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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

But AR requires several technological leaps beyond VR in terms of transparent screens and location tracking. So I'd expect to see usable VR headsets to appear in homes a generation two before AR ones.

I mean, the HoloLens is additive. That means if you want to show a dark object in a room with white walls, you cant.

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> I mean, the HoloLens is additive. That means if you want to show a dark object in a room with white walls, you cant.

You sure? Do you have a source you can cite?

https://twitter.com/akipman/status/595028946720137216

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-...

I'm kind of delighted that the author of that article, Michael Abrash, worked at Microsoft (twice), at Valve, and is now at Oculus.

Most of the journalists w/ first person demos have given relatively poor descriptions, but Oliver Kreylos a UC Davis VR researcher recently published a very in-depth review of his experience w/ the Hololens hardware, including his observations on FOV, occlusion, etc: http://doc-ok.org/?p=1223

Hololens hands on show it to be a ready product. It doesn't require any breakthroughs.

One reviewer was shocked at how opaque the holograms were. I think the situation you're describing with a black object has already been solved:

>What did surprise me, though, was how little opacity there was to the holograms. I expected them to look somewhat transparent, with the background shining through. That really wasn’t the case, though. They looked really solid and there was almost no transparency.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/30/hololens-is-real/

The tech industry has been investing and buying AR companies left and right. http://www.forbes.com/sites/davealtavilla/2015/05/30/apple-f...

There is a lot of money in the AR space right now, and the different technologies for AR right now take several different approaches.

1) CastAR (Eye Glasses that reflect back light to the viewer) looks really promissing: http://castar.com/ I seriously could see this taking over monitors for some people for computing especially if there is security or privacy issues.

2) Magic Leap (Sounds like Science Fiction, have little faith in their promis right now) Beams light into your eye in a way that won't make you sick or give you a head ache. Serious technology problem with silicon photonics production that has stumped Intel right now http://www.technologyreview.com/news/538146/magic-leap-needs...

3) Microsoft Future Vision 2011 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0 Uses glasses to overlay a translation on signs (Traditional idea of glasses with transparent display) I find this to be a decade away easily.

4) Contact lens (Super cool idea not sure how many of us will drop a contact into our eyes) Not only AR but the ability to measure sugar levels for diabetics. http://venturebeat.com/2015/04/25/the-future-of-augmented-re...

5) AR looks to have a $120 Billion dollar projection and VR has a $30 Billion dollar projections http://fortune.com/2015/04/25/augmented-reality-virtual-real...

Magic Leap, however, is apparently not exclusively additive

Transparent screens are definitely the way forward, but don't discount the possibilities of camera-to-screen passthrough within Gen 1 VR devices. Ultimately the distinction between AR and VR is going to dissolve to the point where it's just different ends of a spectrum -- add enough objects and backgrounds to the real world, and you get a virtual world.

I wonder why we need transparent screens though. I see AR as a subset of VR, not a superset of it. Once you've solved the field-of-view, screen resolution and (I'd also argue) dynamic range/colour accuracy of VR, you add a front-facing, wide-FOV stereo camera to it and there you have it, AR with the dark object problem already solved for you.

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