171.3 million transistors per mm^2 is mind boggling. Were Apple's A14 to have the same area as their A13 (98.48mm^2) and maintain that density throughout, you're looking at ~16+ billion transistors. Some comparisons:
- Apple A13: 8.5 billion
- Apple A12X: 10 billion (iPad Pro)
- Nvidia Titan RTX: 18.6 billion
I wonder what kind of use cases are unlocked with 16 billion transistors in your pocket. This node might be the one that gets us to AR.
Agree, the popular idea of AR going around - wide FOV, fancy graphics, good occlusion of incoming light, tiny footprint - is unlikely for a long time due to optics. I think it’s foolish to try to execute that vision now, and why I’ve always thought Magic Leap’s 'do it all' approach was completely wrong (and demonstrated they didn't really have a clear vision for what would make AR mainstream). The only way to achieve that vision for AR is to increment toward it over a long time.
I see v1 as a simple narrow FOV heads up display in glasses frame with very focused use case around place based notifications and heads up information. No input at all, except Siri. Display only turns on when necessary. iPhone is used for input and config, much like Watch was initially.
Even getting to this v1 is going to be a huge challenge in such a small form factor, but a chip with this density will help with power budget. This node consumes 30% less power and fits in an even smaller space.
I’m still half convinced that Apple's AR wearable won’t need any optical breakthroughs, because it won't use optical compositing.
If there’s one thing Apple's mobile engineering is uniquely good at, it’s building a low-latency pipeline. I think they could get the camera-to-screen latency low enough that they could build an AR wearable that is essentially a VR headset with wide-angle cameras on the front: This would enable the high-fidelity compositing that you already see on iPads and iPhones, basically leapfrogging everything else in the AR space without having to invent novel optical solutions.
There's also the non-technical aspect that Google, Facebook or some other advertising giant would probably co-opt the technology immediately to stuff it with ads. That alone turns me off the concept completely. It's a sad state of affairs. With Google Glass on one hand and Facebook's Oculus on the other it's pretty clear that they're aware of the potential of such technologies.
Sure, but that's a bit of a theoretical argument. The ability for at tech to be co-opted isn't something that prevents a v1 launch. That's something that happens later.
Google isn't going to be the one that creates breakthrough AR because that both requires sustained effort over long periods of time and being savvy about what mix of capabilities and details consumers will like. Google is structurally disadvantaged in both of these, which is why Glass has been a failure to date.
Facebook could make the hardware, they have a good research group. But they're at a big disadvantage for meeting core use cases because they lack any maps team, and place-based info is critical to early AR success. And as a company they're engagement-oriented, not really usefulness-oriented. AR is fundamentally a usefulness product, not an engagement product. VR is much more about engagement.
What I meant was input via the device itself. You can't expect people to press buttons on their glasses to get things done, that'd be a bad experience. The only other hands-free input method is gaze tracking, which would be great, but it may not make it into a v1 product.
Obviously there's input possibilities from other devices, and I mentioned iPhone. Unlikely mouse and keyboard input for a long time - AR's unique offering is freedom of movement, not being tethered to a desk.
Again, a v1 really has to be a minimal product that is first and foremost a heads-up display for a narrow set of use cases. Else it'll be too bulky or awkward - just look at the rest of the AR devices out there.
Could be, but I don't believe in Google's ability to create a category-defining consumer product. They're an enterprise company that thinks they're a consumer company, there's a lack of understanding humans in everything they do, and they never put enough wood behind each arrow.
They’re not even enterprise! They’re an advertising company that believes they are changing the world. They are right, just not for the reasons they tell themselves.
Microsoft was an operating system and word processor vendor who wanted to be many other things. The only other thing that ever turned a clear profit in a decade was their hardware division, which I gotta say was well deserved. But all of their money came from tech, and selling that tech. Google isn’t even that.
Our optics are already quite good, I don't think we need higher resolution cameras, just higher-speed cameras. I don't think this is impossible, we just don't have the processing power to deal with them yet.
For batteries, we already have some hope with the solid-state batteries of Goodenough.
We would still need more compute than this I believe, but this should get us close.
AR's optics limitation is not cameras, it's the display. That's a tough optics challenge because you have to block incoming light (very hard) and display the data very close to the eye (hard) in a form factor that is appealing (very hard).
I don't think that's so difficult--once you can play games outside using headsets I think they will grow on people. Right now, as a fashion statement they represent people who sit at home and don't go outside. Not that there's anything significantly wrong with that, except it doesn't represent the majority.
Once we have good AR applications which work outdoors, the whole game will change.
If you had an extremely low latency lightfield display and camera that allowed the eye to do the focusing then you could skip the light blocking part (not that that makes the optics challenge easier).
For anything close to the resolution the tech demos have people expecting, a true light field display, if we could even make one that fit in a svelte headset, would require hundreds of gigabytes per second of bandwidth. There is obviously a lot of redundancy in that signal (many "overlapping" views of the same scene) so there could be lots of opportunity for compression, but then you just spend more of the incredibly constrained battery budget on the CPU/GPU.
Add SLAM, CPU/GPU, Wireless radios... and do that all day on just a <5Wh battery (limited by a form factor anything close to a regular pair of glasses).
Clearly it’s not essential, as Microsoft and Magic Leap have brought products to market without it. But the experience of basically wearing sunglasses indoors while your AR imagery shines glaringly bright against its surroundings is hardly ideal.
If you’re aware of any applications of LCD to accomplish optical subtraction in AR, I’d love to read up on them.
As a former mobile computing nerd and sometimes super capacitor investor, I learned a few things:
The rule of thumb in batteries is about 6% a year, so doubling every 12. This hasn’t changed much if at all, and may actually be worse, since the very best AA rechargeable I could find 20 years ago was 1600mAh and that would mean I should have 5Ah AA’s now and are we even in the ballpark?
So if you saw new battery research that doubled battery density, either you would see it in about ten years or not at all. Goodenough is 94 which means one way or another, Braga (his collaborator) will have to finish this.
Also, important rule for mobile power: if someone mentions power density as one number instead of two, they have a horrible secret they don’t want you to know. Power density is measured per unit volume and per unit mass. There are very heavy small batteries and very voluminous light batteries and either one creates design issues for a portable device. You want a small light battery and not all breakthroughs improve this, and so may be limited to stationary applications.
Batteries have also been improving exponentially, it's just a much slower factor of 5 to 8% a year. I haven't seen the same data for optics but wouldn't be surprised if the situation was the same.
There is a somewhat equivalent to that for batteries: Coulomb’s law [1]. The energy contained in a battery increases exponentially the closer the anode and cathode are to each other.
Due to this, scale and other reasons, we’ve seen batteries become 15-20% cheaper year over year [2] for at least the last two decades.
What you've linked has essentially nothing to do with the discussion. What the person who replied to you thought you were talking about was the equation for energy stored in a capacitor, which is proportional to inverse of distance.
I'm not a physicist, but my understanding is that batteries do not use the electric field at all to store charge, unlike a capacitor. Batteries use chemical reactions to move electrons, not static electric charge.
Batteries are electrochemical[1], and the amount of energy in them depends on the amount of active ingredients (for a given composition).
I guess the distance between the electrodes affect the internal resistance which can affect the effective energy output somewhat, but primarily it's the number of molecules that can undergo redox that affects the energy stored.
> I wonder what kind of use cases are unlocked with 16 billion transistors in your pocket.
Compared to 8 billion? Realistically, it will let web developers write even more bloated Javascript SPAs without enough people complaining about the speed to improve it.
- Apple A13: 8.5 billion
- Apple A12X: 10 billion (iPad Pro)
- Nvidia Titan RTX: 18.6 billion
I wonder what kind of use cases are unlocked with 16 billion transistors in your pocket. This node might be the one that gets us to AR.