EDIT: I think people are misunderstanding me. I dont mean VR/AR will be dead, I maen that all devices will be normal size glasses and big chunky headsets wont exist any more.
EDIT: I think people are misunderstanding me. I dont mean VR/AR will be dead, I maen that all devices will be normal size glasses and big chunky headsets wont exist any more.
Sadly I think you are vastly overestimating the rate of progress here. Quest 2 came out 5 years ago - in those 5 years we've shrunk headset volume by about half (mostly due to pancake lenses). We'll need to find another fundamental improvement in lens technology to shrink the next 50%
I'd say the biggest unsolved issue is the focus/depth of field issue...how to provide variable per pixel depth so that virtual objects can appear in a scene and be focussed on naturally (apparently called vergence–accommodation conflict) since most if not all displays have a fixed focus distance atm.
You could add more cameras and lidar for depth, yes, but then you'd also need a display for the other eye, and you still wouldn't be able to do immersion because your displays are transparent and have a tiny FOV, and you're also not doing passthrough, so why do you need the cameras again? And so on.
For example, consider field of view, which is a critical measurement of these displays. Typical specs are 120 degrees for headsets, 40 for glasses.
Headsets also perform very high performance rendering compared to glasses. The tiny <1Wh batteries in glasses are insufficient for that amount of work.
Glasses can't be expected to compete with headsets, much less eliminate them from the market entirely within a few years. It makes more sense to think of VR headsets and AR glasses as completely unrelated product categories.
I think you are short sighted (haha!) to think that headsets and glasses are different categories, and that headsets are not just a preliminary research phase to things in the future like smart contact lenses etc.
Contact lenses having the capability of a headset? That's just magical thinking.
100 years ago, the mobile phones in our pockets would have been magical thinking too.