They have a functioning prototype. Who are you and why does your opinion matter? (I’m just sick of skepticism automatically being associated with intelligence).
Do we really believe that the deal breaker for Google Glass was just that it made you look like a dork? Because that is the only problem the contact lens seems to solve, and it introduces a whole host of new problems. I'm not sure I feel great about putting a battery straight into my eyeball after seeing what they can do to cars and laptops when they fail.
Contact lenses solve a number of problems especially against headsets. They create others with the interference with vision correction devices but at least one could wear prescription glasses or sunglasses. BTW, I wore contact lenses for about 20 years, then suddenly couldn't wear them anymore and went back to glasses.
>Invisible to people around you.
Except for the not-built body-wearable computer that will eventually run the things [0]
> literally captures the entirety of your retina
This prototype covers <20% of your field of vision [1]
>no motion sickness, higher fidelity
I think you're comparing this to headsets, but I can tell you from [1] that this is not 'high-fidelity' by any means (for one, it's monochrome and each pixel is binary on or off)
Another problem to think about:
A sunny day is c. 30k nits. From the looks of the photo, this display is maybe 100 nits. IT will be nearly impossible to see the display outdoors.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzVAMRe3kmA - [1] https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/30/mojo-vision-reveals-the-w...
"guest" was doing "this is a car, ok, next, this looks like a guy, wait what is in his hand,... is that an alleyway? no light, could someone be hiding in the shadow"
the random person's vision was like "lalalalaala.... end of test, what did i miss?"
That was a quite a big thing for me. i always "look" at things now, when i am walking, driving, something. it definitely gets tiring after a while because of the sensory overload. Now, i cannot imagine what AR would do to that vision, would it be helpful, less helpful? i am not sure but it will be something to consider.
edit: looks like "fight science" or "human weapon"
There’s probably something to be said for having 100 nits right on your eyeball.
A 100 nits huge screen at a distance that covers 20% of my field of vision would be the same as a 100 nits tiny screen close to my eye that covers 20% of my field of vision.
Or to put it another way, things don't look dimmer just because they're further away. It's less total light because it covers less of my field of vision.
But I think it certainly matters, since nits indicate the amount of light (candles per square meter) hitting a board 1m from the source, if the board/eye is only 10mm away, the intensity in that spot is much higher.
That said, the area changes much more than the distance I think, so overal brightness is probably still not equivalent to 100 nits (at 1m).
I think I can see how you've got here but that's not correct. It's about the light emitted per square meter of the source, not a measure of the light hitting a board some distance away.
Moving a screen closer doesn't make it more intense, because as you move closer it covers more of your vision. Total light increased, but not more intense.
Perhaps not materially so given the small relative difference.
> MicroLEDs use 10% of the power of current LCD displays, and they have five to 10 times higher brightness than OLEDs
Also don't forget that a lot of the crazy increases in brightness recently is just us learning you can run a ton of wattage through LEDs if you figure out heat dissipation. The 1 hour (non-rechargeable) battery life on these things likely means they are running very little power through the display (plus who wants anything even slightly warm on their eye?)
I stuck with glasses precisely because I didn’t want to deal with keeping contacts clean, shoving things in my eyes everyday, and retaining the ability to just pop them off and ignore the world.
Liking contacts is a very reasonable prerequisite. I've had no trouble with my contacts for the last 20 years.
But there are billions of people who wear glasses. We wear them for pretty much everything. We don’t care that we have glasses. But contacts make the technology “invisible” for “seamless uptake”?
Miniaturising things to contacts just sounds like they made everything at least an order of magnitude harder to achieve. Meanwhile they could have generated revenue from the glasses wearing population.
Not based on the PR photo. It would be very obvious to anyone who makes eye contact with you.
I'm allowed to share my opinion on here, it's an internet forum dude. Besides, I don't need a PhD to work out that I don't want to put that thing on my eyeball, or that some of the claims are pretty fantastical compared to the proof given.
If they put their prototype on Marques Brownlee or Linus and they said it was good then I would be inclined to believe it. But the CEO being the only wearer and then saying "wowowoww my product is so good this is amazing" isn't too convincing to me.
There are plenty of functional prototypes that never become a viable product. This, to me, has the smell of a company that won't be able to bring the product to fruition.
“the product is nowhere near ready for consumers, the technology doesn't appear to be there, and I can't imagine them being able to release anything other than a tech demo for many years” which is pure speculation and dismisses the entire news as.. a lie, I guess?
We shouldn't take what we read in a PR piece for granted. See:
https://swimswam.com/artificial-gills-breath-underwater-like...
https://wccftech.com/skarp-laser-razor/
https://greenerideal.com/news/vehicles/0627-solar-powered-ro...
And even some of the bigger failures like Theranos where the product was technologically infeasible from the start.
But with at least the three links I have listed - you can probably work out that they were infeasible by just applying common sense. A laser hot enough to easily burn through hair will probably burn your face, tiny artificial gills probably won't be able to keep up with human lungs, and we probably make roads out of tarmac and not glass for a reason.
IMO I think you can work out this is far away from a commercial product from similar logic - their prototype looks like something I wouldn't want to stick in my eye, their current battery can't last the day, and existing contact lens manufacturers can't make a comfortable lens that lasts over a month even without stuffing it with electronics.
Besides, it's not pure speculation, it's sitting on very solid foundations of reasoning that were outlined in the earlier post - Current cutting-edge tech for regular contact lenses has resulted in something (silicone hydro-gel) that lasts at best a month before it breaks down, but allows airflow through to the eye which is very important for long-term use and comfort. It's fair to be skeptical about overcoming this issue, which reasonably you would have to do if you're going to layer in some expensive tech and give a user a reasonable lifetime from the product.
I’m willing, he’ll I’d be happy and excited, to be proven wrong here, but it seems to me that the balance of probability tips in favour of them having something half-baked and non-viable, and my eyes are definitely too precious to risk them on a bad v1 product
Yes, it would be good if contacts were more comfortable, but maybe it's a cost problem rather than a lack of capability.
I remember being in the office on April 1st 2004 and seeing the front page of the first edition of the Evening Standard announcing how google were launching an email service to compete with hotmail which allowed upto 1GB of storage (hotmail was something like 2MB at the time).
I laughed at how a major newspaper had fallen for what was obviously an april fools joke. A day or two later I reflected that maybe I didn't know everything.
Whereas I'm sceptical of the technical/practical feasibility here - more like if someone came along and told me they were going to bring consumer-grade jetpacks to the market that people could use for their daily commute I would be sceptical that they could bring that to market successfully for a variety of reasons other than price/commercials (e.g. safety). This is before we even start talking about getting FDA approval for sticking all this stuff into a contact lens (so they will need to presumably prove it doesn't increase the chance of conjunctivitis, corneal abrasions, and eye irritation). IMO it's quite clear from looking at the existing version that it would cause eye irritation - there is a big block sticking out the front.
The probability of failure for this device is nonzero and and increases the longer you wear it. The failure modes are potentially disastrous, and there's likely no medical personnel nearby to intervene.
Now, in 2022, I still have no need of glasses, although I'd say my vision has degraded somewhat - still good enough to pass the driver exam uncorrected, however.
Night vision is objectively worse after lasik. Poorer light sensitivity, and for the first year, I had halos and starbursts around night light sources, especially when my eyes were tired/dry. This improved over time, however.
I'd do it all over again if I had to. I couldn't wear contacts anymore, they hurt my eyes, and I got used to navigating like a blind person when I didn't have my glasses, so lasik is a miraculous improvement.
For sure you all are going to have a conversation about reading glasses when you turn 40.
Both my parents' eyesight have actually improved significantly recently. They don't really need glasses anymore.
But I can also confirm that my sister who had severe long-sightedness got her eyesight corrected with lasik. That was about 15 years ago, and there are no problems so far.
What the hell?