Pioneer in XR+AI+Spatial Computing -- 30+ years Tech+Design -- now Consultant, Advisor & Board Member -- former 🥽🌎👓📍🐭 (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Disney) -- @avibarzeev.bsky.social
Proper focus is critical for all-day wearable glasses. If you're driving, you want the world to be in focus, not a heads-up display that might be focused at 1-2m away. When you're walking down the street, AR effects could be planted anywhere from arms reach to blocks away, and the world and graphics should always match. Power and heat are also critical. It can't feel hot, so energy is limited to milliwatts. The glasses may be off a lot of the time. With optical-see-through (OST) the natural photons come for free in both directions (showing your eyes and seeing the world). Video-pass-through (VPT) requires constant power to see anything. Dimming is critical too, unless you can produce more light than the sun reflects off outdoor objects. In terms of max light, we already wear sunglasses for sunlight that's too bright for comfort. For example, if you look at a wall that's half-sun-lit / half shadow, the virtual stuff must work as well in both cases. For best results, we need both additive and subtractive displays. And don't forget fashion, fit, and comfort. Glasses for the masses must fit many different head/brow/nose sizes, shapes and styles, and must accommodate your normal prescription perfectly. They can't weigh much more than normal eyewear. Ideally, we can add back a superpower in re-focusing the real world near or far based on gaze too. That by itself would make a billion dollar product even without AI or most AR features.
👓 What is needed for social acceptance of AR glasses? "There is the evidence on how important it is to show the face; it’s a huge complication for hardware, but it’s important enough to do it to provide this indirect eye contact." [25:46] by Tomas Sluka Discover the rest of the discussion together with Naamah Argaman, Avi Bar-Zeev, Martin Banks and myself in the panel we held at AWE on see-through displays: https://lnkd.in/eZzyewhj Thanks to Sonya Haskins and Ori Inbar for another amazing edition of AWE!
PANEL: Beyond Passthrough: How New Display Technologies Can Shape The Future of AR Glasses
https://www.youtube.com/
Neil Redding
5mo
As a lifelong wearer of prescription glasses, I can’t believe I’m still waiting for dynamic focus in my regular glasses. I now have both progressive lenses for most contexts + single-focus lenses for computer use — and yet there are still many moments in the day where I put up with incorrect correction for a particular subject. I’d say well over $1B is available for any company that delivers autofocusing eyeglasses.
Aaron Pulkka
5mo
Worth noting that a heads-up display which is in focus with the world outside the car, would actually be safer than the on-dash displays we currently need to readjust our focus away from the road to view.
Ross Finman
5mo
The focus issue is so key. Having a HUD on my car's windshield that is annoying, and even having a camera-based rearview mirror 60 cm away (instead of a mirror at ~infinity) is bothersome. Always appreciate the points you highlight!
Larry Rosenthal
5mo
the eyes have ALWAYS been the mirrors to ones soul... but of course the late 20th century mass memed "sunglasses" as all occasion wear;)
100% agree to all the tech you mention, it’s a hard set of problems to be sure. But about halfway down you say “don’t forget fashion” and I have to slam on the brakes and say “for the masses, fashion is almost number one.” Why? Because it’s on my face, and the face is the real estate of our identity. You put something on your face and that is what you want the world to see you as. Go ahead and radically change the shape and tint of your prescription glasses for one day at work and record how much of that day you spend discussing how you now look and how you came to the decision to change. Our face is like our signature, except instead of an identifying mark, it’s in many ways the associated “avatar” people have to their entire mental model of us as a person. It needs to be personalizable in a way that smartphones never needed. Heck, even eyeglasses themselves weren’t very publically accessible until they became fashionably flexible. Again, I agree with your list of tech needs. Personally I see eye tracking as a bit more important than most, but it’s because I feel wearables need to understand the wearer deeply and eye tracking is the best way up that mountain. But, Fashion will hold the gate closed until it’s ready.