>I've been reading about AR for years and I still have no idea how, if at all, I would use it.

I do: to display a moving map from Google Maps while cycling. It'd be incredibly handy for navigation in a city. Everyone these days uses a navigation app in their car to navigate (esp. to unfamiliar destinations), but how do you do that on a bicycle? You can get one of those phone mounts for your handlebars, but it's really clunky, and difficult (or impossible) to see in bright sunlight. Plus, in my experience, phones tended to fall out of them, as it was hard to find a mount that would fit a modern-size (read: large) phone; they seem to all be designed with 2010-model phones in mind.

Want another unsolicited opinion?

Peak Design has, in my opinion, a better solution than quadmount - it mounts securely (magnet + slot) and keeps the ability to wirelessly charge. Do have to use their case though, but it's a very attractive case. I use it in conjunction with the Trek BellBeats and I'm satisfied.

Not to be a shill, but you obviously haven't come across Quadlock which completely solves the mount problem at least.

Ok, I looked this up but there's a big problem here: it only works with certain phone models (and requires using their case). There is a "universal" option which basically glues a part to your existing phone or case, but this only works on certain case materials, and rubber isn't one of them (so no Otterboxes allowed). (Also, no polypropylene, polyethylene, or silicone.) So it might or might not work, depending on your phone and case.

But it doesn't solve the visibility problem: good luck seeing your screen in direct sunlight. And also the problem where you have to look down at your handlebards, refocus your eyes for close-up vision (this is really bad if you're over ~40 due to presbyopia), and try to make out the info on the screen, and not get hit by a car or run into a pedestrian or other road hazard. If you're navigating inside a dense city, this sounds positively dangerous. AR glasses would fix all of this.

Well, it works well for my phone. I don't have a big problem with seeing the screen in sunlight.

Looking down is definitely an issue, but not for simply following a route. In fact, for turn by turn nav, I prefer audio. And no, I'm not interested in your opinions about the safety of that :)

AR glasses might work better, but they'd introduce other issues, like conflicting with sunglasses and helmet. Plus a huge expense. I suspect for me even if I owned such a thing I would rarely use it for this case.

>AR glasses might work better, but they'd introduce other issues, like conflicting with sunglasses and helmet.

Well ideally, the AR glasses would double as sunglasses (perhaps photochromic so you can use them at night too). And if they had the same size frames as regular sunglasses (and not these huge clunky ones seen on the prototype), then they wouldn't interfere with your helmet any more than regular sunglasses.

>In fact, for turn by turn nav, I prefer audio. And no, I'm not interested in your opinions about the safety of that :)

Well I'm going to give it to you anyway :-) I've tried audio for turn-by-turn nav, and it really sucks. Not because of safety, but just because it doesn't work well. It's hard to hear if it's noisy, it doesn't tell which road to turn on correctly, etc. I guess if you're in some rural area and there's only one turn visible in the next kilometer, it's fine, but I live in Tokyo and roads here are tiny (1 car wide at best in many places) and close together, so when it says "turn right", that doesn't really tell me much. It also doesn't help much because nav usually wants to direct me on main roads instead of side roads, but side roads are much better for cycling: on main roads, you either ride with traffic and get hit by trucks, or you ride on the sidewalk and dodge pedestrians going in and out of storefronts (the latter is preferred by almost all cyclists here). But on the side roads, you can avoid most of this. The problem, however, is that many side roads don't go far before they're blocked by a park or a train line or something else. A moving map would show you the road layout so you can choose for yourself a convenient route, and also be able to make quick decisions for alternate routes in case you miss a turn or just want to ride a different way for some reason. On top of all that, the audio is just plain loud and annoying and rude to all the pedestrians nearby, and makes me feel embarrassed.

You could have things overlaid on top of real life content in order to provide you assistance, hands free. For example, think about GPS turn by turn navigation while walking or having a recipe displayed while cooking it.

Facial recognition is the killer app for me. Being able to keep track of people and their information would be amazing.

The problem is that people would really dislike that. It's even satirized in Snow Crash in an extremely unflattering portrayal of the kind of person who would routinely do this.

The first use case is negative for me, aszit would further increase my reliance on technology.

The second, yeah, maybe, if it was done incredibly well. but marginal benefit over an iPad or similar.

> The benefit of a mobile phone was extremely obvious to everyone as soon as you said what it was.

I would say the same about AR. I'm surprised by your comment. Lately I've been using it a lot when shopping for furnitures (to place the furniture in my space and see how it fits, amazon and a bunch of furniture places let you do that).