The fact that super-secretive Apple decided to hold a 1,000-person internal meeting on its headset plan is itself confirmation of the scale and depth of Apple’s commitment to this project.
Apple bought Vrvana — including its pending patent application — in November 2017 for $30m. So Apple, and possibly only Apple, has a solution for the latency problem. (3ms!!!)
Increasing FOV in a headset that also meets weight and power and brightness requirements is hard. ... My guess is that Apple does not have a solution for the FOV problem. Yet.
A recent patent filing indicates a technique for “selectively darken[ing] portions of the real-world light from view…to allow improved contrast when displaying computer-generated content over the real-world objects.” Not incidentally, this might allow the lens to be fully darkened, converting an AR (transparent) display to a VR (opaque) display. ...
Apple is building BOTH a pass-through AND a see-through headset.
Apple internally announced a 2022 headset ship date now because they’re confident they can hit that target — but only with pass-through.
The 2023 headset is a see-through headset, and it’s the real technical challenge.
See the full post here: https://medium.com/swlh/apples-ar-vr-strategy-is-both-and-cfdf32d369ac