HoloLens founder and Windows Insider chief say smartglasses will replace smartphones

Back in June, former Wall Street analyst Gene Munster said that the AR powered  Apple Glasses, expected to be launched in 2020, will be bigger than the Apple iPhone. And that analysis is similar to forecasts made by HoloLens creator Alex Kipman, and Windows Insider Chief Dona Sarkar. Both agree with Munster that AR smartglasses could soon surpass smartphones as our main go-to technology.

Kipman, who created HoloLens, says that the smartphone is already dead and that people just don't know it yet. The HoloLens uses a combination of real and virtual worlds to form Mixed Reality. The real world appears as the backdrop in AR (Augmented Reality) while the virtual world obviously appears in Virtual Reality images. According to Kipman, small smartphone and television screens will be replaced by wearable holographic devices like a smartglass screen.

Windows Insider Dona Sakar has similar feelings although she is seeing things from the smartphone side. Saying that she loves her Lumia 950 XL, she realizes that a smartphone is just one single category of a group that encompasses mobile devices.  Like Kipman, Sakar sees Microsoft developing a screenless version of a smartphone that takes over for the handset.


Wouldn't that be ironic, and possibly an amazing come from behind victory for Microsoft if the Surface Phone turns out to be such a product? There probably would be great reluctance to give up the smartphone, but that could be expected anytime that a huge technological change is imminent. And unlike smartphones, there doesn't seem to be too many different ways to differentiate between the product.


Considering that Google Glass was pretty much a consumer failure and that the smartphone still rules the roost, this all seems like science fiction. But we've gone from featurephones to smartphones and are now moving toward AR based smartglasses. As said in the Titanic movie, "It's a mathematical certainty."

source: WindowsCentral