What he’s referring to is that the camera of a smartphone is just that. It’s a camera, for taking pictures, not for providing a 50mm type, 1:1 scale relation with the world. If they were built that way, it’d be too hard to fit the things in that you needed. One of the side effects of this in the use of AR on the hoof, is that it brings a certain degree of distortion to your surroundings when viewed through your phone, something which adds yet another problem to the large pile of issues around getting the real and the virtual to line up on demand and in real time. Just in case we weren’t depressed enough, Feiner chucks on a few more. “The GPS system isn’t good enough either. You can get better equipment with backpacks that surveyors use. It brings the accuracy down to a few cm rather 5m or so and that software is freely available. It’s just that it costs in excess of $10,000.” Not something we’ll be finding in the next Samsung Bada then. “We could also use better gyros, compasses and accelerometers too but the likes of Qualcomm and Nokia have labs working on and targeting AR all over the world and they’ve realised this. So, what they’re actually doing is making their chip technology more tailored for these features to better support what’s already there.” Thankfully, Feiner’s outlook is much cheerier than his reservations might suggest. Within the iron clad practicality of this scientific researcher beats the heart of a man with a dream. “I honesty believe that at some point in the future we’re going to have AR eyewear that’s sufficiently light weight, comfortable, visually appealing, high quality enough and at the right price that people will want to wear while walking around. It has to be socially acceptable and desirable.” While it may sound unlikely to those with 20-20 vision or people who’ve chosen to wear contact lenses instead of spectacle frames to correct their myopia or hyperopia, as Feiner points out, it has become the norm to wear little bits of plastic in our ears - for some they’re even a badge of status. However, he does appreciate that there’s a difference. “We need to be very careful with eyewear, though. It’s a much higher bar to pass when we’re dealing with someone’s face. It’s the first place people look. We need to get around the whole Borg ‘we will assimilate you’ look. We need to have good industrial design to make the glasses appealing and comfortable enough, and still be able to see into people’s eyes, but industrial designers are very good and I’m confident that they’ll find a way of doing it.”
As Feiner points out, there are a certain number of prerequisites for such AR glasses. They need to wirelessly connect to the user’s mobile or at least have tiny CPUs and GPUs of their own and not “instant on” but “always on”, but with an easy way of turning them off when you want a break.
If Feiner and the department at Columbia didn’t already have their work cut our for them, there’s also plenty of issues if you want to start rendering the augmentations on these glasses in 3D, as will doubtless become important when augmentations have to be objects rather than just text. So given that it’s going to be tricky enough even to get good AR spectacles going, how about the nirvana of the augmented reality contact lenses? “Contact lenses? Yep, it will happen. It’s very delicate and there’s lots of problems including radiation to your eyeball and how people are going to be able to see a sharp image so close to their retina rather than a wash of colour. It’s hard but it will be doable. “But my question to you is this - why have it washing around on the surface of your eye when you can have it implanted inside your head? Sure there are social and ethical issues but these things will change with each generation as it becomes more acceptable. “And then if you can have it implanted in your head as an adult, then why not have it done at birth? And if that can happen, then why not into our genes? And at that point, we would have changed the human species altogether but beyond that, I’ve no idea where we’ll go.”
