It’s time, following my post on Rob Spence’s Augmented Vision and the recent buzz in the blog-o-sphere on the topic of eyewear for hands-free AR (on TechCrunch Feb 6, on Wired on Feb 13, on Augmented Planet Feb 15), to return to this topic.
I could examine the current state of the art of the technology for hands-free AR (the hardware, the software and the content). But there’s too much information I could not reveal, and much more I have yet to discover.
I could speculate about if, what and when Google will introduce its Goggles, as been rumored for nearly 3 months. By the way, I didn’t need a report to shed light on this. In April 2011, when I visited the Google campus, one of the people with whom I met (complete with his personal display) was wearable computing guru and director of the Georgia Institute of Technology Contextual Computing Group, Thad Starner. A matter of months later, he was followed to Google by Rich deVaul whose 2003 dissertation on The Memory Glasses project certainly qualifies him on the subject of eyewear. There could, in the near future, be some cool new products rolling out for us, “ordinary humans,” to take photos with our sunglasses and transfer these to our smartphones. There might be tools for creating a log of our lives with these, which would be very helpful. But these are not, purely speaking, AR applications.
Instead, let me focus on who, in my opinion, is most likely to be adopting the next generation of non-military see-through eyewear for use with AR capabilities. It will not be you nor I, or the early technology adopter next door who will have the next generation see-through eyewear for AR. 
It will be those for whom having certain, very specific pieces of additional information available in real time (with the ability to convey them to others) while also having use of both hands, is life saving or performance enhancing. In other words, professional applications are going to come first. In the life saving category, those who engage in the most dangerous field in the world (i.e., military action) probably already have something close to AR.
Beyond defense, let’s assume that those who respond to a location new to them for the purpose of rescuing people endangered by fire, flooding, earthquakes, and other disasters, need both of their hands as well as real time information about their surroundings. This blog post on the Tanagram web site (where the image above is from), makes a very strong case for the use of AR vision.
People who explore dark places, such as underwater crevices near a shipwreck or a mine shaft already have cameras on their heads and suits that monitor heart rate, temperature, pressure and other ambient conditions. The next logical step is to have helpful information superimposed on the immediate surroundings. Using cameras to recognize natural features in buildings (with or without the aid of markers) and then altimeters to determine the depth underground or height above ground to which the user has gone, floor plans and readings from local activity sensors could be very valuable for saving lives.
I hope never to have to rely on these myself, but I won’t be surprised if one day I find myself rescued from a dangerous place by a professional wearing head-mounted gear with Augmented Reality features.