Why is a phone that sits on your face less useful?

You have a phone, yes? Have you ever thought "gee, I sure wish my phone's display would persist in my field of vision regardless of how I turned my head?"

Before you answer, put yourself in the position of everybody else. Consider: phones have existed for over a hundred years; the motorola startac is 18 years old this year. Digital watches are pushing 40. And "glasses" are hundreds of years old.

So the necessary pieces to have a phone display that hovers near your face have been around for two decades, more or less. Yet attempts to marry the two together have met with no joy. Why is that?

Think about how you use your phone. How often do you care what the display says enough to have it in your field of vision? Once a minute? Once every five minutes? Certainly not "always." After all, when your phone is demanding your attention, it's stealing it from somewhere else.

Consider GPS. Let's get even more primitive with it - how long have compasses existed? How long has the basic technology to put a compass directly in your field of view existed? I'm no expert, but I'd wager 200 years at least.

Yet no one has ever wanted that.

Take a look here:

This is 6-day underwear. Some clever(?) japanese dude invented it back in the '80s. It has 3 legs. You put your legs through A and B on day 1, B and C on day 2, C and A on day 3. Then you turn it inside out. Six days . Maximal utility.

But nobody wants to wear underwear for six days.

Nobody wants a phone on their face. Nobody wants a compass on their face. We've been able to put phones and compasses on our faces for decades. It's simply not something the markets have asked for.

"Fundamental utility" means "having utility" at a basic level. A fork has fundamental utility. A ball point pen has fundamental utility. "Three legged underwear" does not have fundamental utility - "underwear" does but adding an extra leg doesn't help anything. It solves a problem nobody has.

...how did we even fathom building mechanisms to further utilize our endeavors to begin with?

That's a hell of a sentence, pardner. I'd say "how do we invent stuff?" The answer is in solving problems that exist.

Here's a great book on the subject.