Concur. With the latest advances in laser projection (see: Microvision's pico projector), it's only a matter of time before we see low-cost see-through HUD glasses. Add a small cam on the bridge for image recognition, and you've got pretty much Terminator vision.
Let me expand on that a little bit, though, so I'm not misunderstood: use the cam for image recognition, sure. But instead of piping the cam image to the projector, simply use it to map the augmented reality elements (visual tags like addresses, direction-path, and so forth) directly to the projector so they line up correctly with what you actually see through the lens. Add a digital zoom pip for when you want some far-off detail up close, I suppose...
Microvision has been touting those projectors for at least most of a decade now. They're so incredibly awesome, if they work and don't have major drawbacks, that I conclude they don't really work. :(
They've shown actual products working, most notably at e.g. CES. Wonder why they haven't brought them to market yet? I'm thinking they're still rather expensive to produce.
If they don't fail in some obvious way (low battery life; heavy or wearing on the ears and nose; risk of damage to the eye; can't produce true color; or something), I'd happily pay thousands of dollars for one, and I can imagine many, many other people would as well, which would help them drive costs down.
At first I thought they were holding out for a large contract from the DoD or something, but after this long I just assume there's something critically wrong with them (one of the above), or that the managers are idiots who can fail to profit from having warehouses of gold. :)
yeah it seems like it would be reducing the scope of problems by orders of magnitude. The thing about heat makes me stomach hurt, maybe unlikely... but i don't want to take a chance of burning my cornea!!
