His latest demo of Realtalk, Biomolecular design in Realtalk, showcases the strenghts of Dynamicland. Really impressive stuff, as usual.
https://youtu.be/_gXiVOmaVSo?t=865
Second, that _completely_ ignores touch, which is the largest of the senses. There's a reason car companies are going back to knobs!
There are prescription sunglasses for shortsightness, astigmatism, etc.
So the sunglasses-form VR would just have to cater for that. Apple's headset-form VR already does (offers the option to have prescription lenses in it).
Day to day, I wear glasses, and have no plans to change that. If I'm going to a show or a movie, or if I'm planning on spending a lot of time outside, I wear the contacts. The contacts are set up for distance not reading. and that's becoming more important as I get older.
It can be disorienting for a few minutes, I forget how much glasses distort peripheral vision.
I get a small supply of daily disposables. I keep a pair in my laptop bag. With vision as poor as ours, you know how difficult it is if your glasses are lost or damaged. It's not life changing, but it is a genuine quality of life improvement for me.
I encourage you to get a contact exam, to verify you can wear contacts. They should teach you how to put them in and take them out. It can be stressful, but you never touch your eye. The doctor or assistant can answer any questions you have. They're not particularly expensive (in the US anyway). You don't have to wear them. Try them out, they might have some benefits you haven't realized.
That said, I don't think i'd wear contacts just for AR/VR. The headsets already seem like a hassle, and extra tooling to make my eyes use them effectively, even more of a hassle.
How many megapixels equivalent does the eye have?
The eye is not a single frame snapshot camera. It is more like a video stream. The eye moves rapidly in small angular amounts and continually updates the image in one's brain to "paint" the detail. We also have two eyes, and our brains combine the signals to increase the resolution further. We also typically move our eyes around the scene to gather more information. Because of these factors, the eye plus brain assembles a higher resolution image than possible with the number of photoreceptors in the retina. So the megapixel equivalent numbers below refer to the spatial detail in an image that would be required to show what the human eye could see when you view a scene.
Based on the above data for the resolution of the human eye, let's try a "small" example first. Consider a view in front of you that is 90 degrees by 90 degrees, like looking through an open window at a scene. The number of pixels would be 90 degrees * 60 arc-minutes/degree * 1/0.3 * 90 * 60 * 1/0.3 = 324,000,000 pixels (324 megapixels). At any one moment, you actually do not perceive that many pixels, but your eye moves around the scene to see all the detail you want. But the human eye really sees a larger field of view, close to 180 degrees. Let's be conservative and use 120 degrees for the field of view. Then we would see 120 * 120 * 60 * 60 / (0.3 * 0.3) = 576 megapixels. The full angle of human vision would require even more megapixels. This kind of image detail requires A large format camera to record.
That said, it makes more salient for me the dichotomy between demos and reality. This demo looks very much like molecular biology does in the movies.
But what is it to look like something "in the movies"? I don't know exactly... All tools have overhead, no matter how cleverly designed. Maybe "the movies" is what you get when you ignore this overhead.
There's a clear phenomenon in looking back on old demos and concluding we must have taken a wrong turn because our systems are still not as good. This is true of Victor's own demos from a decade ago, and many well-known demos from decades earlier.
But rewatching a Victor demo earlier this year, which had blown my mind when I saw it live, it seemed full of a kind of naivety (and a bit of sleight of hand). Of course, he made clear it was only a demo. It was meant to inspire. But now I feel that's an easy excuse for not investigating what really advances our use of tools – and what holds it back.
> …what really advances our use of tools - and what holds us back.
It’s money! It’s cost! The cheaper tool wins.
“Worse Is Better”
Billionaires still want ROI.