The very first technical paper I saw this morning at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference was about a pair of glasses. But not just any glasses — future glasses.
One of the authors of the paper is an old friend and former colleague of mine. I was super excited to see him as one of the contributors to such an important paper.
The key innovation is to replace the usual optics usually employed for Virtual and Augmented Reality by a very cleverly designed holographic optical element — essentially, a custom-made hologram. The end result is something that looks like an ordinary pair of glasses, but with the high visual quality of the best VR headsets.
Sometime in the next few years this technology will be turned into a product. When it does, the impact will be as profound as were the impacts of the Web and the SmartPhone.