The Future of AR and “The Next Big Thing” Illusion
We have a natural tendency to assume that technology is a one-way street, that each new technology invalidates everything that came before it: first analog, then digital, then AI, and so forth.
But the reality is that a technology only invalidates other technologies to the extent that they solve some set of problems better than they do.
Let’s take cars as an example.
It’s been 140 years since the car was invented.
Yet we still have trains. We still have trams. We still have horses. We still have bikes. And we still have walking.
Because the reason why cars are everywhere has nothing to do with them once being considered “the technology of the future” or “the next big thing”.
People use cars because they’re simply good at quickly transporting a small number of people > 1km and < 200km.
Not < 1km. Not > 200km. And not a large number of people. Other technologies are still better at handling those cases.
They were better than horses at doing this one thing, so people started using cars instead.
And we just see lots of cars because many people want to transport a small number of people > 1km and < 200km every day.
Things are that simple.
I say this because society keeps forgetting this every time a new technology comes out.
New technologies are always “the next big thing” that will “change everything”, and everyone ignores the fact that these are just solutions to problems.
The reality is simple: if they do a better job solving problems than other technologies, they survive. If they don’t, they die.
And, for those that survive, if the problems they solve are important to a lot of people, they’ll become influential technologies. If the problems aren’t that important, they don’t.
So there’s nothing magical about any new technology.
But it’s easy to say things in hindsight, so let’s see if things are actually that simple by making a prediction about a future technology.
Here’s the prediction: augmented reality glasses are currently early adopter products, but I predict they’ll become a billion-user product by 2032.
Why? Because they solve problems that lots of people have and they’ll do so better than the alternatives.
And, importantly, there are no major technical barriers in the way of them doing that.
To explain why, let’s go through some of the other technologies that are currently used to interact with digital apps:
Smartphones
Despite the incredible engineering behind them, smartphones are fundamentally just small devices with a two-dimensional screens that you control by touch.
Because it’s small and requires no peripherals, it’s incredibly convenient.
This means smartphones are a fantastic solution for doing something quickly, whether it’s taking a photo or sending a quick text or playing a game while commuting.
But those same properties make it bad at other things.
For one, a smartphone isn’t and will never be the best way to do something precise or complicated. There’s just a fundamental limit to how much you can control things by tapping on a small screen with your fingers.
This will inevitably make it arduous to fill in a spreadsheet, create a CAD model, play a game that has more than two buttons, or do anything else that requires complicated input.
The fact that smartphones are small means that they fundamentally can’t have as much processing power as a bigger thing. So any task that does require serious processing is better achieved through bigger things.
This is why smartphones didn’t miraculously invalidate personal computers, despite once being “the technology of the future” and “the next big thing”.
And companies that understand these fundamental limitations are eventually the ones that actually succeed.
Take Supercell as an example: while everyone else was trying to make computer games on mobile, they made games built around the limitations of mobile.
Instead of complicated controls, they figured out how to recreate the feelings created by more complicated games (like PC strategy games) with simple controls using just one finger (like Clash of Clans).
And, instead of designing their games for the hour-long play sessions you’d expect from someone playing a game console after school, they designed games where players could make meaningful progress during a 5-minute commute.
In other words, they studied and exploited the fundamental properties of the technology, and that’s why they won.
Desktop computers
A desktop computer is a big two-dimensional screen, which you control with a mouse and keyboard.
Those peripherals allow for very precise and complicated input, but come at a severe cost to convenience.
When combined with the sheer size and weight of the computer and monitor, there’s no way you’re ever lugging that thing around.
So it’s never going to be the solution to quickly send a text or check the weather or play some game for 5 minutes on a crowded subway.
But desktop computers are still the best way to do things that rely on processing power and complicated input, like playing videogames with in-depth controls and impressive graphics.
Do they provide the most processing power of any technology? No. That’s supercomputers and cloud computing.
But the extra inconvenience and price you’d have to pay for more processing power isn’t worth it for anyone who isn’t doing drug discovery or weather prediction.
Again, the most successful games ended up being those that were explicitly designed around precise controls and the long play sessions you’d expect from someone who bothered to sit down and log into their big computer.
Counter Strike, League of Legends, Fortnite, or Minecraft are all examples.
By designing around the unique properties of desktop computers, they outcompeted their peers that tried to simply copy paste games and ideas built for earlier technologies (namely game consoles).
And, since they were designed around those unique properties, they were largely untouched by the rise of smartphones and mobile games (which don’t possess those properties).
Virtual reality
Virtual reality, by comparison, is a three-dimensional screen that you control with hand motions and a few buttons.
The three-dimensional screen requires you to put a bulky thing on your head. This makes the technology, by definition, insanely inconvenient.
And people need to understand that this is the price for the “reality” part of “virtual reality”.
So it’s not a form factor question. The same inconvenience will apply to any future virtual reality devices, including high fidelity brain-computer interfaces.
So, while some people might still use, say, a laptop on the subway, no one will ever use a virtual reality headset in those contexts.
In fact, they won’t use it in any context that doesn’t justify a huge amount of effort. Because you’ll be taking that bulky thing off and putting it back on every time you want to drink water, talk to a friend or colleague, check your phone, go to the bathroom or do anything else in the real world.
At some point, they’ll simply return to using their computers and the headset will end up in storage. It’s too much inconvenience for too little reward.
Then, apart from being wildly inconvenient, virtual reality is also a technology that makes you stand out very negatively in any public space. So it’ll never be used outside of your living room either.
The reason is that a headset is ugly or, more scientifically, does nothing to emphasize the physical features that make us attractive to others. It just hides our entire face, which is usually the most important factor behind attraction.
And, if that weren’t enough, our eyes being blocked also makes us seem distant or weird and suspicious, since we’re used to seeing people’s eyes to determine what they want to do and whether they’re paying attention to us.
Human psychology won’t change anytime soon, which is why Apple wasted so much time trying to solve the problem with their goofy projected eyes on the Vision Pro (and we saw it as goofy precisely because we’re so good at reading eyes, so we instantly noticed when things were even slightly off).
However, that same bulky three-dimensional screen that comes with all of these downsides also makes it the best way to feel like you’re actually a part of a virtual world.
And feeling like you’re actually part of a virtual world really matters for some use cases:
It’s much better and cheaper to train a nuclear engineer in a realistic virtual reality simulation of their work environment, rather than expecting them to learn procedures from a textbook or spending a lot of resources to construct a sufficiently realistic training environment in real life.
Virtual reality can also be a much better substitute for face-to-face interaction than texting or video calling, which matters when you’re in a long-distance relationship or have severe social anxiety (or there’s a pandemic).
And many games are all about getting lost into a virtual world. And it's much easier to get lost in that world when you can actually look around it and even touch it (although this use case is still bottlenecked by issues, like how VR games still make you feel like throwing up thanks to motion sickness).
Then there’s the controls part. Virtual reality lets you control things with your three-dimensional hand motions.
This means it’s easy to make things feel visceral and physically involved. Because it’s you swinging that sword or doing the dance move, rather than a character on some screen.
This control setup basically makes virtual reality a version of the Wii or Kinect that allows for much more complicated and precise input, but at the cost of convenience.
And there’s enough demand for this that some games have already become serious contenders against computer and mobile games in their genres, like Beat Saber (a dancing game), Blade and Sorcery (a swordfighting game), and Gorilla Tag (a tag game).
However, controlling things with three-dimensional hand motions (plus a few buttons) also means that it’s just very inefficient for navigating any kind of interface quickly.
Tangibly: instead of moving a 10 gram finger a few centimeters to get to another place in the interface (with a mouse or screen tap), you have to move a 4 kilogram arm 20 centimeters to do the same.
It’s hard to overstate how tedious this gets after a while. And, when combined with the fundamental bulkiness of its three-dimensional screen, it’s why virtual reality isn’t and will never be the best solution for doing everyday tasks.
And, no, using a keyboard doesn’t change things. It makes things better for sure, but not enough to offset having to take your headset off and put it back on 47 times a day.
So, in a nutshell, virtual reality is also just good at some things and bad at others, just like any other technology.
We had a virtual reality bubble because Meta pumped the GDP of a small country into use cases that anyone who’s tried a headset knew would fail.
Augmented reality glasses
So, finally, we get to augmented reality glasses.
These are small three-dimensional screens on your face that you control with your hand motions.
Because the screens are small and because there are no peripherals, it’s incredibly convenient.
In fact, it’s arguably even more convenient than mobile, since you don’t even need to pull something out of your pocket.
But, because it’s small and you have to see through the screen for them to function as glasses, it will also inherently be terrible for any task that depends on processing power or impressive graphics.
So it won’t compete with work tasks or the computer games (or even mobile games) that have any reliance on those things.
However, the fact that you can see through the screen also makes it possible to show three-dimensional things directly in the real world.
So the glasses can show you stuff in advance or even based on what you’re looking at, like the three-dimensional route to your destination or the exact motion you’re supposed to do for a workout or dance routine.
And, even more importantly, it can show you things based on what you just did, like playing satisfying animations and sound effects when you complete something successfully in real life.
Together, these seemingly trivial features make it possible to solve countless problems better than any other technology:
Want to see information about something very quickly, like whether this item is cheaper at another store? You no longer need to pull out your phone and navigate 3 different websites to find the answer. It can happen the moment you look at a store item. Sounds mundane, but that’s what consumer technology is.
How about watching videos or reading a chat while lifting weights, instead of purely pulling up TikTok in between sets or having to rely on the gym having a TV (which may or may not show a channel you’re interested in)? Because there are many situations where you can’t rest your phone against anything or where you’re moving around or in an orientation that makes it hard to look at a phone screen. Not a problem for glasses.
Or maybe you completed that equation in your homework? Here’s a progress bar and a level up effect to make you feel like you accomplished something. And here’s a detailed explanation on what you can improve on, delivered instantly instead of 2 weeks later when the assignment gets graded.
This will, in effect, enable the complete gamification of reality. For better or worse.
Every task that you can think of will have the equivalent of a Duolingo, since the bing bing wahoo dopamine hit of a satisfying animation the moment you do something will always outcompete the boring reality of delayed gratification.
The only remaining barrier to this Duolingo dystopia is that, while current AI models are more than up to the task, they’re still too slow.
Even a two second delay is enough to make those gamified rewards feel way less satisfying, to the point of even being annoying if you’re doing lots of tasks quickly.
And having to wait a few seconds for the model to look something up completely negates any convenience advantage the glasses have over a smartphone.
It’s a dealbreaker for the entire technology.
But this problem is more than solvable. It’s way easier to know that you’re looking at a $3 can of beans or that you just picked up a mop, than it is to operate a car or robot autonomously.
So models just need to get slightly faster. And there’s no way they won’t, when they’ve improved literally 100x in just the past few years.
In other words, no major innovations are needed beyond what even big, lumbering companies have already proven they can do in very recent history.
Another similar bottleneck is form factor: nobody will use them, unless they look like ordinary glasses.
Because, just like with virtual reality devices, a bulky thing on our face makes us look ugly. And nobody wants to look ugly.
But this too is just a question of when, not if. After all, while we can’t trust big companies to do any sort of radical innovation, they’re usually pretty good at lowering size and cost.
Then, moving on from the screens, augmented reality glasses use hand motions for control, just like virtual reality. But there are no buttons this time.
Unfortunately, without buttons, they’ll be even worse for tasks that require complicated inputs.
Especially because, unlike with virtual reality controllers, mice, or even phone screens, you’re literally just poking at air. There’s no clicking or vibrating sensation or even just the feeling of successfully touching something.
Not only does that feel incredibly unsatisfying, it also makes it very hard to precisely control things. Because it’s hard to know if you, say, moved your finger enough to perform an action (like a click) when there’s nothing to tell your finger that you did.
So you’re left with an implicit feeling of “oh I guess that worked?” every single time you do something.
This, alongside the bulkiness of a virtual reality device, is why Apple’s Vision Pro failed for productivity use cases.
Another important factor is that tracking the user’s hands is currently either done through the cameras on the glasses or through a peripheral. Both have problems.
The problem with hand tracking through cameras is that it’s hard to add downward-facing cameras to glasses, without making the thing bulky.
This means that, for the camera to see your hands, you have to either lift them up or look down at them. And that sounds like a trivial detail, but it’s not.
For one, when you’re navigating an interface 100 times a day, having to lift your hands up every single time starts feeling a bit tedious (although not as tedious as having to do the same while holding controllers, like in virtual reality).
Again, you’re moving several kilograms of hand against gravity, rather than just a few grams of finger (like for a mobile device).
More importantly, doing all sorts of big hand movements also makes you stand out in public.
The simple reason is that hand movements were primarily used for communicating with other people in most of our evolutionary history, so people are primed to pay attention to them.
All of the above problems are why Meta decided to go with a wristband that tracks your hands via muscle signals instead.
But, as of right now, that wristband comes with a big price tag and tracking is still much less accurate.
So, if the interface is at all complicated, you’ll constantly be failing at what you’re trying to do — and that gets insanely frustrating after a while.
And, critically, a wristband also just an extra thing that you have to put on, which starts to feel very inconvenient the 160th time you’re taking it off to wash your hands or charge it.
For something like a desktop computer, little inconveniences like this wouldn’t matter. The form factor isn’t built for convenience.
But, for AR, the impact is serious. It’s a small device that sacrifices everything else for the sake of being something super convenient that people will use all the time.
However, none of small inconveniences are truly unsolvable and there are plenty of tasks that don’t require complicated inputs, like all of the simple gamified use cases I mentioned earlier.
So I think input isn’t a true blocker to mainstream success, even if we assume no improvement happens (and it inevitably will).
Then we have the last major feature of augmented reality glasses: the fact that they’re on your face, always looking at what you’re looking at.
This will make privacy a serious problem, even for the average joe — the very same average joe that, until now, hasn’t cared at all about their smartphone being the most effective spying device we’ve ever invented.
The reason is that augmented reality glasses make it very, very easy to violate someone else’s privacy.
To understand why, we have to consider why joe didn’t care about the privacy risk of smartphones.
The first reason is that the NSA spying on you (or Meta selling your data to literally anyone who wants it) isn’t something you’ll ever notice in daily life.
Yes, there will be scandals every once in a while, but they’ll get lost in the noise as Joe goes about his daily life with a million other things to worry about.
The second, more unintuitive, reason is that Joe could easily spot the face-to-face privacy violations that actually do feel viscerally creepy.
Specifically, someone recording you has to point the smartphone’s camera at you. And that forces them to hold it at either an angle or height that’s clearly different from how anyone would normally hold it.
So, as long as people don’t see someone using their smartphone like that, they’ll generally feel safe, knowing that some creep probably isn’t recording them.
And would-be creeps will implicitly feel at least some pressure not to record people, because they know there’s a decent chance they get caught and embarrassed.
The problem with augmented reality glasses, by comparison, is that there’s basically no way to tell if someone is recording you.
The glasses are automatically at eye height and therefore will be able to record you, even if the person is seemingly staring through a window that’s way to your side.
And people aren’t stupid. Everyone will realize this, especially when we’ll start seeing videos of creeps subtly recording women or videos of people doing extremely embarrassing things in settings where nobody would’ve assumed they were being recorded (like the bedroom or hanging out with close friends).
Those videos will viscerally implant themselves into people’s minds and, for many, it’ll probably be hard to feel truly at ease whenever there are augmented reality glasses around.
There’s always the implicit potential that a creep is recording you or that someone, even a close friend, will record you doing something embarrassing.
Even the basic act of looking at someone, which is basically the most important part of any social interaction, will now carry the burden of them now being perfectly positioned to record you. Eye contact will no longer be innocent.
And, yes, you can do things like add a red light that shows if someone is explicitly recording video with the glasses.
But this is incredibly easy to hack (you just need to disable a single LED) and a lot of the glasses’ functionality relies on constantly recording what you see, since that’s the only way apps can know what you’re seeing or doing.
So, red light or not, there will always be a video feed and it will always exist somewhere that opens it up for exploitation — be it by creeps, hackers, or governments.
All that being said, I don’t think this will stop the technology. For the simple reason that bing bing wahoo dopamine hits and even marginally higher convenience are like crack to our monkey brains.
The privacy issues will never be fully prevented but, unlike smartphones, I think users will genuinely care enough that privacy features and privacy-first brand position will matter for the first time for the average user.
Regardless, when we consider that there’s a huge list of tasks that would benefit from gamification or convenience beyond what smartphones provide, I think this will be a billion-user technology.
Conclusion
People tend to assume that new technologies are fundamentally unpredictable and unknowable phenomena, and that the “next big thing” will always disrupt everything everything that came before it.
But the reality is that new technologies are simply solutions to a well-defined set of problems and they’ll only change to the extent that they solve those problems better than alternatives.
And here’s the controversial part of my argument: I think these problems are so well-defined and human needs are so unchanging that it’s possible to make reasonable predictions about the future of a technology.
Yes, truly accurate prediction is impossible, especially when it comes to timelines.
But I think we can beat a coin flip, as long as we experiment with that technology at an early stage and understand what fundamental trade-offs that technology makes.
So, to test this theory, here are the predictions I made about the future of augmented reality glasses, which are currently still early adopter products that I haven’t even tested myself (as of 06/03/2026).
Gamified mobile apps, like weightlifting or dieting apps, will be completely disrupted by augmented reality glasses. Because having to manually jot what you did into an app after every task was so annoying that it was the biggest bottleneck for these apps.
It becomes possible to gamify literally everything. This makes the world a Duolingo dystopia, where everyone is constantly doing things just for the sake of points and streaks. But it’ll be better than the current TikTok dystopia, since actually healthy habits (like going to the gym or running or even doing homework) will suddenly be in the same ballpark of engagement as TikTok.
Podcasts will be impacted, since they’re uniquely good at providing entertainment while you’re doing something else (like chores). Augmented reality glasses will enable gamified chore apps and the ability to play videos during chores, which will be much more engaging for a lot of people. They’ll still exist because they take up less attention than videos or apps, but they’ll have a smaller role in our daily lives.
Only simple mobile games will be disrupted. Because even mobile’s limited input and minimal processing power is way better than what augmented reality glasses can offer. The minor effort that pulling out your phone requires is going to be more than justified by mobile’s superior graphics and controls.
Virtual reality games that rely entirely on physicality will be disrupted, so things like dancing and workout games. Augmented reality glasses will simply be absurdly more convenient (and far less sweaty), while still providing the hand motion-based controls that these games rely on.
Virtual reality games and applications that rely at least somewhat on the feeling of actually being in a virtual world will be completely untouched. Augmented reality glasses won’t be able to compete against a bulky three-dimensional screen that doesn’t need to be see-through. And people want to escape into huge fantasy worlds, not their depressing 30 square meter apartment.
The personal computer will be untouched. Because augmented reality glasses are even worse than mobile at all the things that computers are good at.
Privacy issues with augmented reality glasses will be so noticeable that there will be significant backlash and privacy-first brand positioning will genuinely matter for the first time in consumer technology. There will be countless scandals related to government spying and creeps recording women. But the technology will grow regardless, because it’s not hard to come up with some OKish solutions to distract people from this risk and because convenience and bing bing wahoo dopamine always wins.
The tasks that augmented reality glasses are the best at are so common that they will become a billion-user product by 2032, primarily stealing time away from mobile devices and previously non-digitized aspects of life. Privacy concerns, AI model latency, device size, and price are all solvable problems for big companies, even if no radical innovation occurs from this point on.
