In fairness, though, an app on your smartphone is basically the worst form AR. It forces you to try to look at the world around you through a tiny screen, you can only interact with the app by touching that screen while keeping the camera pointed at the right thing, and you absolutely can’t use your phone for any of the other things you’d normally use it for.

Clunky headsets are better, but only good for use in private spaces and IMO if you’re only going to use the headset in one place, that seems like a better candidate for VR anyways.

IMO the best case for AR basically is a pair of glasses or contacts. Something that takes little to no effort to use and has the ability to augment any area of your vision. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen so far, assholes and perverts seem all too happy to take any device with a camera in it and ruin things for the rest of us.

For a HUD on AR glasses, cameras are not required at all.

That’s true! Though doing anything especially interesting or interactive to actually “augment reality” would be challenging without any camera. I’d be very interested in any type of lightweight AR glasses that don’t use a camera, though. Maybe LIDAR?

LIDAR is too chunky at the moment for head mounts, but i definitely see an industrial application for a Lidar backpack module.