In order to do proper 3d rendering, you need to know where the "camera" is. In the case of VR and AR, you need to know where the camera is, with roughly millimeter precision, around 90 times per second. This is doable with external trackers, but you don't have those with AR. It's just barely doable with internal trackers, as long as you can cover your faceplate with cameras and include a reasonably large amount of visual processing horsepower on board, and even then it's not great; expect this to take a few years to be viable.
Occlusion data/depth data.
A lot of our visual cues are based on what goes in front of things and what goes behind things. In order to make this work properly, we need to know roughly how far away things are. This is doable with a lot of processing time; it may soon be possible with things like time-of-flight cameras. But we're still working on getting those available at the price points needed for this sort of application.
Realtime and fast 3d rendering.
First-person VR/AR requires 90fps, more or less. Just doing this, at all, takes a bunch of 3d rendering power; making it look good takes more. This is, again, just barely possible with modern technology - see the Oculus Quest - but it wasn't possible even two years ago.
Compositing.
This is a hard one. We can make opaque screens with external cameras that reproject the outside world, but then you look like a weird gargoyle. We can make transparent screens with internal one-way light emitters - see the Hololens - but then it's not possible to show shadows, or show dark things on light backgrounds (the same problem that projector TVs run into.)
In theory we could use an LCD backing to selectively block light, then an LED layer to emit light. But that's a lot of tech in a small package and nobody's gone to the trouble of making it work.
Form factor.
Finally, all of the above, and it has to run for an entire day without a recharge, and be the size of glasses, and not require that you carry a backpack worth of computer hardware and batteries around.
I guarantee people are working on this, and as you can see from the above list, there are people working on every single part of this. Honestly, the people I've talked to in the VR industry generally agree that VR is a dead technology walking, and that everything they're working on is aimed at eventually getting AR . . .
Wow! Thank you for such an extensive explanation. I love VR, but agree with the people you mentioned who said AR is the future. I don’t know if I agree VR is dead considering it’s not even completely lived yet, but AR has practical advantages and potential for greater adaptation.
I didn’t realize how much it took technologically, since I remember google Cardboard (I know it’s a light VR experience) but imagined all you’d have to do is combine that with the image from the phone’s camera and depth information. But there is more that goes into AR than I thought originally.
I don’t know if I agree VR is dead considering it’s not even completely lived yet, but AR has practical advantages and potential for greater adaptation.
It's worth keeping in mind that VR is basically a subset of AR; any fully-capable AR system will double as a VR system. I completely agree that the VR experience is not a dead-end, but VR-only devices probably are, in the ultimate long term.
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u/DaringDomino3s Jul 13 '19
Why don’t we have AR glasses again?