14 ms·

Holographic optics for thin and lightweight virtual reality

344 points by onurcel 6y ago

stanlarroque 6y ago
Impressive, but I doubt even FRL can overcome this design limitations. Digilens tried to do that since forever, and when you introduce more colors you will face the same kind of problems seen in Hololens 2.
- piercebot 6y ago
  Would you mind elaborating on (or provide a link to) some of the problems you mentioned Hololens 2 having? Also, I've never heard of Digilens; do you have a preferred source for learning more about that device and what its limitations are? Thanks!
  - stanlarroque 6y ago
    This article does a good job: https://www.kguttag.com/2019/12/18/hololens-2-not-a-pretty-picture/ https://www.kguttag.com/2019/12/18/hololens-2-not-a-pretty-p... Digilens is a company that's been around for 15 years doing all kinds of eye wear stuff.
- bArray 6y ago
  To be completely honest, I would settle for an early monochrome version - I'm sure people can still make some great games/features like this. I think the form factor (and hopefully price) really is so much more important at this point.
  - jayd16 6y ago
    Launch day Virtual Boy ports.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- madaxe_again 6y ago
  There’s a host of further info in the paper itself: https://research.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Holographic-Optics-for-Thin-and-Lightweight-Virtual-Reality.pdf https://research.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Holograph... “Finally, holographic lenses can be constructed so that the lens pro- files can be independently controlled for each of the three color primaries, giving more degrees of freedom than refractive designs. When used with the requisite laser illumination, the displays also have a very large color gamut.” They have full colour working, and apparently well, in the benchtop prototype. There’s discussion towards the end as to options for implementing full colour in the HMD prototype.
- mdorazio 6y ago
  Can you expand on what you mean by "more colors" ? Toward the end of the article they show a multi-color image from the larger benchtop version of the prototype. Do you mean that adding colors doesn't scale down beyond a certain size?
gavinray 6y ago
If anyone here is in the know with the AR/VR scene, could they shed some light on why AR hasn't taken off yet? VR is cool, but it's seems like such a more useful concept to me to have actual reality with enhanced information. Imagine wearing glasses and looking at a plate of food then having it estimate + track calories and macros, or paint GPS direction arrows on surfaces realtime, or put people's names you've met before above their head so you can avoid awkwardly admitting you've forgotten it. Is it technical limitations, or cost? --- Edit: Many people replied with really informative answers to this already. I genuinely appreciate your time and insight, thank you :)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- moron4hire 6y ago
  Three reasons: The hardware is significantly harder to get right. VR devices work well specifically because they don't care about your environment. AR devices, to be any good, need to have a semantic understanding of your environment. That's very hard to do, especially on the power and compute budgets that mobile devices allow. And an AR device that isn't mobile is a stupid AR device. The software is significantly harder to get right. It's a lot easier to model a static scene and make some physics-based interactions in it than it is to try to figure out how to make overlays that react to a real environment. But I think, much more importantly, the people producing most software in the immersive software space just don't care about your immediate environment. They care a lot more about giving you a canned experience. It's hard to find funding for anything that isn't some sort of media consumption. This is true across both VR and AR. In VR it's ok, because there is no environmental context to exploit anyway. But on AR devices, you just end up with a bad VR app: all the hardware limitations of a mobile AR device with none of the differentiating features. So because you don't get software that cares about your environment, you don't get good user experiences on the hardware. Open up your iPad or HoloLens or Magic Leap app stores and take a survey of apps that are there. How many of them have any understanding of your environment? There are a lot that don't even take into account the "room mesh", the solid surfaces that the device can see--say nothing about what those solid surfaces represent! I'd estimate it's upwards of 50% on AR headsets and maybe 30% on iPad that do absolutely nothing with any surfaces beyond asking you to find a flat space on the floor. That's just crappy VR. As for the ones that attempt to understand what is in your room? Vanishingly few. You can make pretty good consulting career out of making what is largely just a PowerPoint presentation in 3D: a collection of canned elements that the user can click buttons to get scene transitions and animations, all with a directed narrative that is trying to tell you something. Advertisers want it. Media companies want it. A lot of big-industry companies completely unrelated to media want it just to show off at conferences to "prove" they are "forward looking". And you'll get a lot of those clients asking--even demanding--you make that as an AR app, especially on iPads. But it sucks. It's just not anything about what's good in immersive experiences. It fits a little better in VR. It still sucks in VR. But it comes around from backwards priorities. These companies start from wanting VR/AR and work backwards to a use-case. And often they lack any sort of experience or even actual interest in immersive design. What they want is to just do a marketing piece. There are very few companies that start with a use case and then find out whether or not VR or AR is the right solution. But that's where the bread-and-butter money is. And it sucks the air out of the room. It leaves the real, good, immersive experience development to people who are independently wealthy enough to do it on their own, or to hobbyists hacking it together in their spare time.
sebringj 6y ago
"The First" series on Hulu reminded me of this in terms of the glasses technology they use quite frequently but coupled nicely with voice and gestures. I was watching this yesterday then saw this thinking this could be just around the corner. Maybe Apple is doing something similar?
aj7 6y ago
Coming soon. The Magic Leap auction. https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/22/21231236/magic-leap-ar-headset-layoffs-coronavirus-enterprise-business-shift https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/22/21231236/magic-leap-ar-he...
dougmwne 6y ago
I'll say this from a consumer/product point of view and not a technical or engineering, but WOW! Assuming they could pull off a finished, high performance product, (big if) this could be the form factor that bring VR to dominance. The silly looking, awkward to wear headset is a big hindrance to adoption because it absolutely matters if you look silly or cool when it comes to consumer tech.
- Valgrim 6y ago
  The fact that these glasses are clearly opaque remind me of Marty's reaction when he sees Doc's brown futuristic glasses in "Back to the Future". It does look a bit silly, but at the same time it looks useful, and not heavy and encumbering like most VR headsets.
  - buu700 6y ago
    To be fair, they wouldn't look weird if you just held a cane while wearing them. They could probably even fit some electronics into a cane form factor.
    - gumby 6y ago
      Would make for some excellent ad hoc light saber games too!
    - ddalex 6y ago
      Batteries would fit perfectly in the cane, and possible acoustic proximity sensors like those on cars.
  - tgarv 6y ago
    There's that word again. "Heavy." Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull?
- xwdv 6y ago
  Dude looks like an emoji with those glasses on.
tmabraham 6y ago
I don't know too much about optics and VR/AR, but can this technology can be adapted for AR applications (a la Google/Apple Glass)? Personally, I think AR applications are much more interesting than VR (especially in the short term)...
- PaulHoule 6y ago
  That is what Hololens 2, Magic Leap, and some other products are. These are "cool" but have not set the world on fire in terms of product-market fix. If you are building an AR system there is always an awkward balance between "letting the environment shine through" and "having projected items be bright enough to be visible". If you put something black in front of the holograms at least now you have just one problem instead of two problems.
  - tmabraham 6y ago
    So you think that instead of something black, if something clear was kept in front, it would technically be an AR system? Of course, then the question is how to make sure the projected items are bright enough with the environment shining through.
    - PaulHoule 6y ago
      Yep. Also that the grooves in the hologram don't screw up the light that passes in through the front. For instance you might get "lens flare" effects which could get obnoxious. It is a lot of details to work out, which is why current AR headsets are still at the bridesmaid and not the bride phase.
      - tmabraham 6y ago
        Oh okay very interesting. I didn't realize that AR headsets were significantly behind compared to VR headsets. But the question is how behind is it, because clearly Apple is able to somehow pull it off, right?
rsweeney21 6y ago
For analysis of new AR/VR technology I highly recommend Karl Guttag's blog: https://www.kguttag.com/ https://www.kguttag.com/ He's an engineer that understands the limitations of physics, especially when it comes to optics and light. He is very good a parsing marketing hype vs reality. (He called BS on Magic Leap years before it launched.) His posts are exceptionally well researched and explained, even if you don't have a background in physics or optics. He recently did an analysis of the Apple Glass leaks. I expect he'll post his thoughts on this new technology from FB soon.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  I'd be careful about statements about 'limitations of physics'. Yes, there are actual physical limitations, but we frequently have beliefs about the limitations of physics that are not actually limitations of physics.
  - igorkraw 6y ago
    Like what? This is a wriggling statement without making any claim, stuff like thermodynamics, speed of light etc. is so fundamental to how we build machines (that work) that most of the limitations we accept as limitations are highly unlikely to be wrong. Fundamental skepticism is nice in a thought experiment, but what value are you trying to add with such a vague statement?
  - lrhegeba 6y ago
    to strengthen your argument here an example where a beliefed limitation was circumvented (and resulted in a nobel prize): see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STED_microscopy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STED_microscopy and the Abbe limit i suppose parent was downvoted bc some thought he was questioning the "hard" laws of physics. but perhaps he could correct this by traveling back in time and changing his wording ;-)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- krm01 6y ago
  I second Karl’s blog. Been following the ML journey through his eyes from the beginning and his insights couldn’t have been more accurate. Despite the many criticism Magic Leap Fanboys gave him. Edit
disposekinetics 6y ago
We're getting closer and closer to the virtual light from William Gibson's novel of the same name.
jayd16 6y ago
What has a better chance of miniaturization. A full lens screen like this or a projector in something like the hololens? The projector has the benefit of supporting passive pass through AR with a semi-reflective mirror. I suppose you could incorporate both.
lukevp 6y ago
I've been curious about something in AR for a while, and I can't seem to find the right terms to query this. Why can't ambient light be used for illumination, and an LCD + polarizer to darken each pixel? If you can approximate the illumination of each point of light going through the LCD (for example, with an outward-facing camera above each lens capturing a full-color image and interpolating it down to where it would be overlayed on top of the LCD) you would know how much you would need to darken each sub-pixel's color to compensate for the light coming in. Then it would be super low-power since there would be no backlight. Also, if you wanted "Transparent" mode you could make it fairly clear. I'm sure there's some reason this is untenable but I'm not really sure what it is - perhaps the inability to be accurate with the compensation?
- ahupp 6y ago
  If you can only subtract light the contrast of what you're viewing against the background will always be poor, almost by definition. Also doesn't handle color.
  - lukevp 6y ago
    Why could it not handle color if it had R/G/B subpixels and adapted the intensity of each pixel based on the color of the light passing through that area of the screen? The intensity of light is quite high outside, could an LCD not darken it enough to have sufficient contrast if you were OK with it only working outside?
    - sangfroid_bio 6y ago
      Just do a quick search for transparent LCDs, I think it will answer your question. (Not enough light gets through, the result looks more like high resolution stained glass than a Retina display)
    - Buttons840 6y ago
      How could you determine the color of the light passing though that area of the screen?
mojomark 6y ago
I remember reading Mamoine's original Pinlight display concept [1]. It blew my mind. 1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266659406_Pinlight_Displays_Wide_Field_of_View_Augmented_Reality_Eyeglasses_using_Defocused_Point_Light_Sources/stats https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266659406_Pinlight_...
kmonsen 6y ago
I think Oculus is pretty cool, but I don't really see the synergy with facebook here.
- oliyoung 6y ago
  the end goal involves wearing a device that enables Facebook content in your field-of-view 12-15 hours a day
- shafyy 6y ago
  VR and AR are the next computing platform and Facebook wants to own the hardware.
  - Chris2048 6y ago
    surely they are just the VDU, not the platform?
    - moron4hire 6y ago
      That's what most of us independent developers in the industry had hoped would happen, but unfortunately it's not happening. Facebook locks the Oculus app store down harder than Apple theirs. They spend a lot of development effort on Oculus-exclusive social integration features, like avatars, lipsyncing of avatars to user speech, and a bunch of other stuff that nobody ever asked for and nobody is using, yet they still keep pushing it. And they're spending a lot of investment dollars to buy up independent studios and lock them into platform exclusives. Facebook definitely takes a platform approach with Oculus. The Oculus Quest is a great device at a great price. It has done the most to make VR a mainstream accessible thing. And yet because of Facebook's behavior and what we know about Facebook as a company in general, we really, really must not let it become the dominant system. Hopefully, other companies will improve their user experiences to match (because Oculus certainly doesn't have a hardware advantage, everyone is pretty much running the exact, same hardware profile with only minor differences).
      - shafyy 6y ago
praveen9920 6y ago
Are there are AR/VR technologies which are addressing software developers? I would very much like to replace my shitty monitor with AR/VR glasses for development. I know this may not seem like "intended use case", but the developer experience can use some innovation for a change. Also one way to bring these technologies close to developers.
- pdehaan 6y ago
  Not for coding. The resolution just isn't there yet. Roughly, per-eye resolution is in the same ballpark as HD displays, but stretched over a 90+ degree field of view. Fonts need to be very large to be legible. You can create a theater sized virtual monitor, but it's just taxing to use. Aliasing artifacts make it worse. At least for text-focused tasks, I'd take virtually any display built in the past 40 years over a modern VR headset.
  - moron4hire 6y ago
    > Not for coding. The resolution just isn't there yet. Spoken like someone who hasn't programmed in VR yet. I don't think you'll be programming any operating systems in VR anytime soon, but there is still a lot of programming, specifically object scripting, that could be done in VR. A number of people--including myself--have built demos that prove out the concept. One of the reasons is that text legibility is not strictly about display resolution. Motion within the view improves legibility significantly. Yes, the fonts render to very large pixels. But the specific pixels they render to are constantly changing. Your brain fuses those images over time. I'm not able to find the paper right now, but the US Navy did a study that proved pilot visual acuity improved when they were in a dynamic scenario. The study performed a visual acuity test where pilots had to identify letters in view from within a flight simulator. One group had full use of the simulator in motion, one was told the simulator motion systems were broken, but they still sat in it to perform the same test rendered on the same screen. And as you said, larger fonts are easier to read. There is a lot of spatial resolution in VR that is not used very often. You're used to thinking about organizing your code on a 2D display, but you have an entire 3D environment around you. That environment could be a zoomable interface where code editors are linked to live objects. Use individual editors for individual code units. Organize them in a tree structure linked to the object. Trees organizers are a lot easier to navigate in 3D than on a 2D screen, especially if you eliminate window scrolling. Window scrolling was created to account for the limited spatial resolution of 2D displays. But in the process, you lose spatial memory of where things are located. Things like windows and tabs and desktop workspaces were invented to try to wrangle that problem more, but they are not as good as a real, spatial filing system. Think about it. You probably know exactly where your favorite book is on your bookshelf. You could probably walk over to it and pick it off the shelf without even opening your eyes. But there is very little chance you can pick any particular file you want in a 2D GUI system, specifically because of the absence of spatial relationships. So a combination of "text legibility is not as bad as you think it is" and "code could be a lot more organized than it is on 2D displays" means that programming in VR is a lot better than you're making it out to be.

344 points by onurcel 6y ago

Impressive, but I doubt even FRL can overcome this design limitations. Digilens tried to do that since forever, and when you introduce more colors you will face the same kind of problems seen in Hololens 2.

piercebot 6y ago
Would you mind elaborating on (or provide a link to) some of the problems you mentioned Hololens 2 having? Also, I've never heard of Digilens; do you have a preferred source for learning more about that device and what its limitations are? Thanks!
- stanlarroque 6y ago
  This article does a good job: https://www.kguttag.com/2019/12/18/hololens-2-not-a-pretty-picture/ https://www.kguttag.com/2019/12/18/hololens-2-not-a-pretty-p... Digilens is a company that's been around for 15 years doing all kinds of eye wear stuff.
bArray 6y ago
To be completely honest, I would settle for an early monochrome version - I'm sure people can still make some great games/features like this. I think the form factor (and hopefully price) really is so much more important at this point.
- jayd16 6y ago
  Launch day Virtual Boy ports.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
madaxe_again 6y ago
There’s a host of further info in the paper itself: https://research.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Holographic-Optics-for-Thin-and-Lightweight-Virtual-Reality.pdf https://research.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Holograph... “Finally, holographic lenses can be constructed so that the lens pro- files can be independently controlled for each of the three color primaries, giving more degrees of freedom than refractive designs. When used with the requisite laser illumination, the displays also have a very large color gamut.” They have full colour working, and apparently well, in the benchtop prototype. There’s discussion towards the end as to options for implementing full colour in the HMD prototype.
mdorazio 6y ago
Can you expand on what you mean by "more colors" ? Toward the end of the article they show a multi-color image from the larger benchtop version of the prototype. Do you mean that adding colors doesn't scale down beyond a certain size?

gavinray 6y ago

If anyone here is in the know with the AR/VR scene, could they shed some light on why AR hasn't taken off yet? VR is cool, but it's seems like such a more useful concept to me to have actual reality with enhanced information. Imagine wearing glasses and looking at a plate of food then having it estimate + track calories and macros, or paint GPS direction arrows on surfaces realtime, or put people's names you've met before above their head so you can avoid awkwardly admitting you've forgotten it. Is it technical limitations, or cost? --- Edit: Many people replied with really informative answers to this already. I genuinely appreciate your time and insight, thank you :)

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
moron4hire 6y ago
Three reasons: The hardware is significantly harder to get right. VR devices work well specifically because they don't care about your environment. AR devices, to be any good, need to have a semantic understanding of your environment. That's very hard to do, especially on the power and compute budgets that mobile devices allow. And an AR device that isn't mobile is a stupid AR device. The software is significantly harder to get right. It's a lot easier to model a static scene and make some physics-based interactions in it than it is to try to figure out how to make overlays that react to a real environment. But I think, much more importantly, the people producing most software in the immersive software space just don't care about your immediate environment. They care a lot more about giving you a canned experience. It's hard to find funding for anything that isn't some sort of media consumption. This is true across both VR and AR. In VR it's ok, because there is no environmental context to exploit anyway. But on AR devices, you just end up with a bad VR app: all the hardware limitations of a mobile AR device with none of the differentiating features. So because you don't get software that cares about your environment, you don't get good user experiences on the hardware. Open up your iPad or HoloLens or Magic Leap app stores and take a survey of apps that are there. How many of them have any understanding of your environment? There are a lot that don't even take into account the "room mesh", the solid surfaces that the device can see--say nothing about what those solid surfaces represent! I'd estimate it's upwards of 50% on AR headsets and maybe 30% on iPad that do absolutely nothing with any surfaces beyond asking you to find a flat space on the floor. That's just crappy VR. As for the ones that attempt to understand what is in your room? Vanishingly few. You can make pretty good consulting career out of making what is largely just a PowerPoint presentation in 3D: a collection of canned elements that the user can click buttons to get scene transitions and animations, all with a directed narrative that is trying to tell you something. Advertisers want it. Media companies want it. A lot of big-industry companies completely unrelated to media want it just to show off at conferences to "prove" they are "forward looking". And you'll get a lot of those clients asking--even demanding--you make that as an AR app, especially on iPads. But it sucks. It's just not anything about what's good in immersive experiences. It fits a little better in VR. It still sucks in VR. But it comes around from backwards priorities. These companies start from wanting VR/AR and work backwards to a use-case. And often they lack any sort of experience or even actual interest in immersive design. What they want is to just do a marketing piece. There are very few companies that start with a use case and then find out whether or not VR or AR is the right solution. But that's where the bread-and-butter money is. And it sucks the air out of the room. It leaves the real, good, immersive experience development to people who are independently wealthy enough to do it on their own, or to hobbyists hacking it together in their spare time.

sebringj 6y ago

"The First" series on Hulu reminded me of this in terms of the glasses technology they use quite frequently but coupled nicely with voice and gestures. I was watching this yesterday then saw this thinking this could be just around the corner. Maybe Apple is doing something similar?

aj7 6y ago

Coming soon. The Magic Leap auction. https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/22/21231236/magic-leap-ar-headset-layoffs-coronavirus-enterprise-business-shift https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/22/21231236/magic-leap-ar-he...

dougmwne 6y ago

I'll say this from a consumer/product point of view and not a technical or engineering, but WOW! Assuming they could pull off a finished, high performance product, (big if) this could be the form factor that bring VR to dominance. The silly looking, awkward to wear headset is a big hindrance to adoption because it absolutely matters if you look silly or cool when it comes to consumer tech.

Valgrim 6y ago
The fact that these glasses are clearly opaque remind me of Marty's reaction when he sees Doc's brown futuristic glasses in "Back to the Future". It does look a bit silly, but at the same time it looks useful, and not heavy and encumbering like most VR headsets.
- buu700 6y ago
  To be fair, they wouldn't look weird if you just held a cane while wearing them. They could probably even fit some electronics into a cane form factor.
  - gumby 6y ago
    Would make for some excellent ad hoc light saber games too!
  - ddalex 6y ago
    Batteries would fit perfectly in the cane, and possible acoustic proximity sensors like those on cars.
- tgarv 6y ago
  There's that word again. "Heavy." Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull?
xwdv 6y ago
Dude looks like an emoji with those glasses on.

tmabraham 6y ago

I don't know too much about optics and VR/AR, but can this technology can be adapted for AR applications (a la Google/Apple Glass)? Personally, I think AR applications are much more interesting than VR (especially in the short term)...

PaulHoule 6y ago
That is what Hololens 2, Magic Leap, and some other products are. These are "cool" but have not set the world on fire in terms of product-market fix. If you are building an AR system there is always an awkward balance between "letting the environment shine through" and "having projected items be bright enough to be visible". If you put something black in front of the holograms at least now you have just one problem instead of two problems.
- tmabraham 6y ago
  So you think that instead of something black, if something clear was kept in front, it would technically be an AR system? Of course, then the question is how to make sure the projected items are bright enough with the environment shining through.
  - PaulHoule 6y ago
    Yep. Also that the grooves in the hologram don't screw up the light that passes in through the front. For instance you might get "lens flare" effects which could get obnoxious. It is a lot of details to work out, which is why current AR headsets are still at the bridesmaid and not the bride phase.
    - tmabraham 6y ago
      Oh okay very interesting. I didn't realize that AR headsets were significantly behind compared to VR headsets. But the question is how behind is it, because clearly Apple is able to somehow pull it off, right?

rsweeney21 6y ago

For analysis of new AR/VR technology I highly recommend Karl Guttag's blog: https://www.kguttag.com/ https://www.kguttag.com/ He's an engineer that understands the limitations of physics, especially when it comes to optics and light. He is very good a parsing marketing hype vs reality. (He called BS on Magic Leap years before it launched.) His posts are exceptionally well researched and explained, even if you don't have a background in physics or optics. He recently did an analysis of the Apple Glass leaks. I expect he'll post his thoughts on this new technology from FB soon.

oh_sigh 6y ago
I'd be careful about statements about 'limitations of physics'. Yes, there are actual physical limitations, but we frequently have beliefs about the limitations of physics that are not actually limitations of physics.
- igorkraw 6y ago
  Like what? This is a wriggling statement without making any claim, stuff like thermodynamics, speed of light etc. is so fundamental to how we build machines (that work) that most of the limitations we accept as limitations are highly unlikely to be wrong. Fundamental skepticism is nice in a thought experiment, but what value are you trying to add with such a vague statement?
- lrhegeba 6y ago
  to strengthen your argument here an example where a beliefed limitation was circumvented (and resulted in a nobel prize): see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STED_microscopy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STED_microscopy and the Abbe limit i suppose parent was downvoted bc some thought he was questioning the "hard" laws of physics. but perhaps he could correct this by traveling back in time and changing his wording ;-)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
krm01 6y ago
I second Karl’s blog. Been following the ML journey through his eyes from the beginning and his insights couldn’t have been more accurate. Despite the many criticism Magic Leap Fanboys gave him. Edit

disposekinetics 6y ago

We're getting closer and closer to the virtual light from William Gibson's novel of the same name.

jayd16 6y ago

What has a better chance of miniaturization. A full lens screen like this or a projector in something like the hololens? The projector has the benefit of supporting passive pass through AR with a semi-reflective mirror. I suppose you could incorporate both.

lukevp 6y ago

I've been curious about something in AR for a while, and I can't seem to find the right terms to query this. Why can't ambient light be used for illumination, and an LCD + polarizer to darken each pixel? If you can approximate the illumination of each point of light going through the LCD (for example, with an outward-facing camera above each lens capturing a full-color image and interpolating it down to where it would be overlayed on top of the LCD) you would know how much you would need to darken each sub-pixel's color to compensate for the light coming in. Then it would be super low-power since there would be no backlight. Also, if you wanted "Transparent" mode you could make it fairly clear. I'm sure there's some reason this is untenable but I'm not really sure what it is - perhaps the inability to be accurate with the compensation?

ahupp 6y ago
If you can only subtract light the contrast of what you're viewing against the background will always be poor, almost by definition. Also doesn't handle color.
- lukevp 6y ago
  Why could it not handle color if it had R/G/B subpixels and adapted the intensity of each pixel based on the color of the light passing through that area of the screen? The intensity of light is quite high outside, could an LCD not darken it enough to have sufficient contrast if you were OK with it only working outside?
  - sangfroid_bio 6y ago
    Just do a quick search for transparent LCDs, I think it will answer your question. (Not enough light gets through, the result looks more like high resolution stained glass than a Retina display)
  - Buttons840 6y ago
    How could you determine the color of the light passing though that area of the screen?

mojomark 6y ago

I remember reading Mamoine's original Pinlight display concept [1]. It blew my mind. 1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266659406_Pinlight_Displays_Wide_Field_of_View_Augmented_Reality_Eyeglasses_using_Defocused_Point_Light_Sources/stats https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266659406_Pinlight_...

kmonsen 6y ago

I think Oculus is pretty cool, but I don't really see the synergy with facebook here.

oliyoung 6y ago
the end goal involves wearing a device that enables Facebook content in your field-of-view 12-15 hours a day
shafyy 6y ago
VR and AR are the next computing platform and Facebook wants to own the hardware.
- Chris2048 6y ago
  surely they are just the VDU, not the platform?
  - moron4hire 6y ago
    That's what most of us independent developers in the industry had hoped would happen, but unfortunately it's not happening. Facebook locks the Oculus app store down harder than Apple theirs. They spend a lot of development effort on Oculus-exclusive social integration features, like avatars, lipsyncing of avatars to user speech, and a bunch of other stuff that nobody ever asked for and nobody is using, yet they still keep pushing it. And they're spending a lot of investment dollars to buy up independent studios and lock them into platform exclusives. Facebook definitely takes a platform approach with Oculus. The Oculus Quest is a great device at a great price. It has done the most to make VR a mainstream accessible thing. And yet because of Facebook's behavior and what we know about Facebook as a company in general, we really, really must not let it become the dominant system. Hopefully, other companies will improve their user experiences to match (because Oculus certainly doesn't have a hardware advantage, everyone is pretty much running the exact, same hardware profile with only minor differences).
    - shafyy 6y ago

praveen9920 6y ago

Are there are AR/VR technologies which are addressing software developers? I would very much like to replace my shitty monitor with AR/VR glasses for development. I know this may not seem like "intended use case", but the developer experience can use some innovation for a change. Also one way to bring these technologies close to developers.

pdehaan 6y ago
Not for coding. The resolution just isn't there yet. Roughly, per-eye resolution is in the same ballpark as HD displays, but stretched over a 90+ degree field of view. Fonts need to be very large to be legible. You can create a theater sized virtual monitor, but it's just taxing to use. Aliasing artifacts make it worse. At least for text-focused tasks, I'd take virtually any display built in the past 40 years over a modern VR headset.
- moron4hire 6y ago
  > Not for coding. The resolution just isn't there yet. Spoken like someone who hasn't programmed in VR yet. I don't think you'll be programming any operating systems in VR anytime soon, but there is still a lot of programming, specifically object scripting, that could be done in VR. A number of people--including myself--have built demos that prove out the concept. One of the reasons is that text legibility is not strictly about display resolution. Motion within the view improves legibility significantly. Yes, the fonts render to very large pixels. But the specific pixels they render to are constantly changing. Your brain fuses those images over time. I'm not able to find the paper right now, but the US Navy did a study that proved pilot visual acuity improved when they were in a dynamic scenario. The study performed a visual acuity test where pilots had to identify letters in view from within a flight simulator. One group had full use of the simulator in motion, one was told the simulator motion systems were broken, but they still sat in it to perform the same test rendered on the same screen. And as you said, larger fonts are easier to read. There is a lot of spatial resolution in VR that is not used very often. You're used to thinking about organizing your code on a 2D display, but you have an entire 3D environment around you. That environment could be a zoomable interface where code editors are linked to live objects. Use individual editors for individual code units. Organize them in a tree structure linked to the object. Trees organizers are a lot easier to navigate in 3D than on a 2D screen, especially if you eliminate window scrolling. Window scrolling was created to account for the limited spatial resolution of 2D displays. But in the process, you lose spatial memory of where things are located. Things like windows and tabs and desktop workspaces were invented to try to wrangle that problem more, but they are not as good as a real, spatial filing system. Think about it. You probably know exactly where your favorite book is on your bookshelf. You could probably walk over to it and pick it off the shelf without even opening your eyes. But there is very little chance you can pick any particular file you want in a 2D GUI system, specifically because of the absence of spatial relationships. So a combination of "text legibility is not as bad as you think it is" and "code could be a lot more organized than it is on 2D displays" means that programming in VR is a lot better than you're making it out to be.