I’m wondering do we know what we want from glasses that will support
augmented reality ? I’m wondering do we live in the world of sci-fi movies or
maybe consumer do not need so abstract devices ? Maybe we can use something
less elegant but without some flaws ? Let us think about it for a second
Comfort
First thing is comfort. They may
not look as cool as we see in the movies but for sure they need to be comfortable.
We need to remember that we are talking about device that we want to wear on
our faces for couple hours a day. Such glasses can’t be heavy to avoid neck
pain. They need to be easy to wear, stable during all every day activities, similar like standard glasses. Maybe some kind of belt over your head ?
This would do the trick but I don’t think that it would be the best idea. Comfort
is a very important element, easy to think, hard to achieve
Battery life
What is the biggest problem with modern
devices from smartphone through smartwatch to your laptop ? Battery life.
Wearables are special type of devices. We want to get from them a lot of cool
features, a lot of helpers in every day life and we want to forget about that
they have battery inside. I think that 12-16 hours on one battery cycle is an
absolute must. Anything less than that will be just annoying for the user.
Think about glasses that you need to charge 2 times a day. You will just stop
using it beside some special occasions. Is it easy to achieve ? I’m afraid that
no. Let us consider main reasons:
·
Not a lot of space. Yes, we are getting better
and better in miniaturization but still comfortable glasses won’t have a lot of
room to put the battery. The battery can’t be to big (weight) so there might be
a problem with the capacity. Making it leaner and leaner also is not such a
good idea (remember the case of Samsung Note 7 ? ) so this will be a major
problem
·
A lot of operations related with generating AR
images, calculating positions and so on are complicated from algorithmic point
of view. It will use a lot of CPU power and it will have a big impact on the
battery life. Every tick of the CPU is consuming power so the math here is easy
😉
Content
I’ve already mentioned in one of
my previous articles that content is also a very important element. Maybe not
on the start because augmented reality is a cool technology and a lot of people
will just use it for some tests BUT if we are talking about regular consumer,
than device that is just “cool” won’t make it. Content need to provided asap
and it must be a high quality content. We love our smartphones and we are used
to have everything there. Augmented reality and glasses is hard combo for
standard consumer, it is easy to think about usage of this in industry,
business or logistic, but how to use it on street ? This is a bit harder, and
this must be solved before putting such glasses into the market
Style
Last but no least….style. We are
not talking here about glasses that will be used in some factory, we are
talking about something that we want to wear on street, that we want to wear
during our meetings with friends. Such glasses can’t look like some “geek”
experiment, they need to be nice, they need to fit to our cloths, our style. Connecting
style with hardware usability is a very big problem. Look at the laptops and
smartphones. It took some time before those devices become usable and good
looking and in this example we are talking about much bigger peace of hardware.
Talking about good style for such glasses might sound a bit stupid but we want
those glasses to be available for regular consumer, for every day usage. They
just MUST look good
