Is there any reason why even right now you can't put all the tech in a pair of glasses and have all the processing in a power bank sized device you put in your pocket, connected via USB-C or other cord?
Magic Leap's ML1 headset [0] works like this, but you still end up with a decent amount of heat-generating stuff on your face.
The "power pack" is the power bank sized thing with the battery and a smartphone caliber motherboard (ARM application processor and a mobile GPU).
There are around half a dozen cameras on the headset, and the GPU is too taxed generating content visuals to do real-time localization and eye tracking. Even if you had enough bandwidth to get all the frames down the cable, it would still be a difficult problem to solve on the GPU while still meeting latency requirements. So instead, there's a dedicated "vision processor" on the headset that processes all of the camera inputs and sends the localization results to the GPU. This vision processor chip gets quite hot.
The projectors themselves can also get pretty hot, especially if you need to crank the brightness up. Difractive optics have a lot of losses, unfortunately...
[0] I worked on parts of ML1 at Magic Leap, but no longer work there.
The "power pack" is the power bank sized thing with the battery and a smartphone caliber motherboard (ARM application processor and a mobile GPU).
There are around half a dozen cameras on the headset, and the GPU is too taxed generating content visuals to do real-time localization and eye tracking. Even if you had enough bandwidth to get all the frames down the cable, it would still be a difficult problem to solve on the GPU while still meeting latency requirements. So instead, there's a dedicated "vision processor" on the headset that processes all of the camera inputs and sends the localization results to the GPU. This vision processor chip gets quite hot.
The projectors themselves can also get pretty hot, especially if you need to crank the brightness up. Difractive optics have a lot of losses, unfortunately...
[0] I worked on parts of ML1 at Magic Leap, but no longer work there.