I want this stated first before I talk about AR and what it will be good for, hardware that will be useful, and what it could be in the future. When I was a kid, and I have said this before, I played quake. I loved Quake and still do. You know what I always found really cool? Huds. And within the last few years, 2 or 3, of watching the tek and hearing Deus Ex propaganda I am balls deep invested into it. Coolest thing about the first game that hardly any games use anymore? Useful as feck HUD. I want a damned hud.
Now then..... AR technology. What are we looking at for its use right now. With the hololense being shown at E3 everyone is on the hype train for AR gaming. Gaming this that and the other; silent hill but in your house chasing you! Isn't it going to be amazing?!?!?!?!?
No..... Not really.
Honestly AR gaming will be a fad and then die in 2 years until something like Sword Art Online happens in Japan and even then it'll be like having a dieselpunk game genre: outlandish and constantly criticized. It will not last. Now why do I say that? Personally, I think we are looking at AR all wrong. Yeah gaming os cool, sure, and yeah maybe porn in your sunglasses will be an investment in a couple of years but..... Hey stop wait, isn't google glass an AR-like tool?
At least the design concept originally was. What came out was a failure but what holo is doing and what M$ wants to do with it is what I think Google wanted to do in the first place but on a more mobile market. With smart watches coming out I think they tried to botch the platform to be similar and failed. Sad, but it happened.
So then, Aremis, what the hell should AR be used for? For now with AR being a wired utility and starting off in gaming it will be best used at a desk. It could be used in hospitals, both with patients and doctors to both present information and keep track of information. I am thinking of the interrogation scenes in Deus Ex HR where it shows info like that to a doctor but maybe everything that would be on the heart monitor and passive body info during surgery. Maybe something to entertain a patient when they get knocked out or something to retrain eyesight during recovery. Optimally this would all work better wirelessly but that has a ways to go. Notice something similar though? HUDs.
Now, what hardware? OS? Would it need an OS even?
That.... Would in my opinion be a bad idea. An OS I mean. It is another point of intrusion in a world that Deus Ex 1 seems to be predicting more of on the daily. What I always have wanted was for my PC to be the center of communication and for the other devices that I use to merely be thin clients connected over a encrypted network and for their uses to be strictly based on the type of devices that they are. Phone - Calls texts and maybe emails; Laptop - file retreival, editing, and large-band communications; AR piece? Honestly? A HUD that relays status messages about my PC, emails I get, file transfers in process, and a Siri like data tracker connected to all other devices including my PC. Only apple would be able to pull this off correctly and any other companies that would want to try to do this would have to be major linux players or M$ if they got their shit together across all platforms.
Where the hardware of the device could be in terms of what it was in a mobile state is where I think the ideas in the RasPi are going to shine. Kids today can make a laptop with a 1366X768 screen for about 180 bucks with a pi, the laptop kits, and whatever they need for expansion. That shows what these errr.... Well technically our desktops are still microcomputers and supercomps are minis still.... Just with shinier names.... Tinycomputer? TeenyTinyComputer? Someone work on that. In any case the Pi's prove that a full computer can be any size at this point and hardware is getting smaller. 6 years and intel might say hey, what about 1 NM and all the energy in kinetic? Screw batteries were doing vibrations! This could be a thing at some point so X86 could be used for easy integration into systems that already exist.
Back with Google Glass, the item could connect to your desktop in the same manner as an away client does over SSH or to your phone on bluetooth! Who knows.... Personally I would love PPC to come back but it would be plausible for MIPS or CIPS to be used as well. Possibly just plain RISC, although MIPS has low memory needs. 64 MB of DRAM could be easily done in a system on a chip setup with a separate graphics utilization system being used. Not a GPU, per se, but a rendering IC definitely.
Now I say PPC would be best is because PPC basically takes care of it all on its own and it just needs the RAM to do it all in. Again, 64 MB of super high speed processor ram would do fine for this. If we look at things such as the Apple Powerbooks from, say, 2004, they had, at least mine does, an ATi 9700 GPU but barely even touched the thing. The CPU had enough headroom to do it all on its own. Now, I know what you're thinking. "My powerbook lit my house on fire!!! I don't want my head on fire either!!!" I'll give you that, but that was also poor design and has since been fixed. Smart TVs use PPC all the time.
Back to the point though, where AR should be used is in a notification system for administrators and people in certain situations. Military, doctors, schools, network admins, and probably many more.
Now, we could easily do this already. For a military example, we have computerized rifles and equipment. If a sniper is monitoring a target through his scope for three days we could make the hardware available to present messages across the bottom of the scope to fire, tell information, and even turn the scope off if the agent in question was rogue. This is just an example.
And surgeons could use the hardware they have now and stay with that format forever. AR is where its going to go though and I can bet on that. I just had the thought of a college student buying one and all the books he would need would be integrated.
As for me, I still want to have my phone integrated to my PC. Show webcam, data transfer info, eve CPU temp and all that stuff and I would never need an AR HUD (and if anyone knows how I could do that please for the love of GNU PM me that shit).
I dunno about you guys, but thats my take on it all. As of now.