If Pokemon GO had this during its hay-day the dork factor would have been socially acceptable.

The number of people from young kids to grandmas running around in groups was _insanely_ cool to see. I'm sad there simply wasn't enough content to keep it up the drive. I wanted to do missions/dungeon crawls/talk to NPCs etc.

This would have made the go experience 100x more fun... can you imagine a Charizard standing on top of my local mall?! omg. All of us using our captures to take over an objective.

We're nearly there.

I get where you're coming from, but I think we all forget how much we looked like dorks out playing pokemon go. The difference was we were dorks in large groups. If you and a friend are doing this together, you're no longer a dork. You're going your own way.

This is where I think Glass got it wrong. They made it feel exclusive when they should've been giving them away.

Looking at your phone is a thing that everyone does, including the coolest people you know. Just looking at your phone is socially acceptable.

Waving a stick around and shouting fireball while wearing a goofy headset is, at present, still unacceptable.

Pokemon Go players don't look like normal people looking at their phones. They look weird, all grouped up ignoring each other.I happened upon some sort of event that attracted like 30 of them and it was unsettling - some people had 2 phones and it was silent except the sound of tapping.

After watching the HoloKit press, though, I should be thankful for silent and grouped up as opposed to running around in a crowded area being an annoying jackass.

When I worked in San Jose every workday morning I waited at the bus stop with other employees (generally no one I knew however) waiting for the Corporate Bus to arrive. Invariably everyone was engaged with their phones except me. I guess I'm old — I haven't found anything interesting on my phone to look at when I just want to pass the time.

I guess I mention this because I suspect that without phones, we might have chatted with one another, got to know one another while we waited for the bus to arrive.

Oh well.

> without phones, we might have chatted with one another, got to know one another while we waited

If I'm an employee on a company bus, I'm just as likely to be a (mostly) silent meeting attendee on a status meeting as listening to an audiobook or podcast. Sometimes I've done this and just communicated via meeting chat to give feedback/add to meeting discussion.

Without phones, I'd probably be WFH so I could attend the meeting.

This is not the form factor that will change the paradigm. The smartphone was. I agree with you that if you had your face slammed against a Gameboy as an adult in the 90s, people would have judged you. That changed real fast, but it had to be the right product/form.

Whoever gets the AR glasses that look like glasses out first wins the game.

> Just looking at your phone is socially acceptable.

Was it socially acceptable to use a brick sized phone?

Tech evolves, I am sure the size of the glasses will reduce.

An AR set that comes in pairs could be neat. Plus they could come ready out-of-the-box to interact with each other.

I can see the killer app being something practical, like being able to look at a recipe and watch a video for food prep while I’m doing food prep. Or being able to look at an engine bay and diagnose am issue and see parts identified as I look and point at them.

I was thinking about that too. Imagine having image recognition within the headset or glasses which can draw boxes around items and match them against a global database. One could be walking around and see something interesting, then press a button or say a phrase to query it for information right in your glasses.

A lot of infrastructure and data would be needed before it reaches a critical mass and mass adoption follows. The more people using it, the more data there is in the system, the more people want to use it.

Another really great feature would be captions for conversations going on around you - a big help for the hearing impaired, and maybe even helpful to ordinary people to keep better track of the conversation flow.

The captions idea sounds really useful. I've used live captions during Google Meet calls and having a ~1 second visible history of live conversation is indeed really helpful for conversation flow. Having that in real life conversations would really be something.

In fall 1999 the wife of one of my co-workers call me and 4 other co-workers all dorks because we were using cell phones. Now I'm sure she's more addicted to her's than her husband.

Is Pokemon GO still popular? My impression is that it was a fad that came and went.