Just as personal computers and then smartphones were once exotic and now both teach and distract us daily, augmented reality is coming for how we interact with the digital and physical worlds.
Apple has a chance to succeed where others have failed… The key to Apple’s success — or failure — will be its ability to mobilize not just its fanatical, and growing, fan base, but also an army of developers, to make apps and services for its headset the way they have for its other devices.
Motivating those developers will require that Apple demonstrate what has so far been lacking for mixed reality: a blueprint for “killer apps” that will be so compelling that early adopters plunk down for this and future Apple headsets.
Organizing a file system spatially is just one idea, of course—there’s every reason to believe that, just as humans have learned to use charts, graphs, spreadsheets and countless other systems for displaying and manipulating information in two dimensions, we might someday feel just as at home accomplishing the same tasks in three.
