I was listening to Cal Newport's Deep Questions podcast a while ago, and I was struck by his predictions for AR technology.
Cal describes a future where we end up with a set of AR glasses that:
- are unobtrusive and look good enough for people to be willing to wear them1
- have a sufficient field of view and resolution where the image is comparable to viewing a real screen
- are connected to a wireless network that can stream high-resolution content (this infrastructure already exists in many places)
He suggests that such a pair of glasses will mean "the end of the consumer electronics industry as we know it."
This idea was so compelling to me. I am not interested in VR (the headsets make me ill), but AR glasses sound amazing. It seemed pretty futuristic though, like we'd be waiting a while to get it.
This week, my favourite tech review YouTuber TechMeOut shared a video reviewing a set of glasses that enables you to watch movies and shows without a screen.
It makes me think Apple has to be working on tech like this behind the scenes, right? They can't just be putting a new camera in the iPhone every year.
It's pretty wild to think about how a good set of glasses, cloud development environments, and a fast internet connection could result in you not needing a computer to write code.
Update: John Gruber thinks we have "15 or so years" before the AR glasses I'm dreaming of will be available on the market 😭.
Footnotes
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I'm pretty sure the main reason Google Glass didn't do well with consumers is that they looked stupid. ↩︎