AR demos keep showing cool tech that just isn’t practical

New augmented reality announcements and demos now surface every day, but almost every piece of AR news suffers from the same issue: No matter how cool it sounds at first, it will generally not be practical for regular people. That’s fundamentally different from virtual reality (VR) news, which tends to focus on devices and experiences that people are actually buying.

The crux of AR’s issue is that there’s no affordable wearable hardware out there. There’s wearable hardware, but it’s not affordable. And there’s affordable hardware, but it’s not wearable. To understand why this matters, let’s look at a couple of AR stories that surfaced over the past 24 hours.