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Comment by kguttag | Hacker News Reader

While the market is "hot" in terms of awareness, it is still a very small market facing major technical challenges. I think AR while useful in enterprise markets (measured in the 100's of thousands a year) is a long way from being ready for the mass consumer market.

I am seeing a lot of progress in some areas and will be publishing an article later this week on them. In particular both Dispelix and Digilens have made considerable progress on the "glowing eyes" issues (Dispelix all but eliminates it). Avegant has a very nice small LCOS light engine that pairs nicely with the Dispelix waveguide.

I think the biggest problem for AR is that the expectations are very high and the physics is very tough. Many physical optical features within a few wavelengths of light were diffraction ruins everything.

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It seems to me like a regular VR headset + dual cameras on the front might be able to get much better results than actual AR?

Even if it did, people won’t wear them in public. Google Glass looked half normal and people were still getting accosted in restaurants.

Yes, but that problem was much more “Google” than “glass”.

Perhaps so. I’m just skeptical that the viewed would accept such VR-pass through style goggles even if the viewer finds them innocuous.

I was working on enterprise Google Glass apps in 2014. The problem was lack of applications. You could do very few things with it beyond showing some text and pictures.

That doesn't matter for industrial applications though.

People freak out at the idea of cameras of some random dude constantly watching them.

This is a bit funny because they'd be watched by multiple cameras in any restaurant or supermarket. OTOH the viewpoint of the overhead monitoring cameras is very distinctive, and the resolution is usually barely enough to see a face. The Glass's camera gave more "normal" and higher-resolution footage.

There is no irony here.

People freak out because it's worn by a _person_ who, specifically, is watching _them_.

You'd probably react similarly if somebody, during a party, for no reason kept pointing a recording microphone at you, even though there were voice assistants like Alexa in the room.

People are discussing whether AR device could be worn in public. But I’m wondering: should it? I mean, I’m the last guy to question novel technology. I was desperate to get the first smartphones. But why would you want an always-on screen in public?

I think this is a "grass is greener" type argument. There are also massive problems with pass-through AR (VR with cameras).

I'm not entirely sure it is. Pass through has serious engineering hurdles to get over first with latency, power consumption, weight etc.

But the waveguide method has limitations rooted in physics and math that won't change until 30%+70% stops equalling 100%.

I know which one I'd put more Hope's in.

Did you get to try the Avegant prototype? It sounds quite promising.

Yes, I took the picture of Avegant used in the article. The Avegant and Dispelix waveguide combination looks pretty good. It is only a prototype without any tracking/slam. It is a display only demonstration by a component company.

I was impressed by the size of the Avegant engine and the transparency and lack of forward projection by the Dispelix prototype. They are claiming they will get 2,000 nits to the eye out of the design which should be good enough for outdoor use IF they have some form of clip-on sunglasses (2,000 nits is not enough for outdoors in full sunlight without some help).

The current Avegant engine has an optical component in that was depolarizing the light from the LCOS display and losing contrast so they wanted me to wait to take through the lens pictures. The image from the current prototype looked sharp but did lack contrast.

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