Thread by @slukas

This reminds me of when I was at @QualcommVenture and the @HoloLens came out in 2016. @sdesh & I conducted our own deep tech investigation on why the FOV of #AR wasn’t full-field, & came away with massive respect for what was accomplished by the @Microsoft team.

So ok thread 1/

https://twitter.com/thedextriarchy/status/1072494832826937345

We realized that the way #VR gets to full-frame FOV was by warping the lenses between your eyes and the display, “blowing up” the screen by wrapping it around your eyes. You can’t do that with #AR bc then you’d warp the actual world, making it unviewable

2/

So the commonly discussed “dream” of a single headset where you just “drop a black screen behind AR and you get VR” is very far away because the requirements of the two are not as similar as one would expect.

3/

Yes there ARE versions of a #VR / #AR combo headset but they are camera pass-thru a la @Vuforia / @htcvive pro. Not the same as a transparent HMD because your view of the world is a replication on a screen and not naturally seen

4/

But for true transparent AR and solid VR to co-exist, the root device would have to be AR with undistorted lenses. Meaning you would be stuck with the current limitations of AR today in terms of FOV, which is a very frequent topic of discussion.

link.medium.com/eob7cwFqAS

5/

Meta had a strong field of view as a feature point, but the physics of it required a larger glass to reflect off of. Plus the larger the display, the more pixels need to be pushed and the more power to drive it. Hence Meta needing to be tethered to a PC for the time being

5/

Besides the high resolution and power requirements, @SDesh and I also went into how objects that appear in your periphery appear differently from those in your central FOV, and how eye tracking could help mimic that properly. More hardware. More power. A long road.

6/

It was also super interesting to me when #ARKit and #ARCore apps started impressing the world while having an even smaller FOV. Was it something about expectations?

7/

Like if you actually drew the FOV bounds in an app, would you be setting expectations of “augmented content is in inside” and satisfy the brain because they’re not surprised that something wasn’t rendering?

8/

Whatever the case, it became obvious to us why almost literally nobody else had a tetherless transparent HMD while a ton of VR headsets were rampant, so even the launch FOV of @HoloLens was a major technical achievement

I just think about all that when I hear an FOV comment

9/9

I swear every time I write these I feel that this is the valid response.