Given that this is AR, not VR, and that AR has never even been as popular as VR outside a few industrial niches, I don't think this should change anything in your estimate of the value. Despite all the hype, the only thing that XR has ever been mildly popular for has been VR gaming. AR glasses can't do that well, since everything is transparent, instead of making you feel like part of the game world, so I would personally bet these will be as DoA as a consumer mass market product as the Holo Lens was.
AR was never popular because there never has been a consumer device for it. When Google glass was first revealed there was a huge buzz for it.
Holo Lens hat the problem that it was both too expensive and too bulky.
If meta can make this sleek and affordable I can really see this picking up, I can think of many use cases where this would be better than both a smartphone and a VR headset:
- Navigation
- Cooking
- Interior design (like the IKEA app)
- reading (holding a real book and 'click' on words to get definitions and translations like on an ereader)
- music playing and instrument learning
I don't see it being the thing that makes it popular, but navigation is an easy thing for me to see improved by AR. Some people are comically bad at reading maps and admittedly, sometimes it's hard to orient yourself when your phone is not properly oriented and there aren't obvious markers to orient yourself with.
A bright blue line right on the ground highlighting your path would be an easy QoL win. Albeit small hence it not being the thing that I think makes it the popularizer.
-- As you say with the ikea app, I think my point is just one example of a wide variety of situations where people have a hard time visualizing that is made literal by AR.
This is a silly take. AR games are perfectly possible. Games don't need to look photo real to be immersive and a holographic animal with enough grounding in physical space still feels real, anyhow.
Additive displays do make it hard to port existing games but that was true for mobiles and touchscreen. If the platform is popular, it will have games.
