What They Say
Of course, I wondered if Karl Guttag had posted recently when I saw this news, but I ended up tracking down an interesting talk he gave on the challenges of Optical v Passthrough AR. It’s worth the 30 mins and issues he covers are:
- There’s no way to do hard edged occlusion
- What is hard with optical AR is easy with passthrough, but vice versa is also true
- A camera is a bad starting point as you don’t have the dynamic range of the eye, it has to clip somehow
- The camera is never in the right place and also have a single plane for one depth of focus
- There is always some delay
- Displays are going to get good enough to replace foveated resolution (like Varjo or others)
- Hard to get AR displays close enough to the eye
- Passthrough AR is tricky because everybody’s room is different and that makes content creation difficult
- To build a market you need to appeal to the ‘four corners’ – kids, teenagers, adults and older people – that is what has made smartphones so successful.
What We Think
This is one of three talks. I plan to dig into the others as well. Guttag is not convinced that passthrough AR is going to happen at the consumer level just because it is so difficult. VR is different(BR)
