Given that the most natural space for a human to operate in is 3D (given the physical world), I believe so. I think the fact that GUIs mostly show 2D data is a product of the limitation of their display medium. For example, watching videos in 360 degrees has been possible for a while now.
I think VR might have potential (forgetting motion sickness), but one thing I think we need is the ability to see our hands. Therefore I think AR is realistically the productivity interface of tomorrow.
I think ultimately AR solves some massive problems:
1. Your "display" is wherever you need it to be. No need to lug around a laptop or monitor. It's as large or small as you need it to be, even partially transparent if required.
2. The ability to integrate information overlay on reality will be really useful, especially if natural hand tracking continues to get better. Imagine a sat nav app helping you navigate some populated area or building. Imagine an app guiding you through the shopping mall based on an optimal route computed from your shopping list, performing price comparisons for you. Imagine working on a document or piece of code and being able to walk over to your colleague and share your display with them. The possibilities are potentially endless.
3. Energy usage should be much less, as you're not wasting light making your background brighter. Suddenly your only real energy concerns are computation, and with cloud computing and internet connectivity improving, maybe you can offload most of the energy usage onto dedicated machines elsewhere.
My guess would be within 10 years we see some key break through. It's really a shame that Google backed out with their glass project.
Disagree. Humans operate in a 3D world, but act on a 2D plane. Very few places in nature let you have one sector over another (one person over another). We have 3D presentation, but there are 4 cardinal directions, no up and down because we don't fly and don't dive very often. We're like Warcraft3 / Starcraft(2) creatures.
For this reason even if we had flying cars, we would crash all the time. Pilots get disoriented easily, and they are cream of the crop.
It sounds like you're considering a human moving about a mostly flat world, rather than interacting with nearby objects. Also, I would argue that humans do still have a natural sense for traveling in the Z-axis, we did after all used to climb and plan paths in 3D.
VR hand tracking is already shipping. You can see your hands in VR using capacitive tracking such as the Valve Index or via pose estimation on camera data such as in the Oculus Quest.
I think VR might have potential (forgetting motion sickness), but one thing I think we need is the ability to see our hands. Therefore I think AR is realistically the productivity interface of tomorrow.
I think ultimately AR solves some massive problems:
1. Your "display" is wherever you need it to be. No need to lug around a laptop or monitor. It's as large or small as you need it to be, even partially transparent if required.
2. The ability to integrate information overlay on reality will be really useful, especially if natural hand tracking continues to get better. Imagine a sat nav app helping you navigate some populated area or building. Imagine an app guiding you through the shopping mall based on an optimal route computed from your shopping list, performing price comparisons for you. Imagine working on a document or piece of code and being able to walk over to your colleague and share your display with them. The possibilities are potentially endless.
3. Energy usage should be much less, as you're not wasting light making your background brighter. Suddenly your only real energy concerns are computation, and with cloud computing and internet connectivity improving, maybe you can offload most of the energy usage onto dedicated machines elsewhere.
My guess would be within 10 years we see some key break through. It's really a shame that Google backed out with their glass project.