I've been enthusiastic about AR for years now and I believe my excitement is justified by the recent popularity of the AR Pokemon Go craze. At first glance, I was not impressed with Abe Davis' software. It seemed like an artificial manipulation. Nonetheless, after watching his TEDtalk and digesting the ideas, I think he is on to something.

From a physicist's point of view, it's all vibrations; waves of energy interacting across the cosmos. These waves make up our reality at different levels; on the solar system level with Earth revolving around the sun periodically, the potato chip bag vibrating in Abe Davis' experiment, invisible oscillations on the atomic level. Of course, one part of his experiment is old hat; lasers pointed at window panes to listen to conversations inside a room is not news. However, recording subtle vibrations on a video and amplifying them to create predictive models of an object's behavior is an insight with great potential IMHO.

He did not go into this aspect of the experiment in great detail, but if we can predict behavior at the level of a shrub branch moving with stimulation why not take it further, say to the cellular level where we could focus radio waves on organelles to cure diseases. While far fetched, the concept would seem to have merit.