Good discussion topic over at Reddit asking what could make augmented reality (AR) more useful in everyday life. My comment:

It needs to extend physical interfaces or make one more aware to senses they might not be using. For example, being able to touch a an ordinary light switch (on/off) is what might be the physical reality. But the AR reality should enable dimming of the light via some gesture on the same object. If a magic wand (aka a mobile device) is needed, AR shouldn’t need the browser for more than discovery - and that’s only if one is in their browser and wants the viewport/canvas to read/sense the environment around them. For example, Reddit could have AR-extended communities or threads where upon being in that community, one can leverage an augmented layer or two to describe or even anchor a conversation thread (“here’s my thing I’m sharing with the community, let me know what you think of this nuance or how I can make it better” kind of thing. Haven’t really seen much about devices pushing echolocation type stuf… but it would make sense to me if stereo/Spatial Audio augmented reality by extending certain frequencies further. Hearing a Garmin Varia radar as a small blip that gets louder, corresponding to the distance an oncoming vehicle, feels like something which could be done a bit further. Or maybe integrating some of the past research done with sound that invokes a feeling of touching/sensing items becomes an AR layer which can be turned on, from devices which have radar/Lidar components, or even when one is looking at a picture/gif and machine learning plus AR enables one to feel as if there is tactile articles present. Going a bit deeper than just the eyes is my wish for AR.

Not the first time that we have had some opinion on AR. Here’s a some of what we have posted previously:

There really is a lot more that can be done. And many ideas have not yet been fully flushed out, even if they have been shared.

At some point, we have to move beyond thinking about what’s more useful to actually just going out and using new modalities. As this artist has.