Our optics are already quite good, I don't think we need higher resolution cameras, just higher-speed cameras. I don't think this is impossible, we just don't have the processing power to deal with them yet.
For batteries, we already have some hope with the solid-state batteries of Goodenough.
We would still need more compute than this I believe, but this should get us close.
AR's optics limitation is not cameras, it's the display. That's a tough optics challenge because you have to block incoming light (very hard) and display the data very close to the eye (hard) in a form factor that is appealing (very hard).
I don't think that's so difficult--once you can play games outside using headsets I think they will grow on people. Right now, as a fashion statement they represent people who sit at home and don't go outside. Not that there's anything significantly wrong with that, except it doesn't represent the majority.
Once we have good AR applications which work outdoors, the whole game will change.
If you had an extremely low latency lightfield display and camera that allowed the eye to do the focusing then you could skip the light blocking part (not that that makes the optics challenge easier).
For anything close to the resolution the tech demos have people expecting, a true light field display, if we could even make one that fit in a svelte headset, would require hundreds of gigabytes per second of bandwidth. There is obviously a lot of redundancy in that signal (many "overlapping" views of the same scene) so there could be lots of opportunity for compression, but then you just spend more of the incredibly constrained battery budget on the CPU/GPU.
Add SLAM, CPU/GPU, Wireless radios... and do that all day on just a <5Wh battery (limited by a form factor anything close to a regular pair of glasses).
Clearly it’s not essential, as Microsoft and Magic Leap have brought products to market without it. But the experience of basically wearing sunglasses indoors while your AR imagery shines glaringly bright against its surroundings is hardly ideal.
If you’re aware of any applications of LCD to accomplish optical subtraction in AR, I’d love to read up on them.
As a former mobile computing nerd and sometimes super capacitor investor, I learned a few things:
The rule of thumb in batteries is about 6% a year, so doubling every 12. This hasn’t changed much if at all, and may actually be worse, since the very best AA rechargeable I could find 20 years ago was 1600mAh and that would mean I should have 5Ah AA’s now and are we even in the ballpark?
So if you saw new battery research that doubled battery density, either you would see it in about ten years or not at all. Goodenough is 94 which means one way or another, Braga (his collaborator) will have to finish this.
Also, important rule for mobile power: if someone mentions power density as one number instead of two, they have a horrible secret they don’t want you to know. Power density is measured per unit volume and per unit mass. There are very heavy small batteries and very voluminous light batteries and either one creates design issues for a portable device. You want a small light battery and not all breakthroughs improve this, and so may be limited to stationary applications.
Our optics are already quite good, I don't think we need higher resolution cameras, just higher-speed cameras. I don't think this is impossible, we just don't have the processing power to deal with them yet.
For batteries, we already have some hope with the solid-state batteries of Goodenough.
We would still need more compute than this I believe, but this should get us close.