Well, to write a concept, you first need to look at current solutions in the market and current technologies, in order to understand why what exists now is completely unnecessary for the user. We have been engaged in AR / VR development for a long time, and managed to work with many AR / VR technologies, tracking technologies, etc., as well as conduct experiments in terms of user experience. This is a purely business story, and it is not so much the price. But more on that later.
Existing Points
While working with Hololens, Magic Leap and other devices, it is becoming increasingly clear that this is a business device. They can only solve specific problems. In essence, most of the work of a person is now connected with entering textual information with which these solutions have problems. It’s possible to enter text from the phone in Medzhik lime, but in hololens at the operating system level - no.
Holograms are certainly cool, but these are special cases. Since now, if you analyze how much time the average person spends in which applications, this is mostly mail, social. networks and instant messengers. All other applications on the phone already depend on a specific person: interests, professional activities, etc. Holograms are either specific b2b tasks or entertainment such as games. What is important, but not the first necessity in everyday life.
Problems of Existing Points
First, let's analyze the main problem - text input . Voice input is inconvenient in many cases, especially in public places. Forget about the fact that it works imperfectly. I think you do not want to say aloud some details of correspondence or banal passwords from services. Plus, it is rather slow compared to the keyboard 10-finger input. Even if there was an ideal speech recognizer, this is a story about when you are sitting at home, and alone. Since this is a matter of privacy, if these are not simple commands given to points, but personal correspondence.
Gesture input, hand tracking. Now some unreal excitement has gone to the tracking of hands, which amazes me. It looks beautiful in films and pictures (I immediately recall the “Minority Opinion”) But, from the point of view of sending simple commands, buttons are more convenient than gestures, and from the point of view of text input, even a telephone keypad will be more convenient than entering text in the air without either a tactile response. Therefore, why reinvent the wheel if there is a telephone in the form of an almost perfect remote control for glasses and an auxiliary device? Just like on a TV, you can enter text from an iPhone if you have an Apple TV. So why not transfer this experience to glasses. Yes, there should be a “uncomfortable alternative” if, say, the phone is not accessible and far away, and you are in no hurry. But at the operating system level, synchronization with a mobile device must be in every augmented reality glasses.
FOV (Field of view) is a slightly overrated problem. In the future, in the release cycle of new devices, so that it makes sense to buy this is what manufacturers can measure. At the moment, FOV is sufficient to solve many problems, and the main task for which I would like to have AR glasses.
Weight. Most points are really heavy, but with the pace at which the transfer of settlements to the cloud and Internet technologies is developing, this problem can be solved soon, along with energy efficiency. The local computing center may be a telephone, because if you buy an AR headset (for example, $ 1-2k), then you probably have a flagship smartphone with very good power.
Price. And here I want to start talking about the main idea of the concept. On duty, I work on a laptop, and work remotely. For a long time I dreamed of the idea: "the most compact workplace that can be quickly created anywhere in the world." And in fact, everything rested on one detail: in reality, it is impossible to reduce the laptop display to the size of a small device. Since this will turn out the phone. Even now, periodically from a tablet with a keyboard connected via some RDP thread, it’s convenient for me to conduct a review code, edit minor bugs or write small scripts. But in AR, you can create a display of any size, while if the glasses according to the form factor can take up places much less than the average laptop. Returning to cost, our team works with complex computer graphics. Therefore, my laptop (of which there are also two, since both Windows and MacOS are needed) costs more than $ 2k. If I had glasses + a phone with a connection via RDP or another protocol with a subscription for work, that would be ideal. Since the power could be changed for the current task. Launch a baking system of light or a heavy render, just paying them from a card to work. And this is a dream.
Now you can describe the concept itself.
The concept of perfect AR glasses
In fact, my dream is the most compact remote workplace, so as not to carry a heavy laptop. We can say that this is a special case - programmers. But in fact, a large number of professions are associated with the fact that you need a convenient device for text input. This is a bunch of two devices. Phone + glasses.
The problem of text input is solved by the fact that the phone turns into a remote control or full-screen keyboard, depending on the task. Glasses act as a monitor of an arbitrary diagonal. A set of sensors - a standard IMU (accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer). The larger the viewing angle, the better, but the main thing is the readability of the text and the brightness on the street. Since current points with the street have some problems. I am sure that with such a set of functions it will be convenient to solve many problems. Writing articles and copyrights, writing code, connecting to the server and displaying the console for debug and monitoring metrics. In this case, the need to carry a device weighing 2 kg +, which takes up a lot of space in the bag, will disappear.
In fact, in the “minimum configuration" glasses are just an output device, a display. Then already on top you can wind up holograms and other "little things". The telephone can act as a computing center. In fact, an analogue of DEX, only deploying an OS for working with an AR headset. I want everything at once, like recognizing the surrounding world and other functions, but in fact they are not mandatory. And at the current level of technology development, just a virtual workplace sounds something realistic. Many glasses monoculars work this way (the same good old Google Glass), but still these are not full-fledged displays.
If you recall the first Apple commercials, there weren’t a million apps, features, or anything like that. It was an iPod, mail, phone, maps and browser in one bottle with convenient controls.
Now the minimum set of applications are social networks, instant messengers, video player, audio player, maps, browser and mail. At the moment, all AR headsets do not solve the problems of the mass user, who remained the same, but simply acquired a new form. They help in the private tasks of specific groups of business users. Holograms are certainly fun and interesting, but the compact display of arbitrary size sounds many times more interesting from the point of view of everyday use. Even a little paradoxical. Rumor has it that now Apple is going to introduce some augmented reality glasses, and suddenly it will be my ideal glasses. We are waiting!