Holographic Lens For Virtual Reality

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2014/jul/31/new-holographic-waveguide-augments-reality

This article provides some insight into the future of virtual reality in the next ten years. Ideally, what you want for perfect VR optics is the ability to beam lasers right into your eyeballs and onto your retina in exactly the places you want. That might sound dangerous, but a laser beam that could cut steel in half wouldn't give a person a bad sunburn and, at the right frequencies, wimpy lasers beamed into your eyes could never cause the slightest harm and could even produce less harm than wearing an ordinary pair of glasses or contact lens. Using more advanced versions of this type of technology it should be possible to produce a lightweight pair of holographic sunglasses that wrap around your head and produce a complete field of vision with even 4k resolutions for perfect immersion in VR.

Of course, the drawback to increasing the field of view and resolution of the images is that it requires outrageous amounts of data processing, however, what the entire industry is focused on is reproducing the efficiency of the human eye and brain in their own designs. Towards that end the perfect zero latency and other near zero latency systems have already been devised including the Mindmaze which actually reads your thoughts and knows what you will do next whether it be move an eyeball or your arm. Knowing, what you will do even before you might know means the computer has all the time in the world to process the enormous amount of data and be ready to display it when, for example, you jerk your head around to look behind you. The same system can also be used to induce haptics such as being able to touch and feel virtual objects or feel acceleration pushing you back in your seat.

In comparison to what's coming in the next few decades at most, Microsoft's Hololens and other comparable devices coming on the market are the equivalent of a fancy Viewmaster. That's the entire history of display technology with, for example, all of our modern displays using a vast array of tricks to fool the human eye simply because it is much cheaper than attempting to reproduce a perfect image, however, with this kind of optical wave guide technology being developed it will soon become much cheaper and easier to produce a perfect imagine in a pair of glasses than on a big screen. Already you can buy glasses that provide the equivalent of a 90" TV screen without the 3D effects that are much cheaper than buying an actual 90" 4k resolution TV.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LYfOnRsZzE

Here's an example of top of the line 2D cinema glasses, but this particular model still has relatively low resolution which should improve in the immediate future. They provide the equivalent of a 40" monitor two feet in front of you, which, is just enormous and enough that your eyes will have to get used to covering that much territory in a desktop. Analog foveated designs for processing even ray traced geometry can provide incredible speed and efficiency in processing the vast volumes of data required to fill the equivalent of a 40" monitor. Essentially, analog designs are about doing more with less and, for computers, that means less memory and less shuffling everything around over any distances. Otoy and Imagination are working in this direction towards real time ray traced geometry and AI aimed at consumer markets and which can even convert old games into ray traced versions using mere millwatts of power in a cellphone. This year we should see a lot of new models of glasses like these coming on the market with close to 4k resolutions and much lower prices.

 

I don't think I'll get into virtual reality.
I kinda like actual reality.

 

It will just be determined by people's laziness

Even if we get to full holodeck like situations, that requires effort.

People will still prefer to sit on the couch, watch reality tv, play video games, eat pizza .

All these superdooper cameras with cricket or football nowadays don't make it better, make you a little dizzy

 

The point of virtual reality is that, unlike reality, it can be whatever you want it to be and the dizziness merely reflects the fact they are not rending it perfectly yet. There's even a pseudo-3D that has been developed that is just a cheap way of adding more depth to things like games without making people dizzy. Sort of like playing with the stereo settings to get the sound you want, these days you can adjust the picture to whatever you want including rendering old movies like "Friday the 13th" in 3D if that's what you want. Watching a movie or playing a video on 4k glasses like this can add a lot of darker shades to things like horror movies and games that just improve the picture quality more than you might assume. Often movie cameras don't even capture the kind of dark scenes that modern video screens such as OLEDs can provide and movie makers currently compensate in things like horror films using unrealistic red lighting for example in an attempt to simulate darkness knowing perfectly well that most TVs and monitors would just show a black screen if they didn't add more light. The same is true for brightness levels with current monitors producing nowhere near the brightness of true daylight, but better darkness, true blacks, and higher contrast are what are much more often appreciated.

 

No, there is only a certain amount of visual stimulation the brain can handle, and that's not the same across the entire population.

That's the bottlneck. Or the definition of "better" is not the same for everyone.

We start messing with what the visual cortex can handle either through drugs or technology to cope with holographic 3D then we won't be us anymore


You still have people that but vinyl records, prefer to text on Twitter with all the other "better" stuff on the internet

Remember back when everyone thought Second Life was the future of the internet. What happended with that?

 

Your comment reminds me of a Babylonian tablet dated roughly a century after the invention of writing. On the tablet, the author complained about the new invention of writing ruining their children who no longer bothered to memorize everything.

Alvan Toffler was earnest when he coined the phrase "Future Shock" but, sometimes, future shock is a pie-in-the-face and what's coming with technology in the next century is enough to humble anyone. Like any other technology the real problem is possessing the wisdom to use it wisely and, for the first time in history, we will soon have the AI helping us to cultivate wisdom using VR programs.

 

Thanks for sharing the article, it was a good read. Its amazing to know how technology can advance in the next couple of years.