In case you've missed it: another aspect of augmented reality has recently arrived (watch Adrian Biedrzycki developing for it live or his archived recordings 1 or 2). Unfortunately, the hardware uses cameras just as Google Glass did, which is a no-go in my mind. I hoped that their technology would manipulate incoming light without filming it. There's the chance that this is pretty much what they do and just the Magic Leap One can't do the tracking without cameras yet, but depth-aware augmentation of seeing in contrast to simple 2D overlays might arrive eventually.

Let me repeat what my interest in augmented reality is: I don't care much about augmenting virtual worlds for entertainment purposes, but a great deal about the physical world I physically inhabit in terms of what I see and can do. Computers and networks can help extending our real-world capabilities, and it's neither difficult nor expensive to make it happen, but for some reason, nobody is working on it, probably because virtual worlds are more fancy than the "boring" efforts of addressing real-world problems where one can't just cheat. Now, with virtual worlds, everything is quite difficult:

With the physical reality, it's much easier:

So considering what we can do right now, even if the average user doesn't have a depth-aware visual augmentation headset: it could be ordinary glasses that offer simple 2D overlays. Jetfighter pilots have a HUD and the Terminator walks around with one of these too. Google Glass could be revived if the camera is removed, but there are other vendors by now, this sort of thing is available on the market by now. I wonder a little bit if bright sunlight would affect readability too much, but that's an issue for printed books and notebook screens just as well and it didn't prevent us from using them anyway. But more importantly, smartphones are in wide use and can be aware of their location via GPS, triangulation, beacons or known position of stationary WLAN access points + usually know the direction they're pointed towards via a compass. Their connectivity to different networks is the same as any dedicated augmentation device would be able to rely on.

To be continued...

No hardware is missing, no physical infrastructure is missing, just the software (architecture/infrastructure). The opposite of "virtual" isn't "real", as virtual worlds are real worlds that exist too (in contrast to unreal worlds that don't exist), the opposite is "physical".