IEEE Future Directions
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Progress continues in developing more advanced devices to deliver “as real as it gets” sensation of augmented, mixed and virtual reality. If we look back just 2 years we are surprised at how much bulkier the devices were.
The last one coming soon to market, the One Creator Edition from Magic Leap is indeed another step forward. It is just a bit bulkier than a normal set of glasses, it feels comfortable on your nose and it is able to deliver good images, but…
Take a look at the video. The review is interesting, it clearly says that the new goggles are a step forward (although may be not as significant as Magic Leap is advertising). At the same time the person who tried them is saying that she is not fooled by the images into believing they are real. They “feel” fake, artefacts.
I remember at the turn of the century it seemed that AR, MR and VR would have been just around the corner. The issue was to have sufficient processing power and good display technology to deliver them in a credible, seamless way.
We got much more processing power than we expected, displays have become great (just look at your fantastic TV set!), yet we haven’t been able to far to cheat our brain. It is not that technology is not good, it is that our brain is so much better in appreciating nuances in the real world and it is able to detect if something does not match.
It is very complex indeed. You have to trick the brain by creating a reality that is credible but that at the same time is not appearing as the real thing, since you are displaying it so close to the eyes! This is why, in general, an image on the television or the movie you what at the cinema look much more real than the same images displayed on goggles. The perspective changes, the eyes are not capturing the same angles when they move and our brain is processing images both based on information provided by the retina(s) and on information provided by the eye movements (this is essential to keep the images stable, otherwise as your eyes move you would see the images jump around).
Goggles can mimic the image, but they cannot mimic reality in terms of copying with eye movements. My impression is that using googles will never lead to a seamless mixed reality (nor AR nor VR). We will to shortcut the information sent by the eye muscles so that the brain can receive a fake, but coherent set of information. For that we would need some kind of implant (or over-riding the nerve signals). It may happen but we are still far from that.
