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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

The iPhone already is an AR device though, and one of its first major apps was an AR application - Layar, back in 2009. One of its major apps has an AR component (Pokemon Go).

I could see them making a Google Cardboard-like mounting bracket / dock for the iphone I guess, maybe with better cameras and sensors.

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I think Google Glass is more where they will go. Except, just like the first iPhone, they will make it actually look like a normal pair of sunglasses. Apple has NEVER made new products, but they have refined existing products at key times to come out with something amazing. iPod, iPad, iPhone were not the first, but they were breakthrough staples that rules their area. Apple Glasses would do the same if done right.

> Except, just like the first iPhone, they will make it actually look like a normal pair of sunglasses.

Not going to happen (any time soon). That's an insurmountable engineering challenge for the foreseeable future.

Let's get specific: How long do you think it will be before Apple release iGlasses? 10 years?

I'm not sure when they will release a product in the vein of "iGlasses", but I'm certain they won't release an AR device that "looks like a normal pair of sunglasses" within 10 years. This isn't a situation where incremental progress will make this possible, there would need to be a fundamental breakthrough in battery and GPU efficiency that, while possible, is not necessary inevitable and definitely not on track within a predictable timeline.

What do you think about solving this with wireless power transfer? There has been some promising research recently into extending the range of resonant inductive coupling.

It's nobody's ideal, but a clip-on/necklace style power solution might be sellable to the public if the value proposition of the glasses is good enough.

A future where resonance charging equipment is safe, functionally practical and ubiquitous is sort of a breakthrough scenario in and of itself, but even then, you're still talking about a technology that is somewhat out of reach. Even if we can squeeze the necessary GPU power into the form factor of "a normal pair of sunglasses", consider the additional heat dissipation requirements of a device as thin as normal glasses that is also in a state of perpetual charge, especially when we take into account the human face's particular sensitivity to heat.

Maybe very thick oversized (by today's standards) frames will come into style and something like that will be on the border of possibility, but it seems like a real stretch within the next 10 years.

After thinking it over a bit, I'm going to take the other side of the bet.

We agree that power consumption is a limiting factor no matter what. In my imagined system, only something on the order of 1W would be delivered to the glasses. Delivering 1W over 10cm with large-ish coil area at >50% efficiency using NFMR isn't really a breakthrough, but it's only a way of eliminating the LiPo bulk and nothing more.

The thing is, I don't think we're near the boundary of power efficiency even with today's silicon. The way forward is to push all the feature tracking and other low-level vision tasks down to the ASIC level, while accepting some strict limitations on the rendering side. So a lot of it comes down to scope of features. Its most immediately useful applications are little more than a glorified HUD -- project some GPS data here or an info overlay there. Blit a video source on top of a marker, that sort of thing.

This sort of practical product, by 2027, I'll say yes. Mindblowing, transform-your-world stuff? No. But let's see what happens...

Speculation is rising that Apple will add 3D sensing to give the phone a sense of depth to be used for augmented reality applications.

3D sensing is not a new technology and was initially adopted by Microsoft‘s Kinect and Lenovo‘s Tango-enabled Phab2 Pro.

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