1. Will it scale? Imagine at some point in the future, when an augmented “Times Square” in New York is online. You go there, hold up your phone and you’re bombarded with augmented info. How do you see what’s good from what’s “augmented spam”?

You can argue that context filtering will solve that problem, but augmented reality is most usefult to tell you the things you don’t know. If I already know there’s a cheap electronics shop “over there”, why would I need a phone to tell me? Context filtering works best by telling you things about topics you’re already interested in, so IMHO these two technologies (augmented reality and context filtering) are somwhat at odds.

2. Why would I walk around with a phone held up in front of me all the time? I’d look like an idiot! And I’d get killed in seconds as I walk into the steet withhout looking. The best user interface for this would be some kind of smart “sunglasses” that have an embedded, 3D “head up display” (HUD).

Now THAT would be useful. Imagine you’re in Tokyo and haven’t a clue what all these Japanese signs say. Your augmented reality HUD translates them into your native language.

That capability will definitely come in the future because it’s so darned useful, but it has to be shrunk several orders of magnitude from where it would be today.

SPuD

The idea is that by showing people a vision for how their world *could* be, they would say to themselves, “what’s stopping us from making this a reality?”.

With top-of-the-line chips (like the new qualcomm S4 krait) and Locata’s ultrafine gps, it wouldn’t take much to make an app like this.

Phew, that was just a bad dream. – advertisers/spammers can’t possibly latch onto this – butthe vision I had seemed so real…

I’m sure AR will be streamed-to-sonsciousness at some point, but I’m inclined to think there’s an eetnsy-weeentsyy-teeny-weeny breakthrough waiting to happen for AR, that overcomes the (maybe it’s just me) problem of having to watch your mobile phone all the time and ignoring the traffic.
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Nice.