Apple Glasses Will Reportedly Use Sony's 'Cutting-Edge' OLED Micro-Displays To Deliver 'Real AR Experience' (macrumors.com) 32
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Mac Rumors: Earlier this week, Japanese publication Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun reported that Sony will supply Apple with OLED microdisplays for its widely rumored AR/VR glasses, as spotted by Mac Otakara. The report has since been corroborated by display industry analyst Ross Young, who said multiple sources have informed him that Apple is indeed planning to use Sony's microdisplay technology for its head-mounted accessory. According to FRAMOS, a supplier of embedded vision technologies, Sony's OLED microdisplays are small, cutting-edge displays with an ultra-fast response rate, ultra-high contrast, a wide color gamut for precise color reproduction, high luminance, low reflectance, and other benefits that would be ideal for Apple's glasses. Sony's microdisplays also have integrated drivers for a thin and light design, and power-saving modes are available for longer battery life.
Young said the glasses will use a 0.5-inch display with a 1,280x960 resolution, and these specs appear to correspond with Sony's ECX337A component. According to Sony's website, this microdisplay in particular has a max brightness of 1,000 nits, an ultra-high contrast of 100,000:1, and an ultra-fast response rate of 0.01 ms or less. The high contrast provided by Sony's microdisplays allows an additional information layer to appear seamlessly, and not as an overlay. "This information is simply added to the background for a 'real AR' experience," according to FRAMOS. According to the Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun, Apple plans to release its AR/VR glasses in 2021, but analyst Ming-Chi Kuo does not expect a release until 2022 at the earliest. Young also believes that the glasses will be introduced in the first half of 2022.
Young said the glasses will use a 0.5-inch display with a 1,280x960 resolution, and these specs appear to correspond with Sony's ECX337A component. According to Sony's website, this microdisplay in particular has a max brightness of 1,000 nits, an ultra-high contrast of 100,000:1, and an ultra-fast response rate of 0.01 ms or less. The high contrast provided by Sony's microdisplays allows an additional information layer to appear seamlessly, and not as an overlay. "This information is simply added to the background for a 'real AR' experience," according to FRAMOS. According to the Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun, Apple plans to release its AR/VR glasses in 2021, but analyst Ming-Chi Kuo does not expect a release until 2022 at the earliest. Young also believes that the glasses will be introduced in the first half of 2022.
Resolution (Score:2)
1,280x960 wow
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Okay for AR stuff but the real question is what are the killer apps?
We were promised fantastic things like visual overlays when making repairs, but it never happened. Just lots of boring games and demos.
The only one I can think of that has had any real success is Nintendo's AR Mario Kart game.
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The problem isn't in the technology. But how software is deployed. The Apple Store with all its rules and regulations. Makes it difficult for special use programs to be used.
It is like how our work PCs often have a bunch of custom software designed for our job. Sometimes that crappy program someone made 30 years ago, but in spite its issues it has proven its worth to the organization. However it is so tightly linked to that company that there is no point on selling it to anyone else.
If you could make
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https://developer.apple.com/pr... [apple.com]
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I am pretty sure the resolution is so lousy is because Apple had a very long drama selecting a supplier, trying to copy the tech from that supplier, failing, being sued, surviving trade war, and finally finding a barely usable substitute.
I also believe they did put a lot of premium on the supplier not being Chinese, and thus safe from trade war escalation.
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Nothing wrong with that.
China's not really our friend...so....makes sense.
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There are plenty of visual overlays. The sticking point has been hardware.
Google Maps has walking AR directions - it's pretty neat to walk up to an intersection and see an arrow come and point you around. It's a bit ea
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What is wrong with 1280x960 It is a perfectly good resolution for its size and closeness to the eye.
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It's very low resolution for VR if it's filling your entire field of view. The Oculus Quest 2 is 1832x1920 per eye, you'd need to go back to the Rift CV1 from 2016 to find that sort of resolution.
If it's for AR where it's only filling a small portion of your field of view, which would be implied for a microdisplay, then it's probably fine. But if this is being sold as AR/VR and not just AR, then I'd expect the optics to be stretching that 1280x960 over 90 degrees FoV.
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So this will be built into something that can be mistaken with sunglasses or prescription glasses? Then it's OK I guess. Otherwise it won't be the case that you wear it when running into Kevin, or when you go about your business and get an email (which itself is going the way of fax machines...)
Some real use cases for AR would be, superimpose objects, surfaces and patterns around the environment, in a way that serves entertainment (movies, 3D "holographic" music performances etc.) or shopping (new clothes,
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It either covers a small solid angle (field of view), which is not very good, or it covers a large field of view and ends up being quite pixelated, which isn't very good either. For example, a mobile phone held at ~40cm has a very small field of view, and even with that, its resolution is equivalent to this, or much better. I'm not sure why there should be a lower resolution standard for VR and AR.
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VR - you are looking for total immersion and realism most of the time, so retina or above level resolution with the widest gamut and field of view for best effect.
AR - some sort of clue (pixels, colours, etc.) is actual a good thing in many applications for glasses, as do you really want reality being overridden with something plausible as you walk around or pick things up?
I think things like tracking and latency are far more important than resolution when it comes to overlay. No point having an 8k display
wat (Score:2)
The high contrast provided by Sony's microdisplays allows an additional information layer to appear seamlessly, and not as an overlay.
Nice commercial for Sony, but the fact is that it's not the display that determines whether the additional layer will look like an additional layer. The software does that. If it's composited in a way that looks natural, it will look "seamless", almost regardless of pixel size or contrast ratio. If it isn't, it's going to look like the overlay that it is no matter how good the display is.
It isn't about the display, but the Processing. (Score:2)
The problems I have with AR isn't the quality of the display, You can have CGA Pixel art, for it to be useful. But the fact for all the devices I have seen, there seems to be a split second lag between what is being displayed vs where it is positioned.
Humans are very visual creatures and we can spot out fake and if something doesn't quite fit how we understand the universe, we get repulsed by it. Having an object not move with the same blurring and in complete sync. Will trigger our alert level, as we s
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If it's being done as an optical overlay without a video passthrough, positional tracking and overlaying can be done very fast, modern VR headsets with inside-out tracking like the Quest 2 can do it in just a few milliseconds. The problem would be the video passthrough if it's not using an optical overlay. The Quest 2's passthrough mode (meant for convenience and setup rather than real AR) is very low resolution and low framerate, and doesn't even have any cameras where your eyes are, so it has to 3D map th
Think about these words: (Score:2)
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Oblig. Futurama VR reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Not what I knew (Score:5, Interesting)
I know myself the person who was working on the previous prototype of Apple's glasses.
Their previous iteration used an inorganic LED screen from a Beijing University spinoff. 5000 nits on a single chip was the thing, and efficiency as far as it can go with LEDs.
Apple did not want to play fair. They poached their engineers, and tried to replicate the technology themselves.
Then Beijing Uni comes into the pictures, and threatens them with a lawsuit, claiming that Apple "tainted" itself with their proprietary IP/trade secrets by hiring their engineers, and that they will blast them out of China if they proceed. And thus, they had to abandon that tech, despite its promise. But the company in question was still wrecked by the exodus of top talent.
This needs to cut both ways (Score:3)
Pathetic (Score:2)
That resolution sounds pathetic. 1280x960 .. even for google glasses style glassholic AR.
More close to reality (Score:2)
Guys, take a look at this: https://www.emagin.com/product... [emagin.com]
It's already used in a number of HMDs, and eMagin is the one, and only American company on the market with 1k+ nits product. The helmet on F35 is using displays from that company exactly because of that high bridgtness.
High brightness is super important, because even 1k nit HMDs look very unimpressive in daylight, and anything below 1k nit is impossible to see at all.
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Adding to that. e-Beam patterning which eMagin uses is VERY expensive, and hard to scale. That's why that F35 helmet thing costs half a megabuck.
What's the limit on nits? (Score:2)
Optics are the biiger problem in AR (Score:2)
Remember Google Glass? (Score:2)
Google Glass was already a thing of the before it was fully developed, for many obvious privacy reasons. And now Facebook is developing something similar and Apple joins the bandwagon. And now it's suddenly OK? I don't get it. Even from Apple (I am an Apple fan) I wouldn't want one of these things in a 10 m radius around me.
7pepty (Score:1)