On AR Glasses

 On AR Glasses

It's the middle of CES, the tradeshow where companies show off technology that will fall into one of three categories: Stuff that will never actually come to market, stuff that will come out but is completely useless, and stuff that will eventually become a product but won't do half of what was promised for several decades and by then an entirely new technology will have been developed that will make it obsolete. Anything labeled with "AI" will fall into all three categories at once.

One piece of technology that's been promised for decades that I am both interested in and have no hope for being practical for a few more decades is AR glasses. AR, short for augmented reality, is where you can see through the glasses and they have a screen on them that you can use like your phone. That's different from VR glasses, which stands for virtual reality glasses. That's just a screen in front of your face, like your phone.

The reason I'm curious about AR is that I stare at screens all day. You do too. There's not much either of us can do about it. I need to in order to write this blog. You need to in order to read it. I'm not printing this out and mailing it to you, my printer broke years ago. Maybe, if we put our screens on glasses, then we can at least occasionally look up, and by look up I mean through, and see the world around us.

This, of course, is not what will happen. We already take our screens with us- our phones- and spend most of our time out staring at them. Cities have started to redesign crosswalks to have lights on the ground so that people looking down at their phones know when to cross. AR glasses won't make us any better. We'll be even more isolated. Now when we're staring at our phone and reality rudely interrupts us, we have to look up. We have to engage. What happens when it's all in our glasses?

We already see this effect with headphones. Everyone in public places plugs into their headphones and earbuds in part because whatever we have to play is more interesting than talking to someone, and in part to put up a shield to prevent others from talking to us. Talking to someone with headphones is interrupting. When we eventually put screens over our eyes that will give us just enough visual information to navigate the world while the rest is our chosen entertainment or work, it will take that much longer for someone to put it away when you need to talk to them. Interrupting them becomes that much more of a time sink away from their chosen task.

We may need to go further in redesigning our cities as well. I once grabbed dinner with an acquaintance from college when I was visiting the city he was living in. The thing about my friend was he was blind in one eye, and his other eye wasn't far behind. We were walking down the street catching up on old times and suddenly my friend wasn't beside me. Instead, he was several paces back and bleeding from the middle of his forehead. He'd walked right into a tree branch that had been hanging over the sidewalk, something I had probably ducked under without a second thought. His reaction was to say, "Oh, not again." This was just how someone visually impaired went through life.

So as I watch the announcements coming out of CES, I keep an eye on how close we're getting to all of us walking around with gashes in our foreheads from avoidable collisions. Because it's better than sitting at our screens all day.