Artificial Intelligence in your face

When I think about the potential of those future cyberglasses that will be showing up sometime in the next fivew years, it’s not the graphics that excite me the most. It’s not even the visual registration of those graphics with the physical world. It’s the A.I.

Sure, those glasses will provide a wide angle view of the augmented world, with high resolution, accurate motion tracking and correct stereo. Sort of like a Hololens, but with wider field of view and smaller form factor.

But what’s really interesting is that you will essentially have the equivalent of real-time Google search operating behind the scenes wherever you look. If you look at a person, your glasses will know who that person is. If you look at a bus stop, the glasses will understand, and will be able to tell you how long until your bus will arrive.

Unlike a Google search, which is something you do while you are not doing other things, all of this will be happening while you are walking around the world and talking with people, and that creates a key difference: It can be happening without you needing to be giving it your attention.

Which means that there is an opportunity for the machine learning algorithms to start figuring things out for you behind the scenes. The experience will start to feel more like having a personal secretary who can figure things out for you.

By analogy, some of us remember a time when you needed to memorize telephone numbers. To millenials, those old ways now seem strange and archaic.

Similarly, suppose you and a friend are on your way to the airport. You won’t need to think about your route if your glasses can just tell you “go one block and take the bus that will be arriving a minute later”.

Or more likely, your glasses will simply indicate those directions visually as an overlay on the world around you — you won’t even have to think about it. The process will be so seamless that you won’t need to take your attention away from the conversation you are having with your traveling companion.

After that world arrives, our old ways will seem strange and archaic.