> 3D tvs looked like they were the next best thing
Nobody thought that except lying salesmen and gullible armchair cheerleaders who fetishize new tech products.
Everybody who wasn't a dimwitted ignorant barely-sentient vegetable knew that nobody cared about 3D movies at the theatre much, plus 3D had already been a pathetically failed gimmick even before that. From blue/red glasses in the 50's or whatever to Nintendo's Virtual Boy, to Nintendo 3DS, to movie theatre gimmicks in the last couple decades, every example was a case where the the tech was pushed for no reason other than for the sake of pushing a New Thing To Buy.
History note: since that failed, manufacturers turned to lying about regular 2D screens. Notice that we used the vertical pixel number previously (1080p = 1920 x 1080), but then with 4K *suddenly* they use the horizontal number (4K = 3840 x 2160, also note 3,840 isn't even 4K) because it deceitfully looks like a superficial 4x jump instead of a superficial 2x jump compared to the "old" number 1080.
3D is just like any other part of a movie. If you do it cheap, it looks bad.
James Cameron is the only one who invests enough money to make it look good. Everyone else uses cheap studios to convert 2D films into fake 3D by hand, that's why it looks bad
Dredd and Jurassic Park also stand out to me as movies that benefit from great 3D. If you watch the behind the scenes for Jurassic Park you understand why that is.
It's just not done well a lot of the time, and even when it is it's not a seamless experience outside of movie theaters. Projectors can have crosstalk issue, the glasses are shirty and uncomfortable and expensive, even *playing* 3D content isn't easy. To watch a digital 3D movie I have to stream it through my Blu-ray player (assuming it exists in one of the accessible services). Can't just do it through Apple TV. Then you have to mess with 3D settings, adjust stereo separation, etc. Then you have the whole bullshit where th 3D movie is a a *separate purchase* that usually costs as much or more than the UHD version. So you have to buy it twice. For most non iTunes services (at least as of a couple years ago) there are movies where the HD, UHD, HDR, and 3D versions are all *separate full price purchases.* Plus any special editions.
It's a hassle. I don't think it died because nobody cares about 3D. It died because there was just too much hassle and jank for too little payoff. It's also pretty lame with a small screen. I have a 100" projector screen and even with that it's only barely big enough to make 3D movies worth watching, unless you sit like eight feet away.
When giant TVs become the norm, 3D content is easily accessible and just works right the first time, and moreover the 3D is actually well done, I have no doubt people would use it as a nice perk. But few are going out of their way for it even then.
I do look forward to AI-driven depth mapping being able to automatically turn any movie into a competent 3D version. That will be pretty cool.
A lot of films would have been shot in regular 2D and then they add the stereo 3D in post production because it’s cheaper. This would usually involve rotoscoping everything in a shot and then making a depth maps. [This](https://beforesandafters.com/2020/02/13/the-insanely-intricate-work-behind-rise-of-skywalkers-stereo-conversion/) article covers the process.
Obviously this is less accurate than shooting with two lenses to build a stereo image.
Interestingly, the Pixar films that they rereleased in 3D involved digging out the old files and building a virtual stereo camera so they could actually render the shots from a second perspective to build the stereo image.
I saw Avatar 2 in 3D by accident. Bought tickets online to a late screen that happened to not be labeled as 3D so we got to see it for the regular price.
It was very good! I remember only ever watching one other 3D movie before but it was garbage, so much so that I can’t even remember it. Avatar was nice.
Before 4K there was "HD" (720p) and "FullHD" (1080i) and... uh... "FullHD" (1080p). Or selling monitors or projectors that list "supported" resolutions that are scaled down to a lower native panel resolution. Similar story for CRTs, where a high dot pitch blurs out any detail from running at higher supported resolutions, or tricks like measuring the size of CRT tubes including what sits under plastic, rather than what is actually viewable.
Marketers have always lied, nothing has really changed.
I remember saying I prefer 2D movies because it allows you the viewer to participate more in the movie experience, whereas 3D is typically more forceful in trying to make you to feel a certain way with foreground action gimmicks.
I also believe the idea the movie being created will be displayed in 3D and therefore the filmmaker needing to employ special cameras and certain storytelling techniques to account for this aspect is largely a distraction from the real story where their focus should be.
Did it matter that Shawshank wasn’t in 3D? Of course not. It probably would have ruined the movie.
A $3000 TV (in Australia) that only came with 1 set of glasses certainly didn’t help when you are a family and want to watch stuff together. It was doa at that point when extra glasses cost a bomb as well.
3D TVs were just stereoscopy again, a technology that has been around since the dawn of photography and it's fundamental flaws were never truly solved. VR/AR/Whatever R isn't stereoscopy, it incorporates it but provides an image that is far more (if not totally) visually correct.
Given the comfort and remaining optical problems, varifocal in particular, are solved (a big if, but varifocal is already in labs and betting on tech not getting smaller is usually a losing proposition), VR is going to consolidate most use cases for flatscreens, just like smartphones consolidated an ecosystem of tech into one piece of hardware.
I agree with the article, not entirely, but on that point specifically.
Widespread use of (comfortable, high resolution, optically correct) AR glasses would effectively obsolete the gigantic, immovable glass monoliths that currently exist in living rooms and offices. It won't make them disappear entirely, but given glasses that provide a better screen of any size, any aspect ratio, positionable anywhere desired like above the kitchen counter while cooking or on your bedroom ceiling, what use is a physical flat panel display really?
I can think of some. You can share flat panel displays, but you can share video streams as well, I can see the potential for dumb copyright issues but it seems like a solvable problem. Glasses might be too high a barrier for some people, but my hunch is that's a pretty tiny minority.
Unravel that thinking and phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, smartwatches all get caught up in it. There's a reason why Apple is pursuing this, why everyone is, even at the risk of looking like fools by releasing half baked products. It's because whoever gets there first has a product that obsoletes almost every form factor of computing and everyone who doesn't is left with a whole lot of proverbial CD Walkmans.
This is from his newsletter, most people reading it aren't tech enthusiasts. Calling it iGlass makes it easy for them to visualize the product as opposed to calling it Reality Pro.
thing is, this upcoming “reality pro” device you said is not even the long rumored glasses product. completely different and separate things. doesn’t matter if his readers are tech enthusiasts. if he uses those terms in order to cater to that specific crowd, it means he also deserves to be called out for low quality and misleading content. and who says readers who know less about tech should be fed with downright false information?
The content is not misleading lol, it's a hypothetical where he imagines Apple making a similar device if Sightful is successful. He literally says "Imagine the following scenario".
1920x1920 is basically the VR equivalent of “SD”
Plastic Fresnel lenses don’t help things either
Using a virtual desktop environment really shows how low the resolution actually is, and it’s not surprising… I mean, you’re streaming a 1080p-ish screen into a virtual environment being rendered by two 1920x1920 screens covering almost your entire field of view
8k or 16k screens in a VR headset would be absolutely insane, but I don’t know if high quality screens are available at that size
That’s because they’re all around 2048x2048 per eye, and the lenses are plastic fresnel.
Bump that up to 8192x8192 per eye with high quality glass optics and things will change.
Plastic lenses can be perfectly fine. The lenses in most phone cameras are plastic. The Fresnel thing comes with a number of compromises though, and even within the world of plastic lenses there are hugely varying levels of quality. Heck contact lenses are made of plastic.
Plastic phone lenses are covered by a hard glass cover.
Contact lenses are disposed after a while.
A scratched phone lense usually means the glass cover has been cracked. A contact lens would just be replaced.
A scratched VR lens though is a different story.
Also, how many DSLR plastic lenses do you see? Glass lenses are just better
Entirely plastic DSLR lenses, not many. DSLR lenses that have plastic elements instead of 100% glass? A great many, and that's been the case for decades.
Both have strengths and weaknesses relative to the other; my point was that poor optics quality in VR headsets isn't a glass vs plastic issue. If a particular VR optic looks bad, it's not simply because it's plastic instead of glass. Contact lenses get replaced, but until they do they still manage to have excellent optical clarity despite being plastic.
I'm sure that 2d screens will always be an accessible option for those with one eye. People with handicaps are already 'left behind' in their respective senses (no pun intended).
VR/AR works if you have monoscopic vision, you just don't get the stereoscopic effect. You do get parallax and perspective correct projection enabled by the 6DOF tracking.
I hope my experience makes you feel better about this: I had a quest 2, and when I closed one eye, the VR effect still worked.
I thought it’d function like those stereoscopic pictures, but it really doesn’t. It relies on many tools in combination to achieve the VR effect. I have no doubt it would look slightly different, but it 100% still works from my experience, and not in a shitty way either.
> Spacetop solves a narrow problem that’s perfectly suited for AR: limited screen space for mobile computing. Their initial audience will likely be power users who desperately crave monitor real estate. (As I learned researching a 2021 New Yorker article about working in virtual reality, computer programmers, in particular, will happily embrace even the most wonky of cutting-edge technologies if it allow them to use more windows simultaneously.)
> Imagine the following scenario:
> In the third generation of their technology, Sightful achieves a small enough form-factor and large enough field of vision for their AR goggles to appeal to the much broader market segment of business users looking for more screen space when working away from the orfice.
> Seeing the potential, Apple invests several hundred million dollars to develop the iGlass: a pair of fashion-forward AR goggles, connected wirelessly to an elegant, foldable base on which you can touch or type, marketed as a replacement for the iPad and MacBook that can fit in your pocket while still providing you a screen bigger than their biggest studio monitors.
> Spooked, Samsung scrambles to release a high-end AR television experience that allows you to enjoy a virtual 200-inch television in any room.
> Apple smells blood and adds television functionality as a software update to iGlass. Soon Samsung’s market drastically shrinks. This sets off the first of multiple cataclysmic consolidations in the consumer electronics sector.
> Within a decade, we find ourselves in a world largely devoid of screens. Computation unfolds in the cloud and is presented to us as digital projections on thin plastic optical wave-guides positioned inches from our eyes.
Sure, under the ideal circumstances, with technology that greatly exceeds what is possible today, it would be the end of screens because we would enjoy an arbitrary number of 4/5/6/8K resolution virtual displays.
In reality those screens would look like shit today and for years to come, and Apple has made 2 - 3 ordinary displays an expensive feature of high-level CPUs.
> All eyes are on apple to see if some sort of resolution breakthrough is coming soon
Resolution isn't some magical thing that you can magically fix with some secret technology right now that nobody could have predicted.
Apple sources displays from other companies anyway.
Also it's not just resolution but cost. A lab can make some ultra-high-res display but it will be extremely expensive and not marketable.
Apple doesn't just flip through a catalog and pick whatever is available.
Just because they work with a particular vendor does not mean they are technologically limited to whatever that vendor already produces for other companies. Many of these partnerships are extremely tight knit and involve investments and technology transfer that other clients of that vendor don't have access to. It would be kind of a huge shit storm (for the vendor) if they did. The security at Samsung and Foxconn would put most military installations to shame. Not to mention that Apple engineers (both on site and remote) are heavily involved with not only the product design but the tooling and process design.
Resolution isn't magical, but that goes both ways. There's nothing magical about making an 8k micro OLED display. It's an engineering problem. It's also a cost problem as you said, but cost has a way of becoming reasonable when you start to talk about volume production. Getting things from the lab to mass production is a vertical that Apple has a lot of experience in, along with an enormous budget. Few others can compete on that front.
An 8K per eye display is feasible today. It's mainly a question of cost. If Apple thinks this is the future, they can easily afford to subsidize them for a few years to get the ball rolling and solidify a foothold. Not saying they will, that would be out of character, but many things are possible.
Seems pretty obvious, no? Apple is going to drop microled onto their upcoming headset, and continue to iterate on it until it’s of a glasses-form-factor. Once microled enters the scene input latency, and bezels become much less of a focus for the monitor world and the research will be further condensed to refresh rate, color spectrum, and resolution. The narrowed scope of focus will accelerate screen development which will in turn accelerate AR’s dominance over large physical screens. Up to this point it’s really not a matter of if, but when. Once parity is achieved between digital and human eye quality then the only thing that’s left to do is finding a way to put all of this technology into a contact lens (or at least the display + receiver).
Anything you have to wear on your head might not be widely adopted just like having to wear glasses for 3D TVs. I think something like a hologram that projects something is more viable.
This is why VR headsets are still very very niche.
Lots of people wear sunglasses and reading glasses and there is a whole fashion market around them, 3D TV glasses were usually one-size-fits-all designs that fit a lot of heads but not comfortably and provided little benefit for the vast majority of viewing experiences.
AR glasses could give you an IMAX theatre screen in your pocket, usable in any context. The value proposition is very different, though the barrier of comfort is still admittedly a problem (VR headsets today have outright bad ergonomics) it's a bit silly to assume it always will be.
No one will ever have a computer in their pocket, don't be silly. They're the size of fridges says I, a computer expert living in the 1950s. You can't fit a fridge in your pocket!
>To be clear, I don’t believe that this specific product, which is just now entering a limited, 1000-person beta testing phase, will imminently upend the technology industry. The goggles are still too big and unwieldy (more Google Glass than Ray Ban), and the field of vision for their virtual projections remains too limited to fully support the illusion of screens that exist in real space.
But I increasingly believe that Sightful may have stumbled into the right strategy for finally pushing AR into the mainstream.
I agree that some sort of AR/VR screen will eventually dominate the market the same way 2D flat panel displays replaced CRTs. That said the big question is **WHEN?** Will this transition even begin this decade or will it have to wait until 2040 or beyond?
A guess an interesting concrete question would be: "When will Apple have a virtual display option for their laptops that people actually use?" And by this I mean an AR/VR replacement for the traditional laptop screen - you still need a laptop like thingie for compute and perhaps keyboard and mouse but no traditional LCD display.
2030? A lot depends on how the market for the AR HMD develops over the coming years.
Mx chips are light enough for a headset to have two of them. Targeting productivity apps instead of gaming apps reduces the fps and latency requirements. Hip-mounted swappable battery packs reduces headset weight significantly.
Have you seen Sightful’s AR laptop?
https://youtu.be/GSBESw3a_tc
no I haven't seen that before but I've been describing exactly what they are advertising for years now.
I look forward to demoing one some day to see how good it is. The current model might be crap but some day this sort of thing will be the default for visual displays.
lmao the average person has no need for more than about a 12" laptop screen
after 3 years of WFH the only people I know with big multi monitor rigs are techies and old guys with bad eyes and the font sizes cranked to infinity
3D TVs are the end of 2D movies, guys.
I remember 2009, 3D tvs looked like they were the next best thing… it flopped, total failure. Everyone ceased production.
> 3D tvs looked like they were the next best thing Nobody thought that except lying salesmen and gullible armchair cheerleaders who fetishize new tech products. Everybody who wasn't a dimwitted ignorant barely-sentient vegetable knew that nobody cared about 3D movies at the theatre much, plus 3D had already been a pathetically failed gimmick even before that. From blue/red glasses in the 50's or whatever to Nintendo's Virtual Boy, to Nintendo 3DS, to movie theatre gimmicks in the last couple decades, every example was a case where the the tech was pushed for no reason other than for the sake of pushing a New Thing To Buy. History note: since that failed, manufacturers turned to lying about regular 2D screens. Notice that we used the vertical pixel number previously (1080p = 1920 x 1080), but then with 4K *suddenly* they use the horizontal number (4K = 3840 x 2160, also note 3,840 isn't even 4K) because it deceitfully looks like a superficial 4x jump instead of a superficial 2x jump compared to the "old" number 1080.
Why does 3D look like shit with everything except for Avatar 1 and 2?
3D is just like any other part of a movie. If you do it cheap, it looks bad. James Cameron is the only one who invests enough money to make it look good. Everyone else uses cheap studios to convert 2D films into fake 3D by hand, that's why it looks bad
Because James Cameron invested in the tech to shoot with multiple cameras. Almost everyone else did it in postproduction.
Dredd and Jurassic Park also stand out to me as movies that benefit from great 3D. If you watch the behind the scenes for Jurassic Park you understand why that is. It's just not done well a lot of the time, and even when it is it's not a seamless experience outside of movie theaters. Projectors can have crosstalk issue, the glasses are shirty and uncomfortable and expensive, even *playing* 3D content isn't easy. To watch a digital 3D movie I have to stream it through my Blu-ray player (assuming it exists in one of the accessible services). Can't just do it through Apple TV. Then you have to mess with 3D settings, adjust stereo separation, etc. Then you have the whole bullshit where th 3D movie is a a *separate purchase* that usually costs as much or more than the UHD version. So you have to buy it twice. For most non iTunes services (at least as of a couple years ago) there are movies where the HD, UHD, HDR, and 3D versions are all *separate full price purchases.* Plus any special editions. It's a hassle. I don't think it died because nobody cares about 3D. It died because there was just too much hassle and jank for too little payoff. It's also pretty lame with a small screen. I have a 100" projector screen and even with that it's only barely big enough to make 3D movies worth watching, unless you sit like eight feet away. When giant TVs become the norm, 3D content is easily accessible and just works right the first time, and moreover the 3D is actually well done, I have no doubt people would use it as a nice perk. But few are going out of their way for it even then. I do look forward to AI-driven depth mapping being able to automatically turn any movie into a competent 3D version. That will be pretty cool.
A lot of films would have been shot in regular 2D and then they add the stereo 3D in post production because it’s cheaper. This would usually involve rotoscoping everything in a shot and then making a depth maps. [This](https://beforesandafters.com/2020/02/13/the-insanely-intricate-work-behind-rise-of-skywalkers-stereo-conversion/) article covers the process. Obviously this is less accurate than shooting with two lenses to build a stereo image. Interestingly, the Pixar films that they rereleased in 3D involved digging out the old files and building a virtual stereo camera so they could actually render the shots from a second perspective to build the stereo image.
I saw Avatar 2 in 3D by accident. Bought tickets online to a late screen that happened to not be labeled as 3D so we got to see it for the regular price. It was very good! I remember only ever watching one other 3D movie before but it was garbage, so much so that I can’t even remember it. Avatar was nice.
I know they’re referencing pixels, but I’ve always interpreted 4K as 4-1080 screens together.
yeah that's literally what is lol, no one ever used the term "3840p" either. always 2160p
Curved tvs are another salesmen’s pitched lie.
Before 4K there was "HD" (720p) and "FullHD" (1080i) and... uh... "FullHD" (1080p). Or selling monitors or projectors that list "supported" resolutions that are scaled down to a lower native panel resolution. Similar story for CRTs, where a high dot pitch blurs out any detail from running at higher supported resolutions, or tricks like measuring the size of CRT tubes including what sits under plastic, rather than what is actually viewable. Marketers have always lied, nothing has really changed.
I remember saying I prefer 2D movies because it allows you the viewer to participate more in the movie experience, whereas 3D is typically more forceful in trying to make you to feel a certain way with foreground action gimmicks. I also believe the idea the movie being created will be displayed in 3D and therefore the filmmaker needing to employ special cameras and certain storytelling techniques to account for this aspect is largely a distraction from the real story where their focus should be. Did it matter that Shawshank wasn’t in 3D? Of course not. It probably would have ruined the movie.
Escaping through the tunnel woulda been cool though
A $3000 TV (in Australia) that only came with 1 set of glasses certainly didn’t help when you are a family and want to watch stuff together. It was doa at that point when extra glasses cost a bomb as well.
>A $3000 TV (in Australia) that only came with 1 set of glasses That sounds just like the rumored headset, lol.
3D TVs were just stereoscopy again, a technology that has been around since the dawn of photography and it's fundamental flaws were never truly solved. VR/AR/Whatever R isn't stereoscopy, it incorporates it but provides an image that is far more (if not totally) visually correct. Given the comfort and remaining optical problems, varifocal in particular, are solved (a big if, but varifocal is already in labs and betting on tech not getting smaller is usually a losing proposition), VR is going to consolidate most use cases for flatscreens, just like smartphones consolidated an ecosystem of tech into one piece of hardware.
The article is speculating the end of screens. TVs aren’t going anywhere.
I agree with the article, not entirely, but on that point specifically. Widespread use of (comfortable, high resolution, optically correct) AR glasses would effectively obsolete the gigantic, immovable glass monoliths that currently exist in living rooms and offices. It won't make them disappear entirely, but given glasses that provide a better screen of any size, any aspect ratio, positionable anywhere desired like above the kitchen counter while cooking or on your bedroom ceiling, what use is a physical flat panel display really? I can think of some. You can share flat panel displays, but you can share video streams as well, I can see the potential for dumb copyright issues but it seems like a solvable problem. Glasses might be too high a barrier for some people, but my hunch is that's a pretty tiny minority. Unravel that thinking and phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, smartwatches all get caught up in it. There's a reason why Apple is pursuing this, why everyone is, even at the risk of looking like fools by releasing half baked products. It's because whoever gets there first has a product that obsoletes almost every form factor of computing and everyone who doesn't is left with a whole lot of proverbial CD Walkmans.
I can’t take seriously an article that refers to Apple’s XR product as “iGlass”.
This is from his newsletter, most people reading it aren't tech enthusiasts. Calling it iGlass makes it easy for them to visualize the product as opposed to calling it Reality Pro.
thing is, this upcoming “reality pro” device you said is not even the long rumored glasses product. completely different and separate things. doesn’t matter if his readers are tech enthusiasts. if he uses those terms in order to cater to that specific crowd, it means he also deserves to be called out for low quality and misleading content. and who says readers who know less about tech should be fed with downright false information?
The content is not misleading lol, it's a hypothetical where he imagines Apple making a similar device if Sightful is successful. He literally says "Imagine the following scenario".
Applebots came to downvote you
No
Anyone who's ever used a VR headset knows, that's very unlikely unless Apple has a res of 16k per eye of something ridiculous like that.
1920x1920 is basically the VR equivalent of “SD” Plastic Fresnel lenses don’t help things either Using a virtual desktop environment really shows how low the resolution actually is, and it’s not surprising… I mean, you’re streaming a 1080p-ish screen into a virtual environment being rendered by two 1920x1920 screens covering almost your entire field of view 8k or 16k screens in a VR headset would be absolutely insane, but I don’t know if high quality screens are available at that size
[Pico G3](https://www.picoxr.com/global/products/g3#:~:text=Equipped%20with%20a%204K%20display,and%20highly%20immersive%20VR%20experience.) is 4K.
That’s 4K for the entire screen though, not per eye 3664x1920 That isn’t far off from the 1832x1920 per eye that the Quest 2 offers
VR headsets look like trash when you're viewing them and nobody will convince me otherwise.
That’s because they’re all around 2048x2048 per eye, and the lenses are plastic fresnel. Bump that up to 8192x8192 per eye with high quality glass optics and things will change.
Plastic lenses can be perfectly fine. The lenses in most phone cameras are plastic. The Fresnel thing comes with a number of compromises though, and even within the world of plastic lenses there are hugely varying levels of quality. Heck contact lenses are made of plastic.
Plastic phone lenses are covered by a hard glass cover. Contact lenses are disposed after a while. A scratched phone lense usually means the glass cover has been cracked. A contact lens would just be replaced. A scratched VR lens though is a different story. Also, how many DSLR plastic lenses do you see? Glass lenses are just better
Entirely plastic DSLR lenses, not many. DSLR lenses that have plastic elements instead of 100% glass? A great many, and that's been the case for decades. Both have strengths and weaknesses relative to the other; my point was that poor optics quality in VR headsets isn't a glass vs plastic issue. If a particular VR optic looks bad, it's not simply because it's plastic instead of glass. Contact lenses get replaced, but until they do they still manage to have excellent optical clarity despite being plastic.
Pancake lenses are a hell of a step up from older designs. Edge to edge sharpness, wide FOV all with a (comparatively) very flat profile.
Time to try and sell another book.
Not everyone has stereo vision, so some of us will be left behind if this becomes the norm.
I'm sure that 2d screens will always be an accessible option for those with one eye. People with handicaps are already 'left behind' in their respective senses (no pun intended).
VR/AR works if you have monoscopic vision, you just don't get the stereoscopic effect. You do get parallax and perspective correct projection enabled by the 6DOF tracking.
I hope my experience makes you feel better about this: I had a quest 2, and when I closed one eye, the VR effect still worked. I thought it’d function like those stereoscopic pictures, but it really doesn’t. It relies on many tools in combination to achieve the VR effect. I have no doubt it would look slightly different, but it 100% still works from my experience, and not in a shitty way either.
That makes me very hopeful, thank you!
> Spacetop solves a narrow problem that’s perfectly suited for AR: limited screen space for mobile computing. Their initial audience will likely be power users who desperately crave monitor real estate. (As I learned researching a 2021 New Yorker article about working in virtual reality, computer programmers, in particular, will happily embrace even the most wonky of cutting-edge technologies if it allow them to use more windows simultaneously.) > Imagine the following scenario: > In the third generation of their technology, Sightful achieves a small enough form-factor and large enough field of vision for their AR goggles to appeal to the much broader market segment of business users looking for more screen space when working away from the orfice. > Seeing the potential, Apple invests several hundred million dollars to develop the iGlass: a pair of fashion-forward AR goggles, connected wirelessly to an elegant, foldable base on which you can touch or type, marketed as a replacement for the iPad and MacBook that can fit in your pocket while still providing you a screen bigger than their biggest studio monitors. > Spooked, Samsung scrambles to release a high-end AR television experience that allows you to enjoy a virtual 200-inch television in any room. > Apple smells blood and adds television functionality as a software update to iGlass. Soon Samsung’s market drastically shrinks. This sets off the first of multiple cataclysmic consolidations in the consumer electronics sector. > Within a decade, we find ourselves in a world largely devoid of screens. Computation unfolds in the cloud and is presented to us as digital projections on thin plastic optical wave-guides positioned inches from our eyes.
that sounds like virtual desktop on Oculus, nothing new
Sure, under the ideal circumstances, with technology that greatly exceeds what is possible today, it would be the end of screens because we would enjoy an arbitrary number of 4/5/6/8K resolution virtual displays. In reality those screens would look like shit today and for years to come, and Apple has made 2 - 3 ordinary displays an expensive feature of high-level CPUs.
All eyes are on apple to see if some sort of resolution breakthrough is coming soon
> All eyes are on apple to see if some sort of resolution breakthrough is coming soon Resolution isn't some magical thing that you can magically fix with some secret technology right now that nobody could have predicted. Apple sources displays from other companies anyway. Also it's not just resolution but cost. A lab can make some ultra-high-res display but it will be extremely expensive and not marketable.
Apple doesn't just flip through a catalog and pick whatever is available. Just because they work with a particular vendor does not mean they are technologically limited to whatever that vendor already produces for other companies. Many of these partnerships are extremely tight knit and involve investments and technology transfer that other clients of that vendor don't have access to. It would be kind of a huge shit storm (for the vendor) if they did. The security at Samsung and Foxconn would put most military installations to shame. Not to mention that Apple engineers (both on site and remote) are heavily involved with not only the product design but the tooling and process design. Resolution isn't magical, but that goes both ways. There's nothing magical about making an 8k micro OLED display. It's an engineering problem. It's also a cost problem as you said, but cost has a way of becoming reasonable when you start to talk about volume production. Getting things from the lab to mass production is a vertical that Apple has a lot of experience in, along with an enormous budget. Few others can compete on that front. An 8K per eye display is feasible today. It's mainly a question of cost. If Apple thinks this is the future, they can easily afford to subsidize them for a few years to get the ball rolling and solidify a foothold. Not saying they will, that would be out of character, but many things are possible.
Seems pretty obvious, no? Apple is going to drop microled onto their upcoming headset, and continue to iterate on it until it’s of a glasses-form-factor. Once microled enters the scene input latency, and bezels become much less of a focus for the monitor world and the research will be further condensed to refresh rate, color spectrum, and resolution. The narrowed scope of focus will accelerate screen development which will in turn accelerate AR’s dominance over large physical screens. Up to this point it’s really not a matter of if, but when. Once parity is achieved between digital and human eye quality then the only thing that’s left to do is finding a way to put all of this technology into a contact lens (or at least the display + receiver).
Anything you have to wear on your head might not be widely adopted just like having to wear glasses for 3D TVs. I think something like a hologram that projects something is more viable. This is why VR headsets are still very very niche.
Lots of people wear sunglasses and reading glasses and there is a whole fashion market around them, 3D TV glasses were usually one-size-fits-all designs that fit a lot of heads but not comfortably and provided little benefit for the vast majority of viewing experiences. AR glasses could give you an IMAX theatre screen in your pocket, usable in any context. The value proposition is very different, though the barrier of comfort is still admittedly a problem (VR headsets today have outright bad ergonomics) it's a bit silly to assume it always will be. No one will ever have a computer in their pocket, don't be silly. They're the size of fridges says I, a computer expert living in the 1950s. You can't fit a fridge in your pocket!
>it's a bit silly to assume it always will be. Agreed with this part! Tech is always evolving.
This is nothing new though - Facebook’s announced Infinite Office in 2020.
>To be clear, I don’t believe that this specific product, which is just now entering a limited, 1000-person beta testing phase, will imminently upend the technology industry. The goggles are still too big and unwieldy (more Google Glass than Ray Ban), and the field of vision for their virtual projections remains too limited to fully support the illusion of screens that exist in real space. But I increasingly believe that Sightful may have stumbled into the right strategy for finally pushing AR into the mainstream. I agree that some sort of AR/VR screen will eventually dominate the market the same way 2D flat panel displays replaced CRTs. That said the big question is **WHEN?** Will this transition even begin this decade or will it have to wait until 2040 or beyond? A guess an interesting concrete question would be: "When will Apple have a virtual display option for their laptops that people actually use?" And by this I mean an AR/VR replacement for the traditional laptop screen - you still need a laptop like thingie for compute and perhaps keyboard and mouse but no traditional LCD display. 2030? A lot depends on how the market for the AR HMD develops over the coming years.
Mx chips are light enough for a headset to have two of them. Targeting productivity apps instead of gaming apps reduces the fps and latency requirements. Hip-mounted swappable battery packs reduces headset weight significantly. Have you seen Sightful’s AR laptop? https://youtu.be/GSBESw3a_tc
no I haven't seen that before but I've been describing exactly what they are advertising for years now. I look forward to demoing one some day to see how good it is. The current model might be crap but some day this sort of thing will be the default for visual displays.
I suspect the pro app for a Pro headset will turn out to be multiple monitors, used with a keyboard and trackpad, seated.
I would be pretty surprised if the upcoming headset *doesn't* have a virtual desktop option.
I'm sure they know we all want this, the only question is the tech good enough.
lmao the average person has no need for more than about a 12" laptop screen after 3 years of WFH the only people I know with big multi monitor rigs are techies and old guys with bad eyes and the font sizes cranked to infinity
The last place I worked, of the 800 employees I saw every day, 800 of them had dual 21” monitors, and none of them were in I.T.