Michael Abrash, the chief scientist of Facebook-owned Oculus Research, which is hard at work on both virtual reality headsets and augmented reality glasses.
Abrash envisions glasses that look just like today's regular glasses — lightweight and stylish — but with the power to enhance the wearer's memory, provide instant translation of foreign languages and signs, mute distracting nearby conversations or sounds and even read a baby's temperature with a glance.
In other words, super glasses.
These aren't virtual reality glasses that enclose the wearer in a separate world. They super-impose virtual information into the real world, a concept called augmented reality. In as little as five years, AR could have its "Macintosh moment" Abrash said on Wednesday, referring to the famous Apple computers released in 1984 which turned personal computers into a mass-market phenomenon.
"Despite all the attention focused on AR today it will be five years at best before we’re really at the start of the ramp to widespread, glasses-based augmented reality, before AR has its Macintosh moment," he said.
"Even once we're on that ramp it will take may years to fully realize AR’s potential, just as it took decades for human oriented computing to mature and reach billions of people," he said.
Abrash is clearly trying to set expectations that the ultimate, sci-fi like AR glasses are not around the corner. But in declaring that the "Mac moment" could be just five years away, Facebook is setting the schedule for what many believe could be the next major computing platform shift.
The Mac was the first mainstream PC to feature the graphical user interface and mouse set-up that's now the standard way we use computers.
There are already some AR glasses today, but they're in the equivalent of the PC's pre-Mac phase. Google Glass, one of the first high-profile attempts at computer glasses, went down with a loud thud because of a clunky appearance, poor performance and a backlash over privacy concerns.
Source:
http://www.businessinsider.com/ar-glasses-to-be-hotter-than-phones-in-5-years-facebook-exec-predicts-2017-4
