Hello,
I believe AR is going to be the next big thing when the technology gets pefected, and early adopters will be able to cash in good. There is already a contact lens that supports rudimentary AR and I think this is the
screenless direction things are going to develop in the new decade. Does somebody have any experience in the field concerning fonts?
https://www.mojo.vision/mojo-lensFor now it is of course hardly impressing.
Comments
The field is, in many respects, similar to the situation with screen resolutions and devices in the late 1990s. There are a lot of different resolutions, all pretty low, and differences in lens type that also affect text perception. So having spent most of the past 20 years moving away from device-specific tuning of fonts, towards higher and higher resolution screens and antialiasing that smoothly renders type with good stroke density, suddenly AR/VR is throwing us back into a world in which individual devices have a profound effect on the display of text, and in which different devices need adaptive type design. Add to this that much AR/VR rendering is targeted at smooth motion, and hence can make text jiggle at the slightest motion of the head, and you get a headache-inducing reading experience.
As a byproduct of the headset testing, I discovered that my eyes have totally different focal depths.
One eye works for close range things, and one for distant things. Well, perhaps I should say worked, as neither is as good as it used to be. I feel I should probably have glasses for driving—I can't read signs until I'm fairly close to them—, but when tested I’m told that I don’t need glasses.
Rendering of fonts in AR involves some of the same kind of display techniques used in traditional screen rendering—rasterisation of outlines to pixels, antialiasing—but also needs to take into account the background and foreground of text in the 3D environment, slanting of text in perspective when not viewed directly, movement, and, at the device level, the kind of lenses used in the headset.
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suddenly snaps to
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Hey Vasil, Thanks for opening up the discussion. Mojo is in a good state in terms of testing and FDA approval however it will take time to get to a consumer state. And Furthermore to get to a stage where manufacturers will pay attention to reading/fonts.
However, right now the AR headsets are getting better and we are fast approaching high-density displays. And the type industry should focus on this direction but I have not seen much traction there. Also for developers, the text is least of priority in terms of processing power allocation for rendering fonts at the moment.
If you interested in learning more about the typography in AR then you can have look at the articles from my ongoing research here https://niteeshyadav.com/research/ which cover it from both type design and tech perspective.
Also, you can refer to my TypeTech video where I have covered the topic from multiple perspectives.
Warning: it is a long in-depth overview! My talk was supposed to be half an hour but coz of COVID the in-person conference was cancelled. So, I decided to change and expand the content for better understanding.
01:31 Difference between AR/VR
05:34 Typographic Structure and basics
8:33 Need of AR specific typefaces
10:08 New challenges in AR/VR
10:45 AR/VR Display types
14:38 Tech Design Challenges
26:05 Current scenario
27:10 Typography in AR (Classification)
Pun intended?