I'm not yet convinced Augmented Reality has proved its case for people and that AR is chasing big numbers and companies without showing what they would actually use it for every day.

I will give Magic Leap some credit on their marketing for the article link in that they show some persons in non-office settings such as laboratories and what presumably are hospital settings.

But for me what's missing is seeing it actually used productively by the persons or testimonial stories about how AR integrates into their workflow.

People are resistant to change even within the face of pretty cool technology. I would position many people don't know what they want to improve their workflow and can only define such wants as complaints about the current workflow. That's my experience working with customers where they have a complaint but just don't know what to search for to see if there's a solution.

To show how I think this should work, when I add a new tool to my workflow usually I can pinpoint exactly what I don't like about something and I have specific terms that help me find it. For example, my org uses Teams, and Teams is unfortunately linked by the hip to Sharepoint which I cannot stand. There are many reasons for this, but the biggest issue is that Sharepoint tries to load everything in-browser, even if it cannot. Eventually it will show you a download link, and for the content I am working with, I don't want Sharepoint to try to load it, I just want to download the file and use the appropriate app to work with it. In business rules, I want all Sharepoint links to automatically convert to download links.

Armed with this, I could search for browser extensions to redirect links to another link, and I found Redirector: https://github.com/einaregilsson/Redirector I cannot sing the praises of this tool enough, and it saves me tons of clicking and waiting by letting me write rules to handle specific link formations and redirect them to another. It was a perfect fit because I could _describe my annoyance_ and the preferred behavior, and armed with that, I could know whether a tool met my needs or not.

This is what is missing for me with AR. As someone in tech, I can describe a ton of my issues with daily workflows quite easily. I can define my problems and how I prefer it works. What I can't see is how AR helps me. Like many, I imagine that persons like technicians, mechanics, anyone who needs their hands available to work on complex hardware/items might benefit from AR, but what I don't see are testimonials from these people that some AR company demoed their product with them and found a way to make their workflow better. I'm not a mechanic; I can do basics with cars or house-hold appliances, but I'm not a professional, and I imagine the AR companies out there aren't either. Why there aren't field tests with discussions and interviews with the proposed target audience for AR is beyond me.

Instead I see people in offices on conference calls, I see random stock photos of people in lab outfits, and I see marketing copy telling me that AR is limited just by my imagination. Thing is I can imagine quite a lot, and I don't see proof AR can do any of it.

If AR has a product ready for betas, this needs to be in the hands of people who might actually use it and developing case studies. The technology is interesting, I'm not denying that, but I want to read stories about actual use cases and testimony from someone who honestly feels "this made my life better." Until that happens, I'm not confident AR is going to take off in a meaningful way for work related purposes instead of recreational.

Here are things I would like to have in an AR/VR environment.

1. More monitors. I can only fit 2, maybe 3 monitors on my desk. If I could easily reposition 5 or 6 virtual monitors that would be great.

2. Whiteboarding. I like to draw things when I have some discussions. Doing that in VR is a pretty decent workflow.

If I could start a Slack 'huddle' with someone and instantly be able to start drawing or have us both interacting with the virtual monitors, I think that'd be enough for me to justify paying.

The tech still has to go further. For multiple monitors you'd really want to offload rendering and I think that current VR goggles are still just too heavy, they need to get cut down to maybe 20% of their current weight, at which point I think they would be comfortable enough to wear for a large portion of a workday.

The benefit of AR would be that I can seamlessly switch between "real life" workflows and "virtual" workflows. For example, I want to get up and grab some water, but I can take one of my virtual desktops along with me so that I can keep watching a conference talk or whatever.

I'm thinking the killer app might be more along the lines of personal use. A HUD for your car or directions to that Egyptian spice I can never find in the grocery. Or measuring the height of your refrigerator to see if will fit under you cabinets. What about hooking it up to my door camera so I can see who's at my front door while I'm in the garage.

Then there are general functional improvements, like dynamic magnification. I would love to read the tiny text on my prescription bottles. Or integrate it with Alex/HomeKit to provide a visual output for those services: "Alexa, what does Brian Singer look like?"

I know "professional" use is easier to sell to, but I think AR won't really be successful until they start making it useful to normal, household users.

All of these can already be done with a mobile phone and only navigation could make the case that it is better with an AR HUD and even then I’m not sure I really buy it based on my personal experience doing so.