[LonelyWolfe]

Just venting and ranting about AR glasses here:

One thing about AR glasses that I don't get so far: Why do ALL of the AR glasses use only 1080p displays per eye whereas all the other VR solutions that also have a display right in front of your eye have even bigger resolutions?

I really do want AR glasses that can act as an alternative to a physical display. But they're always 1080p for some reason. The companies I've seen making them appear to me to keep fixing important issues and adding really useful features - but seem to avoid touching anything that would improve the resolution.

Edit : There's a part of me that believes the situation here is a lot like how Linus Tech Tips described the Dashcam situation.

[numpad0]

The display panels used for AR(and some pre-Oculus VR) displays are completely different thing from normal LCDs. Lots of them used to be a reflective panel made of silicon wafers with RGB front lights flashing in sequence. Driving circuits and interfacing protocols are all non-standard, under NDA, and quite complicated. The panels also needs to be coupled to a complicated optical lens - they're just magnifying glasses, only fancier. The complete thing that has a digital input and an optical output is often referred to as an Optical Engine.

What that means is, these glasses are made by someone paying $$$ once to Asian engineering companies to have it figured out, and everyone reuse that exact setup for years on.

And companies like Sony or Canon, they develop stuffs by scraping engineers off a wall instead of first throwing them at the wall, so every Sony or Canon cameras and projectors come with novel viewfinders and crazy patented lenses. Or panel suppliers like Kopin, Epson, or Sharp can arrange contacts to engineering consultants. I guess. Same likely goes for all the Chinese companies too, though I'm not familiar enough on that front to be able to offer googlable keywords.

Startups and even mid-sized consumer electronics companies don't have that kind of time or financial backings or margins to do the same. They barely manage to pay for assembly and ship it. And so the spec of the final product is whatever spec of parts that they could buy off the shelf.

What about Apple? Well, they pay to have 2 extra display factories built for redundancy by policy - I'm sure that most military organization don't do that. And even then they use a rather simplistic, completely concentric and rotationally symmetric optical design.

(I kind of have a crazy idea to bypass some of that, but unfortunately I'm crazy and so is the idea)

[blensor]

now I'm intrigued, any hints?

[z3t4]

In my experience you need at least 8k per eye to get sharp text. But if you just want to watch a movie 4k will look very crisp and 1080p@30hz also works for movies.

So what you get is basically a larger mobile screen for watching videos, something that competes with video projectors, but you can use it on the bus. It's an easier sell compared to a device that will give you a good reading experience and competes with paper books.

Those of us that want to use them as terminal emulators are still too few.

[blensor]

Not disagreeing with the resolution but I assume for most last-gen use cases it didn't make much sense because you also need to be able to drive that somehow and you can be happy that you get a 2 Lane display port interface up until the more recent phones.

So if you have high res displays that no one can realistically use for the intended mobile cinema use case then you are wasting money and energy

[andrewmcwatters]

The screens are two entirely different products. The current Sony micro-OLED screens being used by product manufacturers for AR glasses require out-of-plane reprojection versus VR headset screens which require focal lenses.

The top-of-the-line solutions by Sony used in current products only go up to 1080p120.

[LonelyWolfe]

I heard something like this in the Linus video. That video also mentioned Sony as well.

[msgodel]

I don't know what I would do with higher resolution personally. This is already enough that xterm's "tiny" font is extremely hard to read. Personally I'd prefer lower power draw to more resolution.

[charcircuit]

AR glasses have smaller FOV which means that a lower resolution can still achieve a higher peak pixels per degree compared to a VR headset.

[riedel]

One of the reason is IMHO that the optical resolution with those lense designs does not get better than 1080p. It seems even that resolution is blurry at the edges. So anything beyond probably would be a waste without totally different optics.

[LonelyWolfe]

This feels like the most probable reason. Likely a big redesign would be needed for larger resolutions.

[kevin_thibedeau]

It's a packaging problem. They don't have the luxury of placing relatively large screens in front of the eyes.

[spookie]

AR solutions value mobility over fidelity. This has numerous repercussions, leading to those displays.

[k__]

Because the glasses are much smaller than headsets, I'd assume.

[stronglikedan]

Apples to oranges, since VR glasses are a much bigger form factor.