No doubt we’re years away from AR being to the point where it will be ubiquitous, which is why I say it’s the future. I don’t see smart phones going away any time soon, and likely they will be required for compute power for initial iterations of AR glasses and maybe that will be true long into the future.
I don’t know exactly what the future holds for tech, but I do know enough to take learnings from the past and use what’s physically possible with certain materials today to come up with a good guess of what will and won’t work.
Maybe people will be ok with plastic or plastic/glass laminated screens again, like they were before Apple made rigid glass the standard, but I know my own experience with my Compaq iPaq back in the ‘90’s was horrid and that was with a flat panel (plastic covered glass screen). Certainly material science has advanced, but I’ve been in the plastic, paper and wood industries for more than 25 years and realize that sometimes, because of the physical characteristics of materials, that you can’t get everything you want - specifically related to this discussion, you can’t have a rigid material also be foldable. The company I used to own figured out how to make wood, which we all think of as being a rigid material, be able to be folded 180 degrees onto itself without cracking (in one direction). But to do that, we had to peel the wood off of logs at 0.006” / 0.15mm thick, which much like Samsung’s ultra thin glass, produces a flexible material, but eliminates its rigidity.
I do think the one solution for a foldable device would be to create separate panels that meet up with no gap or bezel, much like the device that was shown on HBO’s Westworld. But even this idea would need to account for dust or dirt getting in the mechanism or between the panels which could cause damage. I actually hoped that Microsoft would have done this, instead of their gapped / bezeled two screen device, but clearly it’s more complicated to create, at least with current tech.
Privacy is already an issue and something that will require ongoing work, regardless of whether it’s with glasses that have cameras in them or our current smart devices that already have 2, 3, 4 or 5 cameras that are able to take photos and videos even in full dark. Google was ahead of their time with the Glass, and since then everyone is carrying around phones that are recording videos or pictures. If I had to guess, we’ll see Apple offer a hampered version of AR as they attempt to provide privacy protections, while other manufactures just allow for unfettered video feeds from glasses and the market will decide what’s acceptable.
