Pokemon Go is fully 5 years old. It's AR feature was a decent gimmick but pretty basic and a bit buggy. In the subsequent 5 years there's been nothing to equal it. I won't say AR is "dead" but it seems unlikely to reach mainstream adoption any time soon.
The mistake being made is that audio based AR is here and practical, if underutilized. Apple’s transparency mode (and competitor equivalents) is a critical innovation both on usability and social acceptance levels. It supports the blending of digital augmentations on the real world. Audio based AR is also free of many social signs that visual AR systems have struggle with. In particular, I work with teenagers and there seems to be little stigma around holding a conversation with earbuds in place.
> there seems to be little stigma around holding a conversation with earbuds in place
Maybe it's a generational or cultural thing, but I find that kind of thing incredibly rude. But I'm also the kind of person who takes my sunglasses off when I'm talking face-to-face with other people.
The hardware for wearable AR isn't main stream yet. Handset AR doesn't have the same wow factor. We're only now coming to a self sustaining VR industry but things are still progressing.
Is there one killer app for the iPhone? The cumulative experience is the killer app. Likewise, the persistent AR environment will also show us value from the collective, incremental improvements over non-augmented experiences: the sidewalk up ahead has a splash of black ice, the pollen count is high by the creek so cycle on the main road today, etc.
I’d argue that a good mobile browser was the killer app that brought the iPhone to the forefront. It differentiated it from what else was available at the time. It’s hard to pinpoint a killer app now because the ecosystem is mature, but a killer app is often what gets a platform off the ground in the first place.
