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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

I have heard quite different info from one man working at Apple supplier.

Apple for long tried to license display tech from Beijing university, a solid state microled chip with microlenses, but they never agreed on lump sump payment Apple wanted, despite it being "n-times the price" of their whole IP trading business.

So, it became a blocker, with relationship souring, and them resorting to "patenting around," poaching their engineers, and other nasties.

They tried to recreate the chip by themselves, but Beijing uni got a tip of it, and claimed that Apple is now "IP tainted" by what they saw under NDA, and them hiring their engineers.

And so, Apple went on developing "ordinary" transparent VR glasses instead.

A company called Kura is said now to reuse the same chip from Beijing university IC company in their own take on what Apple tried originally.

View on HN

I'm not sure if I'd put a lot of stock in an Apple supplier knowing more than people who talk to internal engineers.

The idea of a combined VR/AR device sounds silly, and I think Ive is right: AR is where Apple should be focusing right now. There is something there for AR, and Apple has been laying the groundwork for AR for years with iOS and iPad OS. VR is very much stuck in a niche right now, and it seems like it will be for awhile.

What they say about N421 is pretty much is what they were saying a generic "transparent VR" or "lightweight AR" display would be, and what the technology would allow.

Think of Google Glass sans camera, and creepiness.

For anything else, there is simply no practical tech on this planet.

The lowest common denominator for "a real world usable AR" is well known: an emissive display, and a simple reflective projection system on some semitransparent medium/mirror dots/viewfinder-overlay-like prisms. No magic.

Pretty much everything else requires battery packs bigger than the glasses themselves, especially if you want daylight visibility.

> I'm not sure if I'd put a lot of stock in an Apple supplier knowing more than people who talk to internal engineers

You will be surprised how much RnD stuff Apple outsources around in China.

Maybe they design their products in California, but they definitely engineer them here in Shenzhen.

I had hard time understanding why they were so skittish talking about their RnD centres in China, and even once denying their existence, when the whole city knew of them, and where they are.

AR is going to have severely limited consumer appeal until the FOV issue is solved, which is much, much harder for AR than it is for VR. Combined AR/VR is because the only way to get a decent FOV is to essentially pass a camera through a VR headset. Tracking latency is also still a huge issue, as is UX (hand-tracking, currently in its infancy, is what is expected, whereas VR can still get away with using handsets, which have become very impressive lately with their impementations of grip-tracking and haptic feedback).

Saying VR is a niche for XR headsets would be like saying word processing was a niche for home computers in the 70s. The tech simply isn't here yet to make an appealing product without everything you need for the "niche" application, so you might as well include it anyway.

I'm not sure if I'd put a lot of stock in a Bloomberg article versus an Apple supplier. Isn't this the same Bloomberg who filled a political debate audience full of plants to cheer for himself, after buying his way on to the stage?

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