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I will. I work in an engineering company which shipped a number of AR glasses projects (for clients I can't name,) and I can say that whomever did engineering for Magic Leap had no idea whatsoever about basics of optics, and such.

And their overall engineering level is totally amateurish — you cannot have such shoddy job being done for money, let alone such amount of money, but they have everything to tick the checkbox in the buzzword department: waveguides, holographics, structural colour, photonic chips...

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One main point:

Holographic waveguides, and such are a dead end development with a substandard image quality which you cannot do anything about, as well as its inefficiency (these waveguides waste 70-90%+ of light.)

You can make them more opaque to preserve more light, but then you get VR sunglasses, instead of what the promise is.

The fundamental problem is that the amount of image light transferred is inversely proportional to the amount of light obscured. — they are extremely inefficient, and there is physically no way around this.

For this reason this solution really had to be sent to the wastebin on day one, and not be presented as the next best thing after sliced bread. This is obvious to anybody knowing optics on above a high school level, and it's inconceivable how anybody paying real engineers can opt for this solution.




If you had to distill this down in layperson's terms- AR glasses are impossible without being essentially sunglasses? Or some sort of other tradeoff?


The first point. This is the case for holographic waveguides, which currently seem to be the industry-wide obsession.

Many other optical schemes don't share this weakness.




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