Camera quality is the easy problem. The hard problems are getting camera latency down and dealing with depth of field and all the other things you lose when you replace the incoming light field with camera images.

I’m pretty impressed with the depth of field the Quest is able to develop in Passthrough+ mode just using the 4 wide field tracking cameras and a smartphone processor from 3 years ago. A residual, after-thought capability like that on a $400 device is pretty impressive, IMHO.

given the rate of improvement in camera tech, I'd say we are very far away from passthrough to be usable

> we are very far away

For different definitions of "very far away". We're only talking about 15 years since we started getting proper video recording in phones, and only about 4 since the big players started focusing on software enhancements.

that's a fair point, but vision is such a high-dimensional and dynamic input that my feeling is the last 20% of super-fast autofocus, auto color balancing, high dynamic range, removing motion-blur, etc. will be very difficult to improve upon. it seems that just increasing brightness/fov by making better waveguides or MEMS will be much easier. that being said, magic leap's lack of success doesn't bode well.