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Last August, ARtillery Intelligence’s monthly report focused on smart glasses. Given new standards set by Ray-Ban Meta Smartglasses, Xreal, Viture, and others, smart glasses are seeing demand inflections. Much of this success is built on the principle of “lite AR.”
What is lite AR? After a decade of chasing heavy AR ambitions, many XR players got realistic about the technology’s shortcomings. They’re zeroing in on AR’s best self today, rather than aiming for overly ambitious ends. This means simpler visuals… or no visuals at all.
Following that narrative, we now embark upon the next chapter: heavy AR. Also known as dimensional AR, this is defined by visuals that understand and interact with their surroundings in dimensionally-accurate ways. It’s all about simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM).
These scene-interaction and dimensionality functions are computationally intensive. That in turn forces design tradeoffs. For example, SLAM requires high-end graphical processing and presents challenges like heat dissipation, device bulk, and cost (Karl Kuttag explains it best).
Though these challenges persist, we’ve seen notable evolution in the past year from Snap, Meta, and Google, with more to come on the near-term road map. But there’s still a long way to go. This is the topic of a recent ARtillery Intelligence report, which joins our weekly excerpt series.
Underrated Challenges
After the last installment of this series examined AR’s fundamental technical challenges – such as vergence accommodation conflict – we now continue the narrative with other practical issues. These are some of the more underrated challenges in optical see-through (OST) AR.
For example, one is known as eye glow. Given that the lenses are transparent, non-wearers from the outside can often see the colored light that’s emitted from displays. This is at odds with some of AR’s social goals, such as making them undetectable (more on social issues in a bit).
But reducing eye glow often has tradeoffs, such as limiting brightness and field of view, creating yet another design dilemma for AR glasses. In fairness, Meta’s new Ray-Ban Display glasses appear to have sidestepped this longstanding issue, partly due to a small field of view.
Similarly, one of AR glasses’ key goals is to be an all-day wearable. But the “all-day” part presents some issues. For example, one question that’s important but rarely asked is what the user experience is like when the device is powered off or in standby mode. Can you still wear them?
Put another way, given that AR glasses will provide ambient intelligence that’s activated at relevant moments, there will be large portions of the day when they aren’t showing graphics. It’s during those times that optical components could encumber wearers’ interactions with the world.
Fundamentals & Physics: What Are AR’s Biggest Technical Challenges?
X Factor
Going deeper into that last issue, the glass etchings used by diffractive waveguides aren’t often visible when looking through AR glasses. They mostly do their thing and stay out of the way. But external light can also reflect off those etchings to disorient users in obtrusive or unsafe ways.
Consider driving at night with AR glasses: headlights from oncoming traffic could reflect off these etched surfaces, causing a prism effect that’s unsafe for obvious reasons. This is just one example of the unintended consequences that need to be addressed in AR glasses.
Back to social issues, it’s also important for AR glasses to avoid interpersonal conflict. For example, one concern is perceived power imbalance. When users have AR “superpowers,” it can lead to an implied superiority, which is off-putting to non-wearers, and culturally problematic.
That factor is exacerbated by users’ ability to record conversations, overtly or covertly. All the above is what bred Google Glass’ infamous “glassholes” dynamic. This is an important cautionary tale for AR’s current era, where the goal should be to empower users as well as non-users.
This isn’t just about social justice and equity, but practicality. If any device incites anxiety or cultural backlash, that’s obviously not good for business. Given that AR faces ample headwinds from a technical standpoint, cultural impediments like this are an important X factor.
We’ll pause there and pick things up in the next installment of this excerpt series to go deeper on dimensional AR dynamics…
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