Like, the only way to describe the technology that would have to exist to deliver that is "mythical". Moore's Law completely broke peoples' brains, ie specifically by making people believe that thermal, mechanical, optical, ergonomic engineering are all just functions of Moore's.

@jplebreton I don't think people understand exactly how far we are away from fitting that amount of compute and battery in something that size, without even having something bigger than an original iPod and ultra low-latency high bandwidth wireless link to it from the glasses. It's wild.

@danhon The question isn't even "how far away are we from that" it's "is this even possible", we are up against some totally inflexible laws of physics but peoples' mental models are still calibrated around "computers went from filling a room to fitting in your pocket in ~60 years".

@jplebreton @danhon Are there really any physical limits to how small you can make VR hardware? To me, it seems like it's mostly an engineering problem, not a physics problem.

@marian42 @danhon engineering realities (die size/density, power consumption, battery capacity, heat dissipation) are ultimately constrained by the laws of physics, and the huge strides in transistor density from 1970-2010~ happened when we didn't really have to worry about most of those concerns. now we do. there are eg battery breakthroughs coming down the pipe, but their yields are nothing like the orders-of-magnitude yields of the Moore's Law golden age.

@marian42 @danhon as far as we know, the engineering reality is that computation has a certain minimum energy (thus heat) cost that isn't going away. we should push against that with research wherever possible but also avoid building futures that crumble if it doesn't improve.

@jplebreton @danhon that seems reasonable. But at the same time, we are far away from the physical limits for computation. If VR moves from a niche toy so something that everyone uses (I don't necessarily predict this), it will become feasible to put much more resources into miniaturizing the hardware, just like what happened with smartphones in the 2010s

@marian42 @danhon "we are far away from the physical limits for computation" - that's an interesting statement, actually. i guess it depends on which limits you mean - like yeah in terms of raw compute available we can probably scale up absurdly (and burn down the rainforests building it, etc). but when space/volume is the constraint, i don't think it's a given that "VP but in a pair of glasses, runs for more than 5 minutes, doesn't burn you" is a thing that can physically exist in our universe.

@marian42 @danhon the brain is amazingly efficient yeah, but it's also not doing hardly any of the things we ask a VR headset to do. our entire civilization is built on avoiding using computation wherever possible / using as little of it as possible, eg to get a spoonful of food into our mouths, and externalizing the computation we can't avoid in various ways (counting with stones, the abacus, etc). if we built a brain-like computer it wouldn't be able to do most of what we need a headset to do.