Apple’s new smartwatch can track your heart rate, pay for your Chicken McNuggets and give you turn-by-turn directions by sending vibrations to your wrist. You can buy one in 18-karat gold. The device, which will be available early next year, is the latest in slick wearable technology, a booming category that includes Google Glass, the Jawbone Up fitness tracker and Liquid Image goggle-cameras.

But are these innovations really game-changers for travelers?

On one hand, it’s amusing to contemplate the promise of wearable technology (or wearables) when the travel industry is still trying to solve basic problems such as how to board 300 people onto an airplane without the process devolving into a stampede. I’m reminded of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” — the pyramid that illustrates how rudimentary physiological requirements such as food and shelter must be met before we can concern ourselves with less crucial desires. If there were such a pyramid for travel, boarding a plane with Jetsons-style alacrity would come before watches and glasses that alert us to the nearest Margaritaville.

On the other hand, wearables, particularly the Apple Watch, could eventually transform the way we travel. Given that sensors on the back of the device can track your pulse rate, perhaps it might also detect if you’re becoming unruly during a flight and follow up with a zap to your wrist and a stress-reduction video?

Fantasies aside, some technology and travel experts see real-world potential in wearables, even though many are most likely years from being what we want them to be.

Take smartwatches, which are already available from brands including LG, Motorola and Sony. They’re good at pushing information and alerts from your calendar to your wrist, where it’s easily glanced.

The wrinkle, said James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, is that most smartwatches are clunky and impersonal. They cannot pinpoint where you are or what you want, so the information they provide is not game-changing. “A traveler needs that friend that’s sitting on their wrist that says, ‘I know you, I know what you like,’” he said. “That’s the kind of thing that Apple can do.”

But let’s get to what will be available early next year when the Apple Watch comes to market. One of the biggest boons for travelers involves maps and GPS: Walk through a city and the watch can deliver different vibrations to your wrist to indicate whether you should turn left or right, so you don’t have to wander the streets peering at a tiny device (or be a good map-reader) to know which way to go. “It’s like having this invisible guide with you,” Kevin Lynch, vice president for technology at Apple, said during the news conference.

And some travelers will like that the Apple Watch has Apple Pay, a new mobile system that allows you to pay at the registers of places as varied as McDonald’s and Walt Disney World. Until the system is ubiquitous, I’ll be carrying my wallet.

I’ll also be carrying my iPhone because, well, you must to use all the features of the Apple Watch — and that’s a real drawback for travelers who aim to carry fewer, not more, devices.

Wearables haven’t exactly taken off. And, for what they cost, they’re not always practical for the average traveler. Google Glass is $1,500, while the Apple Watch starts at $349 and you have to have an iPhone 5 or higher for it to work. Ditto for the Samsung Gear 2 smartwatch, which is about $300 on Samsung.com and requires that you own a Samsung phone or tablet.

“Nearly 4 in 10 travelers can see a benefit of using wearables when they are traveling,” said Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst with Atmosphere Research Group. To attract more of them, he said, the devices should be easy to use: The typical American traveler is about 41 years old, not 21, according to Harteveldt. And if the wearable is a smartwatch, it should look inconspicuous, if not beautiful. “It would have to be something that doesn’t make me look like an extra on the set of an alien movie,” he said.

Apple tackled that concern, offering an array of watch faces and bands, including leather and stainless steel mesh. “It’s as much about personal technology as it is about style and taste,” Timothy Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said at the news conference. Though for those of us with fashionable watches that merely tell time, the Apple Watch presents a problem. There’s only so much wrist real estate.

Only time will tell if wearables become our second skins. “This is not going to be an overnight story,” Harteveldt said.

That’s what makes it exciting. And maybe a little scary. As Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior vice president for design, put it in a video during the news conference: “We’re now at a compelling beginning.”