Apple Inc. (AAPL), Google Inc. (GOOG): The Next Computing Revolution Will Take Us Beyond the Screen, but in Which Direction?

You can read more about wearable computing, which includes devices that don’t add a layer of immersion but simply enhance your life, in a technology overview I created last year: Click here to get started.

Who wins and who loses?
It’s possible that we’ll go through our lives in the 2020s (or even earlier) switching between room-scale projected experiences and fully immersive augmented-reality displays in our eyewear. However, there may simply not be room in most people’s lives (or wallets) for a holodeck and a set of virtual-reality goggles. Either direction would be a massive leap forward in human-computer interaction, which has been circumscribed virtually since the beginning by a screen and our fingertips. Effective software operation and functional variety are likely to push us in one direction or the other, which would point to the more-portable wearable systems as the ultimate victors — but a world in which most interaction happens remotely, the projected reality in our living room might be all we’ll ever need.

What do you think? Will the future be all around us, or right in front of our faces?

The article The Next Computing Revolution Will Take Us Beyond the Screen, but in Which Direction? originally appeared on Fool.com.

Fool contributor Alex Planes holds no financial position in any company mentioned here. Add him on Google+ or follow him on Twitter, @TMFBiggles, for more insight into markets, history, and technology.The Motley Fool recommends Amazon.com, Apple, Facebook, and Google and owns shares of Amazon.com, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.

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