Welcome to Lowpass! This week: This week: What audio AR tells us about the future of augmented reality, and how video viewing differs depending on which TV you own.

The future of AR sounds good

This week, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley revealed a bit more about his new venture: New York-based Hopscotch Labs is building what Crowley dubbed “software for the streets” – apps that combine location information with audio content and experiences.

“Our first project is a ‘Marauders Map for AirPods’ called BeeBot,” Crowley explained on LinkedIn. “You can think of it as a mashup of OG Twitter (‘what's happening’), OG Foursquare (‘who's where doing what’), Waze (but for walking thru cities), with some AI fairy dust gluing it all together. It's meant to be light and fun and to create joy and serendipity.”

“I always thought of audio as poor man’s augmented reality,” Crowley said on the Big Technology podcast earlier this year, arguing that audio apps like BeeBot would be first to make AR happen on a broader scale. “I’ve seen the glasses, I’ve tried the glasses. Those glasses aren’t happening any time soon. If you want to play in that space, this works,” he said in reference to the Airpods he was wearing.

After recently trying Meta’s Orion glasses, I actually believe that AR wearables will come sooner than many of us used to think. However, I’ve also long been fascinated by audio-only AR. With Hopscotch giving this tech another go, and both spatial audio earbuds and smart glasses gaining in popularity, I decided to talk to some experts in the field, and figure out whether this kind of “poor man’s AR” is here to stay.

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