I doubt it, these devices have a serious user input problem. The cornerstone of computers is human-computer interaction. That's what makes these pieces of silicon useful. They're tools for humans - meaning, it doesn't matter if the tool is better if it can't be used easier.
Smartphones were a step back in a lot of ways. Typing is slower. No mouse. Fingers are fat and imprecise. The result is most applications were severely dumbed down to work on a smartphone.
The trade-off was portability. Everyone can carry a smartphone, so it's okay that the human-interaction is worse in a lot of ways. Then, when we need that richer interaction, we can reach for a laptop.
The problem with smart glasses is they go even a step further in how poor the interaction is. Speech as an interface for computers is perhaps the worst interface. Yes, it's neat and shows up in sci-fi all the time. But if you think about it, it's a very bad interface. It's slow, it's imprecise, it's wishy-washy, it context dependent. Imagine, for example, trying to navigate your emails by speech only. Disaster.
Smart glasses, however, are not more portable than phones. Not by much. Everyone already has a phone. So what do we gain from smart glasses? IMO, not very much. Smart glasses may become popular, but will they replace the smartphone? In my opinion, fat chance.
What I think is more likely, actually, is smartphones replacing smart glasses. They already have cameras. So the capabilities are about the same, except smart phones can do WAY more. For most people, I imagine, the occasional "look at this thing and tell me about it" usecase can be satisfied by a smartphone.
> The result is most applications were severely dumbed down to work on a smartphone.
Good point, and it could be argued the user soon followed that dumbification, with youngest generations not even understanding the file/folder analogy.
I think we can go dumber ! Why need an analogy at all ? It will all be there, up in your face and you can just talk to it !
Voice is slow, but it can be sped up with vocal macros. One syllable/non-word noise commands.
There's also touch pads on the side of the smart glasses as another input option. And I could imagine some people liking little trackball-esque handheld controllers(like from the Black Mirror episode "The Entire History of You").
And there's also air gestures using cameras on the smart glasses to watch what your hands are doing.
I don't think any of these has the raw data input bandwidth that a keyboard has, and for a lot of use cases even a touchscreen could be better. But maybe that can be made up by the hands-free, augmented reality features of smart glasses.
Eye tracking is a UI in its infancy but should be as fast as manual manipulation. Either form factor could use it but glasses are more motivated to figure it out. Headwear is also well situated for neural interfaces.
I was among the nerds who swore I'd never use a touch keyboard, and I refused to buy a smartphone without a physical keyboard until 2011. Yes, typing on a screen was awful at first. But then text prediction and haptics got better, and we invented swipe keyboards. Today I'm nearly as fast and comfortable on a touch keyboard as I am on a physical one on a "real" computer.
My point is that input devices get better. We know when something can be improved, and we invent better ways of interacting with a computer.
If you think that we can't improve voice input to the point where it feels quicker, more natural and comfortable to use than a keyboard, you'd be mistaken. We're still in very early stages of this wave of XR devices.
In the past couple of years alone, text-to-speech and speech recognition systems have improved drastically. Today it's possible to hold a nearly natural sounding conversation with AI. Where do you think we'll be 10 years from now?
> Imagine, for example, trying to navigate your emails by speech only. Disaster.
That's because you're imagining navigating a list on a traditional 2D display with voice input. Why wouldn't we adapt our GUIs to work better with voice, or other types of input?
Many XR devices support eye tracking. This works well for navigation _today_ (see some visionOS demos). Where do you think we'll be 10 years from now?
So I think you're, understandably, holding traditional devices in high regard, and underestimating the possibilities of a new paradigm of computing. It's practically inevitable that XR devices will become the standard computing platform in the near future, even if it seems unlikely today.
To play devils advocate, Speech is how humans delegate to other humans. Usually faster and clearer to communicate with an employee via voice in person or over the phone than on email.
i'll never wear them but i'm sure they'll have wireless conn for a keyboard, mouse, and other sane inputs, just like phones. for me the worst part of touchscreen is having to hold the device like a fancy glass egg (on a sane device i'd look up how to spell the word for that) no matter what i'm doing out of fear the wrong thing will happen if i don't. at least a plain monitor strapped to my face doesn't have that concern.
Smartphones are not even that similar to laptops. Smartphones wiped out beepers, old cellphone, PDAs, and decimated MP3 players and cameras.
Laptops, of course, have the much bigger screen and keyboard, not really replicated by smartphones. They have use-cases that smartphone can’t cover well for hardware reasons. So they’ve stuck around (in a notably diminished form).
If good AR glasses become a thing… I dunno, they could easily replace monitors generally, right? Then a laptop just becomes a keyboard. That’s a hardware function that seems necessary.
>Smartphones are not even that similar to laptops.
I believe that was the entire point of the comparison. Smartphones replaces SOME use cases of laptops in the same way ubiquitous smart glasses could replaces SOME use cases of smartphones.
Smartphones are mobile. Glasses with a keyboard would require either being fixed to a keyboard location or a keyboard with the form factor of a smartphone, and if that’s the case why do you need the glasses?
Smartphones replaced laptops. A huge amount of people don't own a laptop or desktop PC - they do all computing via smartphone or maybe tablet. My wife almost never opens her laptop, nor does my mom
You have missed the point utterly. “AR glasses will replace smartphones the same way smartphones replaced laptops” — they didn’t replace laptops. Therefore AR glasses won’t replace smartphones in the same way smartphones didn’t replace laptops.
I don't think "replaced" is the right word, just like with smart glasses. The form factor and user experience are key attributes when choosing a device, independent of raw hardware power. It's likely we'll continue to live with multiple device types coexisting.
BTW, I have to consciously turn off my cybersecurity mindset when thinking about smart glasses. It's hard not to see all the new attack vectors they introduce.
It won't replace you can't take selfies with smart glasses!
I wear my Ray Ban Metas a lot (bought in 2023) and love them but i can't take selfies with them. I have to pull out my phone. They are complimentary to phone tho i do enjoy not having my phone on me to take pics, vids and ask it for the time now (add 5G to it and it will do more like stream music).
Whatever Open AI is working on to replace the iPhone it will need to be able take selfies! I'm betting it's just an AI Phone with the experience of the movie H.E.R. where almost everything is done from the lock screen and it takes the best selfies of you (gets you to the best lighting) and everything under the sun.
Outside of this tech bubble that we are all in, many use them as their primary (or only) computer. More than 60% of internet traffic is from mobile phones.
The smartphone completely replaced the personal computer for most people.
10 years ago all my non-tech friends and family had laptops. Now they all use their smartphones as primary computing devices. My nephew who just graduated from high school and works in IT doesn’t even own a personal laptop.
> Nobody sits down in an office and does work on a smartphone
Now that we have USB-C monitors, phones have USB-C, and high-end phones have CPU performance similar to low-end desktop CPUs (A18 vs Intel 14100), we could actually start replacing laptops with phones for some use cases.
const_cast|8 months ago
Smartphones were a step back in a lot of ways. Typing is slower. No mouse. Fingers are fat and imprecise. The result is most applications were severely dumbed down to work on a smartphone.
The trade-off was portability. Everyone can carry a smartphone, so it's okay that the human-interaction is worse in a lot of ways. Then, when we need that richer interaction, we can reach for a laptop.
The problem with smart glasses is they go even a step further in how poor the interaction is. Speech as an interface for computers is perhaps the worst interface. Yes, it's neat and shows up in sci-fi all the time. But if you think about it, it's a very bad interface. It's slow, it's imprecise, it's wishy-washy, it context dependent. Imagine, for example, trying to navigate your emails by speech only. Disaster.
Smart glasses, however, are not more portable than phones. Not by much. Everyone already has a phone. So what do we gain from smart glasses? IMO, not very much. Smart glasses may become popular, but will they replace the smartphone? In my opinion, fat chance.
What I think is more likely, actually, is smartphones replacing smart glasses. They already have cameras. So the capabilities are about the same, except smart phones can do WAY more. For most people, I imagine, the occasional "look at this thing and tell me about it" usecase can be satisfied by a smartphone.
MailleQuiMaille|8 months ago
Good point, and it could be argued the user soon followed that dumbification, with youngest generations not even understanding the file/folder analogy.
I think we can go dumber ! Why need an analogy at all ? It will all be there, up in your face and you can just talk to it !
goda90|8 months ago
There's also touch pads on the side of the smart glasses as another input option. And I could imagine some people liking little trackball-esque handheld controllers(like from the Black Mirror episode "The Entire History of You").
And there's also air gestures using cameras on the smart glasses to watch what your hands are doing.
I don't think any of these has the raw data input bandwidth that a keyboard has, and for a lot of use cases even a touchscreen could be better. But maybe that can be made up by the hands-free, augmented reality features of smart glasses.
itsdrewmiller|8 months ago
imiric|8 months ago
I was among the nerds who swore I'd never use a touch keyboard, and I refused to buy a smartphone without a physical keyboard until 2011. Yes, typing on a screen was awful at first. But then text prediction and haptics got better, and we invented swipe keyboards. Today I'm nearly as fast and comfortable on a touch keyboard as I am on a physical one on a "real" computer.
My point is that input devices get better. We know when something can be improved, and we invent better ways of interacting with a computer.
If you think that we can't improve voice input to the point where it feels quicker, more natural and comfortable to use than a keyboard, you'd be mistaken. We're still in very early stages of this wave of XR devices.
In the past couple of years alone, text-to-speech and speech recognition systems have improved drastically. Today it's possible to hold a nearly natural sounding conversation with AI. Where do you think we'll be 10 years from now?
> Imagine, for example, trying to navigate your emails by speech only. Disaster.
That's because you're imagining navigating a list on a traditional 2D display with voice input. Why wouldn't we adapt our GUIs to work better with voice, or other types of input?
Many XR devices support eye tracking. This works well for navigation _today_ (see some visionOS demos). Where do you think we'll be 10 years from now?
So I think you're, understandably, holding traditional devices in high regard, and underestimating the possibilities of a new paradigm of computing. It's practically inevitable that XR devices will become the standard computing platform in the near future, even if it seems unlikely today.
unknown|8 months ago
[deleted]
naveen99|8 months ago
kgwxd|8 months ago
exac|8 months ago
bee_rider|8 months ago
Laptops, of course, have the much bigger screen and keyboard, not really replicated by smartphones. They have use-cases that smartphone can’t cover well for hardware reasons. So they’ve stuck around (in a notably diminished form).
If good AR glasses become a thing… I dunno, they could easily replace monitors generally, right? Then a laptop just becomes a keyboard. That’s a hardware function that seems necessary.
What niche is left for the smartphone?
Talanes|8 months ago
I believe that was the entire point of the comparison. Smartphones replaces SOME use cases of laptops in the same way ubiquitous smart glasses could replaces SOME use cases of smartphones.
bobthepanda|8 months ago
shortrounddev2|8 months ago
Henchman21|8 months ago
wslh|8 months ago
BTW, I have to consciously turn off my cybersecurity mindset when thinking about smart glasses. It's hard not to see all the new attack vectors they introduce.
paul7986|8 months ago
I wear my Ray Ban Metas a lot (bought in 2023) and love them but i can't take selfies with them. I have to pull out my phone. They are complimentary to phone tho i do enjoy not having my phone on me to take pics, vids and ask it for the time now (add 5G to it and it will do more like stream music).
Whatever Open AI is working on to replace the iPhone it will need to be able take selfies! I'm betting it's just an AI Phone with the experience of the movie H.E.R. where almost everything is done from the lock screen and it takes the best selfies of you (gets you to the best lighting) and everything under the sun.
nsxwolf|8 months ago
1659447091|8 months ago
Sounds like a value proposition for society, to me!
derwiki|8 months ago
kepano|8 months ago
acuozzo|8 months ago
TiredOfLife|8 months ago
andoando|8 months ago
You only really need one for doing some type of work
fnord77|8 months ago
kube-system|8 months ago
epgui|8 months ago
shortrounddev2|8 months ago
iancmceachern|8 months ago
Laptops and tablets replaced desktops. Nobody sits down in an office and does work on a smartphone.
Smartphones replaced phones, pagers, music players and cameras.
mulmen|8 months ago
10 years ago all my non-tech friends and family had laptops. Now they all use their smartphones as primary computing devices. My nephew who just graduated from high school and works in IT doesn’t even own a personal laptop.
BurningFrog|8 months ago
Smart glasses will probably do the same to smartphones.
Things are rarely completely replaced, at least not quickly.
dehrmann|8 months ago
Now that we have USB-C monitors, phones have USB-C, and high-end phones have CPU performance similar to low-end desktop CPUs (A18 vs Intel 14100), we could actually start replacing laptops with phones for some use cases.
absurdo|8 months ago
[deleted]
unknown|8 months ago
[deleted]