Augmented reality and ID tagging might be the killer apps for video glasses

Since 2006 I have owned and written about video glasses, including in my Six Trends that are transforming Online and Future of Media Lifecycle framework.

Despite my predictions, we still don’t see many people around wearing video glasses. However I still think it’s going to happen, as I predicted earlier this week.

In the many radio interviews I’ve done this week I was asked a lot about the video glasses. As I explained, there are many applications for video glasses, but augmented reality is the most powerful.

The recent swathe of augmented reality apps on iPhone have shown us the very beginning of the potential of AR. However people don’t want to be always holding up their phone in front of their face.

A case in point is ID tagging, in which facial recognition software identifies people in your field of vision and provides additional information about them. This is something far more easily and less obviously done using video glasses.

The classic scenario is that you see someone you’ve met before and don’t remember their name, but your AR glasses displays their name and any other publicly available information or things that you’ve noted previously next to them.

Imagine when the technologies in this video can be embedded into your glasses. This kind of information could easily get people to start wearing glasses when they go out into social situations.