Agreed. A functional heads-up display in normal-looking glasses would render almost every smartphone obsolete. Add a good way to do text input (air typing on an AR-projected keyboard?) and most laptops and desktops can go away too.
If we're still poking at tiny screens in 2025, something has gone very wrong.
I still think smart-glasses has a chance to come back. If you think about it, combined with AR and hand-tracking, they can make everything that has a screen obsolete.
Your smart-glass will replace your TV, Laptop, Console, Watch, Camera, and of course Phone.
Could be. One of my pie-in-the-sky ideas is a heads-up display in glasses using eye tracking or hand gestures for input. If I ever actually tried to build that, using Android as a base would be the obvious choice.
I'm not sure why they went after the consumer market first. I feel awkward on the street talking into a headset. But at my desk, it's my preferred technology for taking a call.
There are industries where a mini heads-up display would be valuable. Consider, for example, a mechanic. Peering into an engine and seeing the parts labelled, color coded and flagged by diagnostics would be powerful. Or a policeman surveying highway traffic. Or a lawyer reviewing paper documents. In none of these cases would a Glass-like device be awkward.
I can't really see AR Glasses replacing Smartphones even if the tech is there.
Sure it's nice to have a display you can always see while keeping your hands free, but even when it perfectly recognizes what you say voice input is still slower and clunkier than using your hands. Gaze tracking is similarly clunky compared to multitouch.
Not to mention the privacy aspect (would you want everyone around you to know exactly what you're typing/searching for/interacting with?)
You could have some kind of physical input device you keep in your pocket - but at that point you're carrying around more stuff than if you just had a smart phone. (Edit: sensors on your fingers so you can type on an imaginary keyboard?)
Basically it just doesn't seem to make any sense to me, but hey maybe I'm missing something. Useful tech for certain use cases sure, but I don't think those use cases really overlap enough with what we use smartphones for to replace them.
It's just a matter of time. All our tech gets smaller and lighter with each generation. One of these days the display glasses will be barely more than regular eyeglasses.
And just maybe in my lifetime we'll get a neural link so visual won't even be necessary to "see" the info from the computer.
I don't want cameras strapped to my head, I want a lightweight display I can wear unobtrusively and doesn't make anyone near me nervous (doubly so since this is from a company known for invading privacy), even if it's a fairly low resolution one. Version 1 could even be 4 lines of text and I'd still pay for it - I already wear glasses every waking moment of my life anyway.
Pair it with my phone, give me driving directions which don't require me to take eyes off the road. Remind me of things when I arrive home or get in the car. Let me read texts. Overlay that 9-minute pasta timer in a corner of my field of view until it runs out. Blink in a corner to remind me that my lawn sprinklers are still running, so I don't go to sleep forgetting to turn them off (ahem).
I'll probably learn to use a swype-style keyboard while keeping the phone in the pocket and looking ahead through the glasses.
Come on, I grew up awed at the HUDs of Robocop and Terminator, give me a damn HUD, it's 2023.
And then what? We just get a different way to interact with screens?
Phones and tablets can leverage their size to pack bright displays, tactile controls and large batteries. Targeting the Ray-ban form factor is going to require some ugly sacrifices, and even an optimal solution is going to be a hard sell compared to the miniaturized technology of it's day.
I keep hearing the "make AR glasses" shtick, but I don't think there will be real demand for it. You either wear the heavy, light-blocking fighter-pilot headset for full immersion, or you get the dinky 15 degree FOV washed-out Google Glass. And both of them cost a mortgage compared to the smartphone.
Indeed, I think AR glasses will replace at least the display portion of smartphones. If I had to guess, the progression would go something like this: Initially, it will be glasses connected to the smartphone. Then, glasses connected to a watch-like device. Finally, just the glasses.
I touched on this before https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12104656. Imagine waiting in an airport and browsing instagram or watching videos on a relatively large, private display via glasses. The tiny, visible-by-others smartphone display would look very primitive in comparison.
While I’m sure AR glasses are coming and will be popular, the notion that they’ll be so popular that smart phones won’t even have screens is particularly bold.
Smartphones didn’t replace PDAs, most people didn’t have a PDA to replace. Smart phones replaced whole categories of devices and bundled them into one: cameras, camera phones, PDAs, MP3 players, watches, timers, alarm clocks etc.
People keep looking for “the next big thing” and it just isn’t coming. The smartphone was a singular event in the history of computing and it wont be replicated within our lifetimes. At most it will be unbundled again, unevenly (eg, smart watches, and glasses)
You're likely to look back with a bit of a chuckle about not having seen it coming. Just my guess of course, i've been wrong before.
Google glasses were still way too clunky; ubiquity may not happen in earnest until the technology comes as contact lenses. That's still science fiction, but far from impossible. And many of us wear glasses already, so wearing something discrete that doesn't look as ridiculous as google glasses did, would already be embraced.
There is a huge opportunity for such tech to change our life as much as the cell phone. Discrete heads up display with instructions for new objects, forgotten names, dates, places etc.. Beautiful, personalized artwork and decor at the office and home. The list is endless.
I'm extremely bullish on AR/VR, neurotech, and smart wearables over the next decade or two, but this article seems oddly focused on AR glasses replacing phones. We're definitely seeing the phone separate into pieces closer to the body (wireless earbuds and watches), with the phone serving as a hub. The Apple Watch is almost where the original iPhone was in terms of technical capability (and has already passed some of the iPods, minus a headphone jack), but it lacks the large screen, large battery, and large compute power of modern phones. This should sound familiar: this was the main difference between the iphone and laptops at the time. Compute power and battery sizes can maybe reach good enough levels to replace the phone's role as a hub for most people within the next decade, but it's not clear anything can be done about the screen without expanding along or beyond the wrist. This, to me, is the value proposition of an AR HUD (which, maybe, absorbs or emerges from the growing smart earbud/headphone category). When looking at it as a compute element, I don't know if putting the brains on one's head (ironically) will be compelling vs the flexibility of storing it in a pocket or purse or strapped to some other body part with better ability to bear the extra load. I doubt AR glasses will gain brains fast enough to displace phones before something else takes its place. Strictly viewed as a device for viewing/hearing things controlled by some other device the user owns, the biggest challenge for glasses replacing the phone screen will be competition from all the other displays we're putting everywhere we look (living rooms, cars, pockets, etc...) It's possible AR wins by some benefit of economics (fewer screens!), but it's also possible that it loses because of inertia.
I have a lot more to say on this, but half a century from now, I think we'll certainly look back at the phone as a weird transitional device with a lot of odd UX compromises, but as it was (and still is) for laptops, desktops, and mainframes before them, the phone will probably not go away in some niches for decades (if ever). It's still a huge question to me whether over-eye AR will be the leading form factor that replaces them, and I'm unconvinced that the mass market future is AR glasses alone.
I think this technology could replace mobile phones. I just notice how often i need to grab my mobile phone, just to check some little peace of information I need. When i'm in the car I cannot grab it.
Note that the glasses look ugly, but they are already developing lenses with screens in it. This is basically technology becoming one with your brain.
i find this very hard to believe. it seems obvious to me that smartphones and tablets have completely filled the niche invented by the HUD glasses of yesteryear's science fiction. they will never be popular, because they are too invasive. people like to be able to put the internet in their pocket and take it out again when they need it.
i wouldn't be surprised if google has a bunch of engineers working on the technology that could be used in HUD glasses, but i would be very, very surprised to see anything ever come to market. google will not enter the hardware market with such a risky product.
I'm hoping that in 10-15 years, existing smartphones with giant screens will seem like a thing of the past, and that we'd have tiny devices that look "dumb" for a third person from 2017, but are much smarter and have AR capabilities just like we've seen in Sci-Fi movies and video games for a long time.
We don't need large screens to consume more content - we need content to look larger and more content to be seen in our eyes. I see wearables (watches, combined with earphones, and eyewear of some kind) becoming independent of a smartphone as one step forward in this evolution.
Shifts in computing paradigms are incredibly rare. The smartphone is unlikely to be replaced for a long time to come. There will be plenty of head fakes along the way no doubt (smart speakers and voice bots come to mind), but the smartphone is simply too good and has too much utility to be easily challenged.
And you also have to make a bet that Apple won't come to dominate that area as well (even if they aren't first to it). AR glasses have some promise to be a new general purpose computing platform, but even then I'm skeptical that it will be able to mount a serious challenge to the smartphone.
Maybe not replace, but at least displace the phone, watch, camera. I think one of the major hurdles with smart-glasses isn't tech, it's the changing of social norms. Right now, if you walk down the street waving your hands in the air, you'll look like a crazy person.
When people first started using cellphones, from the outside, it didn't look much different than looking down at a book or portable gaming device.
That's a good point, maybe eventually some of the tech will leak out and not actually require wearing the goggles.
Regarding phones, I see your point there too, but at least with phones people can still look up make eye contact, easily set the phone down when needing to interact with someone; unlike these, there is a definite wearing-them and not-wearing barrier that many will probably not cross on a whim, so we'll just get used to interacting with virtually projected eyeballs on the outside of them. Very strange to me.
Smart glasses, maybe, if there's an iPhone-level breakthrough in optical tech.
What will likely be ubiquitous is simply a seamless, always-on, phone-based AR experience. Lock screens will become a relic of the 2010s as phones move to becoming AR-first devices, with apps joining SMS and phone calling as secondary use cases.
Glasses will be on the market and in use, but they'll probably be too bulky for ubiquity in the next decade. Smart contacts will be the long-term goal, but that tech will be missing a lot of prerequisites for some time.
If we're still poking at tiny screens in 2025, something has gone very wrong.
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