you all say oculus rift but why not google glass?

Because it can't have "the same functionality."

The Rift is a VR device. Glass was a relatively limited (compared to current offerings) AR device. And it's dead.

^^ That. It's AR vs VR.
In some ways, AR will be the VR killer, when it's good enough.
At the moment though, AR systems have terrible FOV, terrible resolution, terrible cost, etc -- when compared with current VR systems.

And it's dead.

Not dead, just back into stealth mode.
It's Microsoft's turn to bring out a prototype (HoloLens) and you can be sure that Google will be back in the game when/if they succeed in bringing it to market.

Google has been investing in Magic Leap, so I guess they will eventually be using their AR technology sooner or later. With that said, there is lots of room for many different types of interaction models - not just headsets. You can use a smartphone for AR relatively easily, just like Pokeman...

anyway whats the magic behind creating such googles (i mean creating that lets say oled display on glass.plastic) how do they do it?

edit.

i ask because i would love to try to make one. at least i could have light weight, almost invisible interactive headset, ofc for game dev but first i need to know how they do it so i can compare my thoughts to real things. but dont ask me what i want to do it, i can tell only that it will require a positioning devices, but not gps

I don't know how the hololens screen projection system works. I suspect that they have three very thin layers of glass and each layer contains the red, green and blue channel and they rely on the additive properties of light to render a colored image.

Rendering an imagine is the first of many big challenges you'd face if you're going to make your own AR device. Remember that augmented reality is... augmenting reality! That means you have to know a bunch of things about reality before you can augment it! You need to know where things are in reality space, so that means you'll need to have two cameras that are constantly doing image capture, feeding the capture to a processor, which then tries to gather depth information to create a "z-buffer" for the real world. Why do you need this? For occlusion of course. If you have a ball in augmented reality and it rolls behind the couch, your device will have to know that the 3D position of the ball isn't visible anymore because it is being occluded by the couch. But, maybe a portion of the ball is still visible? So you'd have to do some fancy logic against each pixel in the ball mesh to see if its depth buffer test is less than or greater than the real world depth buffer. Then you've also got to map out the shape of the objects in the real world so that you can have collisions with it. Your ball should bounce off of the couch rather than phasing right through it, and in order for that to happen, you have to do some time processing the environment around you in order to generate triangulated collision meshes.

This is computationally expensive stuff, so the "magic" of the hololens is that you're really wearing a stand alone computer on your head which has enough processing power and battery life to do this decently for a reasonable amount of time. It's really quite incredible if you think about how much computational power you'd need to do this, and they've shrunk it down to the size of a head band. You also have a microphone, so you can issue voice commands to the system which is pretty smart at interpreting them (I've never tried that feature).

Anyways, trying to compare hololens to oculus rift is like comparing boats vs cars and complaining that your boat can't drive on the highway, or your car doesn't float. They are fundamentally very different...

I suspect that they have three very thin layers of glass and each layer contains the red, green and blue channel and they rely on the additive properties of light to render a colored image.

Sounds odd to me. I don't think the additive properties of light have anything to do with this. It probably has a full spectrrum (white) light source which then would be filtered through the three layers. An aqua layer to filter unwanted red, a yellow layer to filter unwanted blue, and a violet layer to filter unwanted green. A glass layer cannot magically add a red tone to light, AFAIK.

I suspect that they have three very thin layers of glass and each layer contains the red, green and blue channel and they rely on the additive properties of light to render a colored image.

Sounds odd to me. I don't think the additive properties of light have anything to do with this. It probably has a full spectrrum (white) light source which then would be filtered through the three layers. An aqua layer to filter unwanted red, a yellow layer to filter unwanted blue, and a violet layer to filter unwanted green. A glass layer cannot magically add a red tone to light, AFAIK.

I think you're both talking about two different aspects of the system. Forgive the ascii art -- sounds like slayemin is talking about how the projection gets reflected into your eye (right), and you're talking about where the projection comes from (top).

   Green Source  ___
     Red Source  __ \
    Blue Source  _ \ \
                  \ \ \ 
                  L L L
                  a a a
  Eye->           y y y
                  e e e
                  r r r
                  1 2 3

I think you're both talking about two different aspects of the system. Forgive the ascii art -- sounds like slayemin is talking about how the projection gets reflected into your eye (right), and you're talking about where the projection comes from (top).

   Green Source  ___
     Red Source  __ \
    Blue Source  _ \ \
                  \ \ \ 
                  L L L
                  a a a
  Eye->           y y y
                  e e e
                  r r r
                  1 2 3

Hum, you'reI probably right. Cute diagram, BTW :)

Google should sell glass again without its features, giving ability for us to program gpu on it if its there. The only reason im asking it is because they stopped selling it plus they made the funxtionality wrong. I rather dont want to say what i could make with this if it had only ability to render with gpu , use its gyro and have ability to connect external radio positioning device but its my dream, too bad i dont know how to make such tiny things. The original second question was how do they build such layers, not how they are designed.

I have a HoloLens. It's a really cool toy, but attempting to sell this device to the general public would be a disaster and MS knows it. I think there's a wonderful future ahead for AR googles when they get the tech and use cases nailed, but VR is here now and AR is just a prototype.

By the way, the surprising amazing thing about the HoloLens isn't the holograms - it's the world tracking. I can lay down holograms in a couple offices and the hallways, and wander about freely and it always knows exactly where I am. And it persists the world correctly at all times. No cameras or laser projectors or outboard sensors needed. This makes room-scale VR look like child's play.

Lastly, on the subject of VR: Vive is fantastic. The dual tracked controllers actually give you a real tactile sense into the world. Oculus, on the other hand, sucks due to not having it. (Although their optics might be better, I'm still deciding.) Being in VR and using an Xbox controller to play is weird and disconnected and fundamentally not that fun. (The single camera setup also means Oculus has some nasty occlusion issues.) Vive feels like what VR should be. Hopefully Oculus Touch will address the issue later this year.

By the way, the surprising amazing thing about the HoloLens isn't the holograms - it's the world tracking.

^This.
It really does make the Oculus and Vive's IR tracking systems seem "old technology"!

Hopefully Oculus Touch will address the issue later this year.

The tracked area will still be smaller than the Vive's, due to there only being two cameras in front of you, rather than one projector on either side of you... but the prototype Touch controllers IMHO are waaaay better than the Vive controllers.
Thumb:
* Vive has the thumb touch pad, which is more flexible -- virtual buttons, virtual mouse, virtual thumb-stick, swipe gestures, etc...
* Touch has a traditional thumb-stick and a few buttons, xbox style... which I prefer. Touch also has capacitive touch so it knows whether you've got your thumb resting on the controller or not, allow you to give a "thumbs up" gesture as an input.
Index finger:
* Vive and touch are both pretty much the same - an analogue trigger. Vive's trigger feels a little firmer. Touch has the capacitive sensor, allowing a "finger guns"/"pointing" gesture as input.
Middle finger:
* Vive has a stupid button that takes an awkward amount of force to squeeze.
* Touch has another analogue trigger, just like the index finger (again with a capacitive sensor for "finger off trigger" detection). Picking up items by squeezing feels far better than with Vive's button. It sounds minor but this made a massive difference in immersion to me.

VR is far more challenging that it looks (like many other things). To get some understanding of issues, I would suggest reading Micheal Abrash blogs for start, like: http://siliconangle.com/blog/2015/09/24/oculus-chief-scientist-michael-abrash-on-the-core-challenges-facing-vr-oc2/

It's already been said, but Google Glass is not functionally on the same playing field. Plus, there's something more immersive about a helmet. Google Glass is designed in a way that you are still aware of and seeing your complete surroundings. A good VR experience is completely immersive.

In the long run (10 years or so), I'd expect the two technologies to converge. Without much modification even to current tech, AR could approximate VR by shutting out the light from the outside world, VR could approximate AR by filming the outside world and integrating it with the display. The rest is software.

I think there are big parallels to the console and smartphone world, where VR is consoles and AR is smartphones. VR's immersiveness is going to be better for gaming, and it's going to beat AR to the mass market. AR has far more applications outside of gaming, and will eventually reach a much wider audience.

As with smartphones, people will eventually end up having an AR device which they carry with them everywhere, and they'll be able to play games on them in VR mode. As with consoles, hardcore gamers will also have VR devices at home because of the advantages of their specialized gaming hardware, but for most people, their AR devices like their smartphones will be sufficient to scratch any gaming itch.

In the long run (10 years or so), I'd expect the two technologies to converge.

Samsung is already half-way there, at least idea-wise. They patented "VR in contact lens" some 2 years or so ago, if I remember right. Now the only thing that remains is a working implementation...

It's already been said, but Google Glass is not functionally on the same playing field.

This conversation had been 4 months dormant. It's not a good idea to necro long-dormant threads. New visitors to the thread probably won't notice the date, and probably won't read the whole thread, before replying (and the OP probably isn't still watching the thread). I should probably close the thread but I'll leave it open for now.