Thanks for your comprehensive response! I've also been watching the field for a while, have done some contracting for others trying to make their own AR devices, and tipped my toes in the water making some basic prototypes myself.
>some combination of way too heavy, expensive, fragile, short battery life, no wifi connectivity, too much UI long to get to point of value and/or simply not useful
Was the screen quality, resolution, visibility in brightness, etc also one of these limiting factors? Or would you say screen quality has gotten reasonable by now?
>The AR/VR use in the field typically came down to looking something up in a manual or calling someone.
That's good to hear as someone interested in the field, I've been skeptical of the fidelity and utility of the fancy augmented 3D overlays.
Ah I see you realized something similar:
>The cool AR 3-D demos or overlays rarely worked in the field on real equip or didn't actually convey anything useful (everyone knows the basics of how the machine works).
>Both easily and perhaps more effectively done on a smartphone.
Surely there are some use cases where hands-free operation would be a game changer, but I don't know enough about potential industries where this would be the case.
>The use case we're currently working on is inspections or filling out forms with audio/videos.
That's pretty interesting, do you even need a screen, or just voice? I would think a pretty quick-and-dirty way to do it is to take pdf forms, enumerate (put small numbers) next to every editable field, and then use voice commands like, "write the following in field 3: ...." The purpose of having a screen would be to verify what the LLM + voice is inputting in the form. Then at the end you can tell it to save/submit or whatever.