Regarding the discussion of augmented reality hardware, it's much more likely that we'll see something like AR on cell phones first: some way of finding where you are (GPS or wireless signal triangulation) + real-time camera + some way of finding where you're facing (digital compass and tilt sensor or image matching and tracking against a panoramic image database) + geotagged info database + screen = stuff like this. Existing technology, the sort of hardware quite a few people are already buying and carrying around. I'm a bit of a cell-phone luddite (don't want to spend much money on service, so no smart-phone for me yet), but that sort of thing excites me. I wish I could point my phone at the bus stop and see when the next bus arrives, or point it at the streetscape and see all the relevant restaurant reviews on Yelp. If AR takes off, I'd expect some of the weirder hybrid-reality stuff to build on the existing userbase for those sorts of "more practical" AR applications.

I'm almost done with catching up on the archives, so I'll try to write something up when I'm finished.