Epic Games CEO: AR glasses will “eventually replace smartphones”

Enlarge / The Magic Leap One is the first step to getting a billion people wearing AR glasses by 2025, according to Epic CEO Tim Sweeney.

SAN FRANCISCO-A little under three years ago, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney predicted that augmented reality glasses (which layer virtual 3D images on top of your view of the real world) would completely replace all traditional screens in a ten-year timeframe. At the Game Developers Conference (GDC) this week, the head of the company behind the Unreal Engine and Fortnite said he still expects that to happen, predicting a billion users for such AR glasses by 2025.

"I expect this to eventually replace smartphones," Sweeney told Ars in an interview. "Walking around in real life, instead of watching people fiddling around with the cell phone in their pocket, you'll be watching them make gestures to interact with this [augmented reality] user interface."

It won't be an instant transition, of course. Sweeney suggested we could get to 10 million early adopters for AR glasses "in the next two or three years." From there, "you take, say, 10 million users and really astonish them and give them a product that's really amazing in order to get to 100 million users. Then you have to satisfy the 100 million users to get to a billion users and so on. It's going to deploy over time."

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