As for not making things dark, yes that's true. You can of course tint the glasses or use an extra layer to darken the outside world, or you can really crank the brightness causes the user's iris to contract creating the impression of higher contrast in the dark regions. Best option is to combine the approaches with a camera observing the environment, which can even be done on a per-pixel basis as in the paper I helped write [1]
As for power/performance, it's all a matter of desired form factor. If you don't mind a cable to an arm or hip attached android device, you can have everything you need right now. Alternatively there's the Hololens style huge headset. But if you want slimline glasses yes you'll be waiting a few years.
A lot a people are bearish on the future of AR and I can appreciate that viewpoint, but the arguments you've brought for it are at best half true and I hope readers don't see this and think any of these problems are unsolvable (or indeed, haven't already been solved)
[0] https://tech.moverio.epson.com/en/bt-300/ [1] http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7523376/
A better situation is where the preprint or open access version is available.
WHAT?! Does that mean it's the authors who pay publishers to get their work published? Is that really true? And then publishers also charge readers for what they were paid to publish in the first place?
If so then... I don't even... :)
It also fosters discussion, since we can view your work and see whether it stands on its own merits, or whether it's related to the discussion past the title and the abstract.
The IEEE site also shows that your article has been viewed 238 times. My comment linking to the unimprisoned version was upvoted 5 times, and a good rule of thumb is that 4*upvotes = view count on a clickable link. (I've measured this in the past.) So your readership probably increased by at least 10%.
Lastly, I'm hopeful that IEEE and other institutions will eventually yield to the forces of technology, as the RIAA did. Attempting to stop technology by force doesn't have a good track record of success. It will be an unpleasant ride until then, but the world will be better off.
To answer some of the sibling comments:
rspeer > You get no actual benefit from IEEE making money off of your article, right?
I'm well aware, although as an IEEE member I don't think it's fair to say no benefit, although it is very hard to quantify.
klibertp > what difference it makes for you personally, as an author and researcher, whether people access your work via a paywall or not?
None. As said above, I think my tenor wasn't communicated well enough. I was more just surprised that, given that sillysaurus3 and I have never communicated before, someone would take an action that could have potentially been quite upsetting (I know a few researchers where that would have definitely been the case).
klibertp > Does that mean it's the authors who pay publishers to get their work published? Is that really true? And then publishers also charge readers for what they were paid to publish in the first place?
Absolutely not in our field. As I understand it, in some fields there is a charge for very long form writing to cover the work required in reviewing and editing (though perversely the actual person who does that work is often unpaid), but generally pay-to-publish would indicate a low quality journal and would be an outlet of last resort.
Having used the Hololens it actually works quite well. Also in IBMs 17 year old thing https://www.cnet.com/news/computers-off-the-rack-from-ibm/
http://www.mcubemems.com/product/mc7010-9-axis-igyro/ (that's 3mm square). Plenty of space on a pair of glasses for a 9 dof IMU.
11 milliseconds on a modern CPU is a long time for image processing. You need a lot of grunt to do it, but it would work. It makes sense that the glasses should just be a dumb screen with some odometry, connected to a much more powerful data source.
"AR" doesn't mean "projecting clear text onto the real world". It means retransmitting the real world from a camera onto an LCD with things added.
We literally already have the technology built into phones. You add some lenses and a battery pack and you're good.
Unlikely. I've elaborated on this in the past.
Basically: You cannot make things dark. You can't use LCD type technology to block part of the lenses for the same reason you can't see scratches on your lenses: you're not focused on your lenses! You're focused in the distance. That means the ideal of having crisp, readable text overlays is mostly a fantasy. You can prove this yourself: get a piece of tape, write some text on it, and put it over your lenses. You can't read the text. You can even use clear tape to simulate what a real overlay would look like.
The second problem is power. Oculus makes sense because you're tethered to a high-end workhorse. When you're using glasses, you have neither a video card nor a huge source of power at your disposal. That means battery technology would need to improve by a massive amount just to make the glasses not die within hours.
The third issue is target recognition. The real world is instant. That means any overlay you use would need to attain 90FPS to appear seamless. If you're going to do the most basic thing with an AR device -- drawing an arrow on the ground, indicating where to walk, a'la Google Maps -- you'll need to recognize the ground + render the overlay within 11 milliseconds. This might work for a ground-based overlay, since you can assume it's a flat plane in a big city, as long as your gyroscope is accurate enough. But where would you even stick a gyroscope with that kind of precision inside a glasses form factor?
The best form factor for this would probably be some kind of "bandana", where the meat of the device sits on the back of your head. That'd look dorky and it'd be uncomfortable, but you might be able to pull it off.
The only way this might work is if you use LCD tech to dim the entirety of both lenses enough to then project light on top of them. But again, your focusing out in the distance, so trying to show anything readable (text messages) seems kind of a fantasy.
Here's proof: Pull out your phone and hold it up to your eye where lenses of glasses would normally be. I'm not sure if you could even render it in a way that would account for the focus blur.