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.
