I feel like they have struck gold with the Meta Ray-ban glasses. Perfect form factor, looks cool, not obtrusive, has actual features that people want to use. That IMO is the future of wearables + AR/VR + AI, not a bulky headset.
The same thing happened with previous technologies. Steve Jobs didn't "invent the smartphone" -- he just made a smartphone at the time when the underlying tech (VLSI, displays, WLAN, WWAN) got to the point where it could fit in a pocket and have battery life of a day. Similarly he didn't invent the MP3 player. He made one at the point when Toshiba were able to manufacture a very small, low power hard drive that meant you could get more than 10 songs on one.
I don't think you'll ever be able to. Maybe not for decades for AR/VR. The AI stuff is cool; you can offload that, but mostly they'll just be a glorified camera mount and headphones for the actual 'glasses.'
Intels next gen iGPU has has similar benchmarks to a 3080. Compute is still scaling incredibly quickly. I think the optical problem will end up taking much longer than compute.
(phones are an obvious choice but I suspect you could jam significantly more power into the same form factor if you didn't need screen, speakers, mobile modem etc)
But the Ray-bans aren't AR or VR. They're just glasses with a camera, microphone, and speakers plus connectivity for streaming the camera's feed. How is that AR or VR in any way?
If I'm going about my day and a voice in my ear gives me context about my surroundings, identifies people and objects, answers questions, tells me which direction I need to walk in, records and live streams my POV and more, that's AR. The experience doesn't always have to be visual.
Imo whether you overlay an image on your eyes or if they just do binocular camera passthrough, they could both count for VR. It's just most phones can't do binocular passthrough due to the lack of appropriately spaced cameras.
This is relevant for stuff like the f35 where you can look "through" the jet
They're working from both ends. VR/Passthrough content on a device with a screen and then the ideal form factor on the Raybans. The goal is to merge them. Its still TBD on when and if that's possible.
