Ever since Google Fiber and a few municipalities began building gigabit fiber networks people have been asking how we are going to use all of that extra broadband capability. I remember a few years ago there were several industry contests and challenges to try to find the gigabit killer app.

But nobody has found one yet and probably won’t for a while. After all, a gigabit connection is 40 times faster than the FCC’s current definition of broadband. I don’t think Google Fiber or anybody thought that our broadband needs would grow fast enough to quickly fill such a big data pipe. But year after year we all keep using more data, and since the household need for broadband keeps doubling every three years it won’t take too many doublings for some homes to start filling up larger data connections.

But there is one interesting broadband application that might be the next big bandwidth hog. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, was recently on Good Morning America and he said that he thinks that augmented reality is going to be a far more significant application in the future than virtual reality and that once perfected that it’s going to be something everybody is going to want.

By now many of you have tried virtual reality. You don a helmet of some kind and are then transported into some imaginary world. The images are in surround-3D and the phenomenon is amazing. And this is largely a gaming application and a solitary one at that.

But augmented reality brings virtual images out into the real world. Movie directors have grasped the idea and one can hardly watch a futuristic show or movie without seeing a board room full of virtual people who are attending a meeting from other locations.

And that is the big promise of virtual reality. It will allow telepresence – the ability for people to sit in their home or office and meet and talk with others as if they are in the same room. This application is of great interest to me because I often travel to hold a few hour meetings and the idea of doing that from my house would add huge efficiency to my business life. Augmented reality could spell the end of the harried business traveler.

But the technology has far more promise than that. With augmented reality people can share any other images. You can share a sales presentation or share videos from your latest vacation with grandma. This ability to share images between people could drastically change education, and some predict that over a few decades that augmented reality would begin to obsolete the need for classrooms full of in-person students. This technology would fully enable telemedicine. Augmented reality will enhance aging in the home since shut-ins could still have a full social life.

And of course, the application that intrigues everybody is using augmented reality for entertainment. Taken to the extreme, augmented reality is the Star Trek holodeck. There are already first-generation units that can create a virtual landscape in your living room. It might take a while until the technology gets as crystal clear and convincing as the TV holodeck, but even having some percentage of that capability opens up huge possibilities for gaming and entertainment.

As the quality of augmented reality improves, the technology is going to require big bandwidth connections with a low latency. Rather than just transmitting a 2D video file, augmented reality will be transmitting 3D images in real time. Homes and offices that want to use the technology are going to want broadband connections far faster than the current 25/3 Mbps definition of broadband. Augmented reality might also be the first technology that really pushes the demand for faster upload speeds since they are as necessary as download speeds in enabling a 2-way augmented reality connection.

This is not a distant future technology and a number of companies are working on devices that will bring the first-generation of the technology into homes in the next few years. And if we’ve learned anything about technology, once a popular technology is shown to work, demand in the marketplace there will be numerous companies vying to improve the technology.

If augmented reality was here today the biggest hurdle to using it would be the broadband connections most of us have today. I am certainly luckier than people in rural areas and I have a 60/5 Mbps connection with a cable modem from Charter. But the connection has a lot of jitter and the latency swings wildly. My upload stream is not going to be fast enough to support 2-way augmented reality.

The economic benefits from augmented reality are gigantic. The ability for business people to easily meet virtually would add significant efficiency to the economy. The technology will spawn a huge demand for content. And the demand to use the technology might be the spur that will push ISPs to build faster networks.