Comment by nomel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nomel | Hacker News Reader

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You should ignore anyone claiming unquantifiables like "light years ahead".

In 10 years, my hopeful list is:

  * More custom/specialized silicon for XR. There's aren't many players here currently.
  * Retina/~60 PPD.
  * Micro LED (not OLED), making varifocal and HDR possible.
  * Varifocal lenses, which are just as important for comfort as high res.
  * Cameras optimized for passthrough, rather than borrowed from cellphones.
  * Lighter weight. They're almost tolerable, rather than acceptable, as is. This almost certainly involves offloading some of the compute.

But, a powerful untethered XR system and a lightweight set of untethered glasses will necessarily be very different, in capabilities. I imagine I'll end up with a tethered device, as a display replacement, in the next 10 years.

Thanks for this list, doesn’t seem like the pair of glasses that people are envisioning, more like iPhone X, lots of incremental improvements but not a major difference from v1 to v10 or even v15.

> doesn’t seem like the pair of glasses that people are envisioning

Do you have an example of these people, or what they're envisioning? Are they expecting ready player one type glasses in the next 10 years? I think there will be different classes of devices: everyday wearable AR more than XR, and screen replacement/heavy compute XR, with vastly different experiences.

> lots of incremental improvements

As should be expected. This is the only way tech has ever progressed, without exception. The only perceived exceptions involved shifting existing tech into a space that it wasn't present before.

> from v1 to v10 or even v15.

I think it's a little more than that. I think most would agree that it's not usable, in its current state, for a screen replacement, or as a primary computing device. Even Apple suggested so in their announcement, saying something like "short trips". I suspect that V15 will be the primary computing device, for most people. If that ends up being true, that's significant.

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