[will_walker]

Physics is working against everyone here, it’s just too hard to get a bright, sharp screen in the form factor, weight & style that can literally appeal to everyone. The processing power to obtain world lock is not trivial either.

In contrast, a watch is just a scaled down phone with skin sensors. Most of the building blocks already exist.

Sociology is another blocker. Our species has evolved to read each other’s eyes to identify attention and emotion. As soon as you block the eyes with a pair of darkened screens, you lose that ability to directly connect human to human in person. Sure there are individual used cases like biking they could be compelling, but they are niche applications.

[billiam]

This is a good salad of truth, but I think it misses the point. VR is not going to happen for a long time, but this high status product is mostly about demonstrating the possibilities of AR, which is happening all around us with existing technologies. Apple has concluded that it will be worth it to demonstrate how information superiority and affordance will work in a $3k headset before the lightweight glasses become feasible. The applications for this product (sports, research, conferencing, gaming, etc) won't depend on real world interaction.

[will_walker]

Yes, but the basics of computing (text input, pointing, selecting) haven't been worked out for the new paradigm. Like you point out, how information superiority and affordance work even in standalone applications hasn't really been solved. Without tactile touch components, it's very hard to interact with spatial data (one of the reasons CAD is so hard to learn).

I'd suggest that we'll need another 'mother of all demos' that solve some of these HCI problems, not just the fit and finish upgrade that Apple typically offers.