philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

The Future of AR Beyond the Vision Pro Is Already Brewing

I recently flew out to Long Beach, California, for the AWE augmented and virtual reality conference, but I left my mixed reality VR devices — the Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3 — back in New Jersey. Instead I took two pairs of smart glasses: Meta's Ray-Bans and Xreal's Air 2 Pro. I took photos and made calls with the Ray-Bans. I watched movies on the plane with Xreal. And I didn't miss those chunky VR goggles one bit. ...

These gadgets don't offer up anything like the full-fledged mixed reality that can happen in the Vision Pro or Quest 3, but their increasing utility points to a future of augmented reality beyond bulky headsets. ...

Meanwhile, AWE reminded me that better lenses, displays and hand tracking are coming but still face real challenges. How will future glasses offload all their processing? What about the battery? ...

The Meta Quest 3 and Vision Pro were scattered everywhere around AWE's expo floor in plenty of peripheral and software demos. That's because they both support hand tracking, and they combine camera feeds of the real world with overlays of virtual graphics to mix reality surprisingly well.  ...

Ultraleap, a company that already has hand-tracking technology on existing VR and AR headsets, is testing a smaller, more power-efficient event camera technology — which only senses rough changes in light and movement as opposed to specific details — that could last for hours on smaller glasses while looking for hand micro gestures, similar to what the Apple Vision Pro does with more power-hungry infrared. ...

See the full story here: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/the-future-of-ar-beyond-vision-pro-is-already-brewing/