Facebook lit up the nascent virtual reality industry like a pinball machine when it bought Oculus for USD 2 billion in 2014. After a few years, Oculus was spun into Facebook Technologies and a series of virtual reality hardware products were brought to market: Oculus Rift, Oculus Go and Oculus Quest.
Since then, the tech giant has been researching augmented reality in order to make a pair of lightweight AR smart glasses. According to a recent Facebook blog post, the company believes that tracking capabilities would have to extend approximately 50 times beyond the power efficiency of Oculus Quest. The untethered Quest currently relies on a Snapdragon 835 System-on-a-Chip (SoC) for tracking, but recent report in the Electronic Times suggests that Facebook has hired Samsung Electronics to manufacture custom chips for their AR glasses.
The custom AR chip could be manufactured with the newest 7nm electron-beam photolithography that Samsung Electronics used to create the SoC on the Galaxy Note 10. Though this hypothetical chip would allow for very low power usage, it wouldn't account for another extremely stultifying engineering challenge: motion-to-photon latency.
Motion-to-photon latency is experienced in both augmented and virtual reality but is more pronounced in augmented reality. In augmented reality, optical see-through (OST) systems overlay digital content onto physical reality (aka the real world). The visual perceptual systems of humans do not have any latency. This is exactly why the latency of digitally overlaid content in AR that does have latency is more noticeable than in the fully occluded virtual environment of VR. Mobile AR and VR headsets lack computing power compared to their tethered counterparts.
The user experiences latency by watching digitally overlaid content catch up with a user’s motion via trails or jerking motions. Say you move your head to the left, the displayed digital content will lag and sometimes produce unwanted artifacts or "noise" that appear relative to the time, orientation and position of the headset. This makes the experience unpleasant and less remarkable then when motion-to-photon latency is present.
Battery life is crucial for untethered headsets, and if Facebook uses a new SoC designed by Samsung Electronics to improve the battery life, it might free them up to work on other more serious bottlenecks to delivering an augmented reality hardware product to the masses.