensive to produce to bring to market in this form. As enthusiastic as the press was after Orion's unveiling, the technical shortcomings will surely become more apparent once the dust settles.
Building AR glasses that are suitable for everyday use is an immense technical challenge. I sometimes wonder if the researchers at Meta and other companies have a clear technological path to real AR glasses, or if there are still many unknowns and basic R&D to be done. I suspect the latter, in which case the development of AR glasses would be one of the most expensive and uncertain experiments in the history of technology.
Meta suggests that AR glasses like Orion are not that far away from productization. I'm skeptical because I've heard similar promises many times before and the actual development has been much slower. But even then, it's not certain that people would wear Orion or an improved version of it. Maybe they would rather not see holograms and digital overlays in their field of vision and are fine with AI glasses like the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses. Even if the technical experiment of AR glasses is successful, the social experiment is still ahead of us and raises just as many questions.
Back to your question: If I had to bet, I would say that people wearing AR glasses won't be a common sight until the 2030s at the earliest. Or it may not happen at all and the project may be abandoned because the technical challenges are too great to make AR glasses suitable for consumers.
In any case, the development of AR technology should be seen in decades rather than years, and there are still so many technical, cultural, and social question marks and unknowns that the future is shrouded in a thick fog.
Kind regards,
Tomislav"
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