Some of the nicest AR interaction revolves around “tangible interaction” - augmenting physical objects that you can touch and hold and feel, where the augmentation responds to your handling of the object.
One of the great unappreciated advantages to “magic lens” style cell-phone AR is the screen acts as a “tangible proxy” for interaction with the virtual objects. If we want to interact with augmentations that don’t correspond to physical objects using a heads-up display we run into trouble.
There’s no such thing as “intangible interaction” - even in the folk record, when we’ve “interacted” with intangible things like “spirits”, we’ve resorted to tangible proxies like ouiji boards. The purely intangible stuff, like psychic visions, tended to be read-only too.
Most of the scenarios in this AR concept video try to solve this problem by projecting the AR elements on to a proximal plane (desktop, palm etc) that can act as a tangible proxy, but this leads to some trade-offs - the biggest of which is taking a 3D technology and limiting it to (sometimes awkward) 2D interaction.
Maybe this is the best we can do with HUDs without kitting ourselves out with haptic handware and giving ourselves gorilla arm or tennis elbow trying to interact with things that just aren’t there. Or maybe this is the killer flaw with HUDs - the “Holy Grail” of AR - you can see, but you can’t touch - HUDs are just a tease.
