Apple is probably releasing their VR/AR product this year, which means they're probably going to patent a *bunch* of stuff which is wildly obvious but just coincidentally has never been shipped before. So it's occurring to me it is a good idea to start publicly documenting various "hey, you know what would be a good idea to do in VR" ideas, so we can point to it as prior art when the lawsuit happens.
Some things I've been thinking about for years:
1. If you have AR, it would be really cool to do walking street directions that actually superimpose a red path line, floating arrows etc on the real world.
2. It would be cool to do a "teleconference" in AR sitting at a table with the person you're teleconferencing with superimposed into another chair. (My brother and I have discussed this idea before.)
3. The Hololens can pop up Win10 Metro windows that you touch with your finger to activate touch buttons. What I *really* want is for an AR headset to create actual *monitors*, IE, I have no monitor on my desk but I can spawn as many fake ones as I want floating above it. I would control these with a keyboard and a mouse sitting on the desk, and would have a mouse cursor I would move between like multiple monitors. I would use touch only to touch/grab and move the fake screens around.
(It would be very fun to have a half-laptop computer, with no screen, just the keyboard and trackpad bits, with all the screens provided by AR glasses.)
4. The most frustrating thing about VR is you can't use your phone in VR. It's just ironic! You're INSIDE a computer but you can't USE your computer. You can't even check the time. Steam has these overlay apps that help with this a little, but what would be really great is to just *simulate your phone*. This would be extra easy for a company like Apple or Google because whatever device is running the AR interface could just run iOS/Android apps in a tiny in-VR phone-shaped pane.
