6 ms·

There is no Moore's Law in optics & batteries. The AR everyone imagines is much further away than most realize.

by jp555 7y ago

solinent 7y ago
> There is no Moore's Law in optics & batteries. Our optics are already quite good, I don't think we need higher resolution cameras, just higher-speed cameras. I don't think this is impossible, we just don't have the processing power to deal with them yet. For batteries, we already have some hope with the solid-state batteries of Goodenough. We would still need more compute than this I believe, but this should get us close.
- npunt 7y ago
  AR's optics limitation is not cameras, it's the display. That's a tough optics challenge because you have to block incoming light (very hard) and display the data very close to the eye (hard) in a form factor that is appealing (very hard).
  - nitrogen 7y ago
    If you had an extremely low latency lightfield display and camera that allowed the eye to do the focusing then you could skip the light blocking part (not that that makes the optics challenge easier).
    - jp555 7y ago
      For anything close to the resolution the tech demos have people expecting, a true light field display, if we could even make one that fit in a svelte headset, would require hundreds of gigabytes per second of bandwidth. There is obviously a lot of redundancy in that signal (many "overlapping" views of the same scene) so there could be lots of opportunity for compression, but then you just spend more of the incredibly constrained battery budget on the CPU/GPU. Add SLAM, CPU/GPU, Wireless radios... and do that all day on just a <5Wh battery (limited by a form factor anything close to a regular pair of glasses).
  - BubRoss 7y ago
    I don't think blocking light is essential. Even so LCD for blocking and micro LEDs might work.
    - mortenjorck 7y ago
      Clearly it’s not essential, as Microsoft and Magic Leap have brought products to market without it. But the experience of basically wearing sunglasses indoors while your AR imagery shines glaringly bright against its surroundings is hardly ideal. If you’re aware of any applications of LCD to accomplish optical subtraction in AR, I’d love to read up on them.
  - solinent 7y ago
    > form factor that is appealing I don't think that's so difficult--once you can play games outside using headsets I think they will grow on people. Right now, as a fashion statement they represent people who sit at home and don't go outside. Not that there's anything significantly wrong with that, except it doesn't represent the majority. Once we have good AR applications which work outdoors, the whole game will change.
  - jp555 7y ago
    AR display = optics.
- hinkley 7y ago
  As a former mobile computing nerd and sometimes super capacitor investor, I learned a few things: The rule of thumb in batteries is about 6% a year, so doubling every 12. This hasn’t changed much if at all, and may actually be worse, since the very best AA rechargeable I could find 20 years ago was 1600mAh and that would mean I should have 5Ah AA’s now and are we even in the ballpark? So if you saw new battery research that doubled battery density, either you would see it in about ten years or not at all. Goodenough is 94 which means one way or another, Braga (his collaborator) will have to finish this. Also, important rule for mobile power: if someone mentions power density as one number instead of two, they have a horrible secret they don’t want you to know. Power density is measured per unit volume and per unit mass. There are very heavy small batteries and very voluminous light batteries and either one creates design issues for a portable device. You want a small light battery and not all breakthroughs improve this, and so may be limited to stationary applications.
npunt 7y ago
Agree, the popular idea of AR going around - wide FOV, fancy graphics, good occlusion of incoming light, tiny footprint - is unlikely for a long time due to optics. I think it’s foolish to try to execute that vision now, and why I’ve always thought Magic Leap’s 'do it all' approach was completely wrong (and demonstrated they didn't really have a clear vision for what would make AR mainstream). The only way to achieve that vision for AR is to increment toward it over a long time. I see v1 as a simple narrow FOV heads up display in glasses frame with very focused use case around place based notifications and heads up information. No input at all, except Siri. Display only turns on when necessary. iPhone is used for input and config, much like Watch was initially. Even getting to this v1 is going to be a huge challenge in such a small form factor, but a chip with this density will help with power budget. This node consumes 30% less power and fits in an even smaller space.
- mook 7y ago
  That sounds vaguely like Google Glass; I wonder if a comeback would be on the horizon now that voice assistants are more widespread.
  - npunt 7y ago
    Could be, but I don't believe in Google's ability to create a category-defining consumer product. They're an enterprise company that thinks they're a consumer company, there's a lack of understanding humans in everything they do, and they never put enough wood behind each arrow.
    - hinkley 7y ago
      They’re not even enterprise! They’re an advertising company that believes they are changing the world. They are right, just not for the reasons they tell themselves. Microsoft was an operating system and word processor vendor who wanted to be many other things. The only other thing that ever turned a clear profit in a decade was their hardware division, which I gotta say was well deserved. But all of their money came from tech, and selling that tech. Google isn’t even that.
- 7y ago
pedrocr 7y ago
Batteries have also been improving exponentially, it's just a much slower factor of 5 to 8% a year. I haven't seen the same data for optics but wouldn't be surprised if the situation was the same.
ricw 7y ago
There is a somewhat equivalent to that for batteries: Coulomb’s law [1]. The energy contained in a battery increases exponentially the closer the anode and cathode are to each other. Due to this, scale and other reasons, we’ve seen batteries become 15-20% cheaper year over year [2] for at least the last two decades. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coulomb%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coulomb%27s_law [2] https://data.bloomberglp.com/bnef/sites/14/2017/07/BNEF-Lithium-ion-battery-costs-and-market.pdf https://data.bloomberglp.com/bnef/sites/14/2017/07/BNEF-Lith...
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  Wait, what? It's linear, and it only applies to capacitors. Batteries are a completely different beast. The cost reduction we have been seeing for batteries has completely different reasons, and no relation at all with that.
  - ricw 7y ago
    Divided by distance^2 - looks inverted exponential to me. It does apply to spooled batteries, which is pretty much most modern batteries but most importantly Li-ion batteries
    - thfuran 7y ago
      What you've linked has essentially nothing to do with the discussion. What the person who replied to you thought you were talking about was the equation for energy stored in a capacitor, which is proportional to inverse of distance.
      - ricw 7y ago
        It absolutely has. It’s basic physics and it definitely applies to batteries or in fact any static charges, which is what is being discussed.
        nitrogen 7y ago
Veedrac 7y ago
And yet... https://youtu.be/52ogQS6QKxc https://youtu.be/52ogQS6QKxc There's no fundamental physical limit that forces AR/VR headsets to be big and heavy.

There is no Moore's Law in optics & batteries. The AR everyone imagines is much further away than most realize.

by jp555 7y ago

There is no Moore's Law in optics & batteries. The AR everyone imagines is much further away than most realize.

> There is no Moore's Law in optics & batteries. Our optics are already quite good, I don't think we need higher resolution cameras, just higher-speed cameras. I don't think this is impossible, we just don't have the processing power to deal with them yet. For batteries, we already have some hope with the solid-state batteries of Goodenough. We would still need more compute than this I believe, but this should get us close.

npunt 7y ago
AR's optics limitation is not cameras, it's the display. That's a tough optics challenge because you have to block incoming light (very hard) and display the data very close to the eye (hard) in a form factor that is appealing (very hard).
- nitrogen 7y ago
  If you had an extremely low latency lightfield display and camera that allowed the eye to do the focusing then you could skip the light blocking part (not that that makes the optics challenge easier).
  - jp555 7y ago
    For anything close to the resolution the tech demos have people expecting, a true light field display, if we could even make one that fit in a svelte headset, would require hundreds of gigabytes per second of bandwidth. There is obviously a lot of redundancy in that signal (many "overlapping" views of the same scene) so there could be lots of opportunity for compression, but then you just spend more of the incredibly constrained battery budget on the CPU/GPU. Add SLAM, CPU/GPU, Wireless radios... and do that all day on just a <5Wh battery (limited by a form factor anything close to a regular pair of glasses).
- BubRoss 7y ago
  I don't think blocking light is essential. Even so LCD for blocking and micro LEDs might work.
  - mortenjorck 7y ago
    Clearly it’s not essential, as Microsoft and Magic Leap have brought products to market without it. But the experience of basically wearing sunglasses indoors while your AR imagery shines glaringly bright against its surroundings is hardly ideal. If you’re aware of any applications of LCD to accomplish optical subtraction in AR, I’d love to read up on them.
- solinent 7y ago
  > form factor that is appealing I don't think that's so difficult--once you can play games outside using headsets I think they will grow on people. Right now, as a fashion statement they represent people who sit at home and don't go outside. Not that there's anything significantly wrong with that, except it doesn't represent the majority. Once we have good AR applications which work outdoors, the whole game will change.
- jp555 7y ago
  AR display = optics.
hinkley 7y ago
As a former mobile computing nerd and sometimes super capacitor investor, I learned a few things: The rule of thumb in batteries is about 6% a year, so doubling every 12. This hasn’t changed much if at all, and may actually be worse, since the very best AA rechargeable I could find 20 years ago was 1600mAh and that would mean I should have 5Ah AA’s now and are we even in the ballpark? So if you saw new battery research that doubled battery density, either you would see it in about ten years or not at all. Goodenough is 94 which means one way or another, Braga (his collaborator) will have to finish this. Also, important rule for mobile power: if someone mentions power density as one number instead of two, they have a horrible secret they don’t want you to know. Power density is measured per unit volume and per unit mass. There are very heavy small batteries and very voluminous light batteries and either one creates design issues for a portable device. You want a small light battery and not all breakthroughs improve this, and so may be limited to stationary applications.

npunt 7y ago

Agree, the popular idea of AR going around - wide FOV, fancy graphics, good occlusion of incoming light, tiny footprint - is unlikely for a long time due to optics. I think it’s foolish to try to execute that vision now, and why I’ve always thought Magic Leap’s 'do it all' approach was completely wrong (and demonstrated they didn't really have a clear vision for what would make AR mainstream). The only way to achieve that vision for AR is to increment toward it over a long time. I see v1 as a simple narrow FOV heads up display in glasses frame with very focused use case around place based notifications and heads up information. No input at all, except Siri. Display only turns on when necessary. iPhone is used for input and config, much like Watch was initially. Even getting to this v1 is going to be a huge challenge in such a small form factor, but a chip with this density will help with power budget. This node consumes 30% less power and fits in an even smaller space.

mook 7y ago
That sounds vaguely like Google Glass; I wonder if a comeback would be on the horizon now that voice assistants are more widespread.
- npunt 7y ago
  Could be, but I don't believe in Google's ability to create a category-defining consumer product. They're an enterprise company that thinks they're a consumer company, there's a lack of understanding humans in everything they do, and they never put enough wood behind each arrow.
  - hinkley 7y ago
    They’re not even enterprise! They’re an advertising company that believes they are changing the world. They are right, just not for the reasons they tell themselves. Microsoft was an operating system and word processor vendor who wanted to be many other things. The only other thing that ever turned a clear profit in a decade was their hardware division, which I gotta say was well deserved. But all of their money came from tech, and selling that tech. Google isn’t even that.
7y ago

pedrocr 7y ago

Batteries have also been improving exponentially, it's just a much slower factor of 5 to 8% a year. I haven't seen the same data for optics but wouldn't be surprised if the situation was the same.

ricw 7y ago

There is a somewhat equivalent to that for batteries: Coulomb’s law [1]. The energy contained in a battery increases exponentially the closer the anode and cathode are to each other. Due to this, scale and other reasons, we’ve seen batteries become 15-20% cheaper year over year [2] for at least the last two decades. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coulomb%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coulomb%27s_law [2] https://data.bloomberglp.com/bnef/sites/14/2017/07/BNEF-Lithium-ion-battery-costs-and-market.pdf https://data.bloomberglp.com/bnef/sites/14/2017/07/BNEF-Lith...

marcosdumay 7y ago
Wait, what? It's linear, and it only applies to capacitors. Batteries are a completely different beast. The cost reduction we have been seeing for batteries has completely different reasons, and no relation at all with that.
- ricw 7y ago
  Divided by distance^2 - looks inverted exponential to me. It does apply to spooled batteries, which is pretty much most modern batteries but most importantly Li-ion batteries
  - thfuran 7y ago
    What you've linked has essentially nothing to do with the discussion. What the person who replied to you thought you were talking about was the equation for energy stored in a capacitor, which is proportional to inverse of distance.
    - ricw 7y ago
      It absolutely has. It’s basic physics and it definitely applies to batteries or in fact any static charges, which is what is being discussed.
      - nitrogen 7y ago

Veedrac 7y ago

And yet... https://youtu.be/52ogQS6QKxc https://youtu.be/52ogQS6QKxc There's no fundamental physical limit that forces AR/VR headsets to be big and heavy.