[This talk is available on the GDC Vault, but requires subscription access]

In this talk I discussed AR and VR travel down the Gartner Hype Cycle, and how the placement for technologies like these is often based on footing that is hype itself. I went on to talk about some of the hardware trade-offs (see my Venturebeat article on the same).

I went on to propose a couple possible directions, and demonstrated some proof-of-concepts developed in my lab. In particular two devices demonstrating two views on what I called ‘device transitions’ - a period of time when new devices co-exist along side old ones (e.g. think of how PDAs and early smartphones required tethering to PCs in order to maintain/manage them).

The two proof of concepts I demonstrated here:

• A belt-worn, small form factor PC tethered to a pair of NReal glasses - demonstrating that you could walk around viewing an AR model from a cad package, and then dock the PC to use it as a traditional desktop.

• An extended windows desktop (originally we built our own pair of waveguide-based glasses to demo this but later switched to the NReal glasses. The idea was to allow someone using a laptop to get the benefits of a multi-monitor display, but retain the high quality readability of the laptop’s panel. We were able to show this interacting seamlessly, supporting drag-drop from one monitor to the other, etc.

I also talked about my team’s work on the OpenXR standard in order to allow more interoperability.

Lastly, I talked about some of the software challenges - and in particular how augmented reality would face a challenge if built off of the Smartphone App-centric ecosystem. I stated this as “Contextually-aware seems like the right path, but who owns the context in a world where context is king. “