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Comment by zhyder | Hacker News Reader

All current AR glasses are fundamentally designed to see the real world with existing light, as opposed to XR (mixed reality) glasses that block out all existing light from reaching your eyes and create a real-time "passthrough" video feed. So AR glasses can't really block any real world ads, can only place an annoying overlay on them. It'd work with XR glasses but no one wants to walk around in the real world with those on.

Maybe someone will invent an electrochromic layer on AR glasses that can selectively block light at individual pixels (rather than darken the whole lens, as current electrochromic layers on some AR glasses do)... that's when RealWorldAdBlock would actually be viable.

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Unfortunately there are some real problems with that. Imagine a pair of regular glasses with a small dark rectangle on the lens. Do your eyes see the nice sharp edges of the rectangle? Nope, they just see a dark blob because it's too close to focus on.

In the same way, even pixel perfect darkening has the same problem. You don't see a nice cutout, you see a blurry blob.

Why is a blurry blob that big a deal? In theory a headset could use the focused additive display to draw passthrough video in the blurry regions that should not be darkened to provide a crisp blackout edge at a natural brightness.

I think that would need to be adaptive to the current focus of your eye when not looking at the display since we're talking AR. That's a much, much trickier problem than delivering light of constant focus in a workable AR package, which itself is no walk in the park.

If you haven't solved the near-far focus problem, you don't actually have AR in the first place?

There's a difference between projecting focused light into the optic path and blocking the natural light you're selectively trying to allow through that same path.

Why not?

If there’s a future vision pro that’s half the weight and bulk… I could easily see people walking around with one. They would be unusually oversized sunglasses by then.

This is wrong. The last Magic Leap had see through frames with an additive display and an additional dimming layer to black out regions of the screen.

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