Hardware > Bitmoji, Animoji, and Snapchat AR [depend] on fairl | on product

Hardware
> Bitmoji, Animoji, and Snapchat AR [depend] on fairly capable CPUs/GPUs. (...) and are enriched by powerful face-tracking camera. (...) iPhone 11 and iPhone 12 (...) create extensive RADAR maps of everything from your home, to your office, and the street you’re walking down — and place you within these maps, relative to other local devices, down to a few centimeters. (...) All of this is possible through standard consumer-grade hardware.
> [Oculus Quest 2] had 1832×1920 per eye (thoughly equivalent to 4K). Palmer Luckey, one of Oculus’s founders, believes more than twice this resolution is required for VR to overcome pixelation. (...) While humans can see an average of 210°, Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 display covers only 52° (up from 34°). Snap’s forthcoming glasses are only 26.3°. To take off, we likely need far wider coverage. These are primarily hardware challenges, not software ones.

Networking
> Microsoft Flight Simulator (...) includes 2 trillion individually rendered trees, 1.5 billion buildings and nearly every road, mountain, city and airport globally. (...) [It] requires over 2.5 petabytes of data (...) [and] is a live service that updates to reflect real-world weather (...) and air traffic. (...) By sending rendering data on an as-needed basis, games can have a much greater diversity of items, assets and environments.
> The biggest challenge in networking is also its least understood: latency. (...) It doesn’t matter if it takes 100ms or 200ms or even two-second delays between sending a WhatsApp message and receiving a read receipt. (...) The most immersive AAA online multiplayer games, however, require low latency. (...) Latency, in other words, determines whether you win or lose, kill or end up killed.

Compute
> Google Stadia and Amazon Luna (...) process all video gameplay in the cloud. (...) Another thesis suggests that we’re better off betting on advances in local compute, rather than remote supercomputers that must then contend with unreliable networks. (...) Consumer processors improve much faster than networks as they’re far more frequently replaced and aren’t literally fighting the speed of light.
> The insatiable need for processing — ideally located as close as possible to the user, but even near industrial server farms — invariably inspires notions of decentralized computing. (...) Anyone who installs solar panels at their home can sell excess power to their local grid (and, indirectly, their neighbor). Elon Musk touts a future where your Tesla earns you rent as a self-driving car when not in use.