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by probablybanned 3383 days ago
What do you think about solving this with wireless power transfer? There has been some promising research recently into extending the range of resonant inductive coupling.

It's nobody's ideal, but a clip-on/necklace style power solution might be sellable to the public if the value proposition of the glasses is good enough.
1 comments
root_axis 3383 days ago
A future where resonance charging equipment is safe, functionally practical and ubiquitous is sort of a breakthrough scenario in and of itself, but even then, you're still talking about a technology that is somewhat out of reach. Even if we can squeeze the necessary GPU power into the form factor of "a normal pair of sunglasses", consider the additional heat dissipation requirements of a device as thin as normal glasses that is also in a state of perpetual charge, especially when we take into account the human face's particular sensitivity to heat.

Maybe very thick oversized (by today's standards) frames will come into style and something like that will be on the border of possibility, but it seems like a real stretch within the next 10 years.

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probablybanned 3382 days ago
After thinking it over a bit, I'm going to take the other side of the bet.

We agree that power consumption is a limiting factor no matter what. In my imagined system, only something on the order of 1W would be delivered to the glasses. Delivering 1W over 10cm with large-ish coil area at >50% efficiency using NFMR isn't really a breakthrough, but it's only a way of eliminating the LiPo bulk and nothing more.

The thing is, I don't think we're near the boundary of power efficiency even with today's silicon. The way forward is to push all the feature tracking and other low-level vision tasks down to the ASIC level, while accepting some strict limitations on the rendering side. So a lot of it comes down to scope of features. Its most immediately useful applications are little more than a glorified HUD -- project some GPS data here or an info overlay there. Blit a video source on top of a marker, that sort of thing.

This sort of practical product, by 2027, I'll say yes. Mindblowing, transform-your-world stuff? No. But let's see what happens...

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