It could be a great competitive product, but right now it looks like a PR game.
There's a dozen serious companies working on AR, none of them want to unveil their product yet. I'm trying to see what's new here other than an arguably false impression that they are first with something described as magic, no less, because they unveiled an R&D prototype using vague BS wording. Until they describe this using plain scientific terms, I can only guess.
Tech for VR is relatively easy today, it's mostly combining an HMD with a Move-like 1:1 mapping. AR is a slightly bigger deal, it needs a Google-Glass-like semi-transparent display, an RGB or Kinect-like depth camera on the HMD, and processing using whatever compute resources is available,CPU, DSP, GPU, or even an ASIC. All of these components for VR and AR are becoming available, not because they were invented recently, but because the required sensors, accelerometers, gyros, displays, ToF camera, and compute power, are becoming less expensive, and now available outside of military/medical applications price points. The new thing happening in the AR field today is diffraction lenses becoming less expensive, which is what I'm guessing they are talking about. Maybe they have a novel production method for a computer-generated diffraction lens, or a generic diffraction pattern that can fit the purpose without needing a complex generated pattern (like maybe linear gratings? easy to mass produce?). Canon went the complex route for their compact telephoto lenses, and it's currently too expensive to produce. Bluray/DVD drives have been using holographic lenses for years but it's like a two milimeters lens, nothing like what is needed here.
The wild card I think is patent warfare.
There's a dozen serious companies working on AR, none of them want to unveil their product yet. I'm trying to see what's new here other than an arguably false impression that they are first with something described as magic, no less, because they unveiled an R&D prototype using vague BS wording. Until they describe this using plain scientific terms, I can only guess.
Tech for VR is relatively easy today, it's mostly combining an HMD with a Move-like 1:1 mapping. AR is a slightly bigger deal, it needs a Google-Glass-like semi-transparent display, an RGB or Kinect-like depth camera on the HMD, and processing using whatever compute resources is available,CPU, DSP, GPU, or even an ASIC. All of these components for VR and AR are becoming available, not because they were invented recently, but because the required sensors, accelerometers, gyros, displays, ToF camera, and compute power, are becoming less expensive, and now available outside of military/medical applications price points. The new thing happening in the AR field today is diffraction lenses becoming less expensive, which is what I'm guessing they are talking about. Maybe they have a novel production method for a computer-generated diffraction lens, or a generic diffraction pattern that can fit the purpose without needing a complex generated pattern (like maybe linear gratings? easy to mass produce?). Canon went the complex route for their compact telephoto lenses, and it's currently too expensive to produce. Bluray/DVD drives have been using holographic lenses for years but it's like a two milimeters lens, nothing like what is needed here.
The wild card I think is patent warfare.
Then he decides he'd also like to be able play Minecraft at the same time.
From the demo vid there was reasonable lag between hand input and what we saw. Assuming that's not introduced by the capture, the display itself can't have that much lag or it should be telling in reviews. So I'm guessing the display is something special that accommodates this.