I. Introduction

Augmented reality (AR) glasses may redefine smartphones’ role in daily computing, much as smartphones once reshaped our relationship with the desktop. In late 2024, Meta unveiled Project Orion, their first lightweight see‑through headset meant for all‑day wear. Industry roadmaps from Apple, Google and Samsung point to consumer‑grade models arriving in 2026, with annual refresh cycles reminiscent of the iPhone after 2007.

What is AR? Unlike virtual reality headsets that obscure the outside world, AR glasses keep the user’s physical surroundings visible while inserting context‑aware digital images, text and 3‑D objects directly into the wearer’s view. The interface abandons 2‑D touch in favor of voice, gaze and neural hand‑tracking, freeing hands even as it overlays them with digital objects. These devices are a concrete step towards Zuckerberg’s metaverse vision, where the digital world inhabits the physical one through “holograms”.

After seventeen smartphone generations, handset innovation has flattened to incremental camera and chip upgrades. Consumers, primed for novelty and status, will likely see the friction-free interface as worth the upgrade. Manufacturers will stoke the cycle with sleek advertisements, tight ecosystem lock‑in (think iCloud for your vision), and demonstrations of all smartphone capabilities ported to the new interface.

A single in‑store demo may be as persuasive as 2007’s first pinch‑to‑zoom, and picking up a smartphone more than 100 times per day may soon feel as outdated as dial‑up. Yet history shows that the personal thrills of a new interface routinely outweigh perceived social costs. Television ownership in the United States leapt from 9% of households in 1950 to 90% by 1960; theorists like Robert Putnam and Neil Postman would later argue that television homogenized popular culture and collective identity but significantly contributed to the decline of civic engagement, physical spaces and social capital. Smartphones replayed the cycle: Sherry Turkle coined “phubbing” in 2011 to diagnose phone‑induced conversational shallowness, yet U.S. smartphone adoption still climbed from 35% in 2011 to 90% by 2024. Even those wary of the social side-effects felt pressure to stay reachable, share photos, or use productivity-related apps.

The risk is magnified by inequality...

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