It probably is up there.

Think of the number of problems that it has to solve.

Medical imaging is pretty straightforward. You’re beaming energy into something and then capturing the image. Humans are doing all of the recognition.

Microprocessors are very difficult but each thing is an evolution of the last.

AR glasses is probably the most difficult integration problem ever solved so far. It is taking a ton of technologies that have only every been used at much larger scales (cars, planes, stationary cameras), shrinking them down, then they’re trying to integrate that with a pair of glasses that are both comfortable and stylish and have a long enough battery to use, and are affordable to buy.

The object recognition is getting pretty decent, but right now phones struggle with this let alone something glasses sized. AND getting the device to do it on device vs the cloud for both privacy and latency. Then once you have object recognition, you have to then filter out which recognized objects are important to display. How does the device figure this out? Watching your eyes? Have you seen a video of human eyes moving? They’re not exactly stable, they jump around constantly and your brain stitches all the image’s together into something cohesive. What about when you want to use gestures to control things, like scrolling through menus on a virtual screen? How does it differentiate between that and when you’re touching an actual screen? So now you need cameras on the inside too, but also super advanced AI onboard to figure out gestures from random hand waving. You also need to build an entire suite of apps that work with this. Smartphones didn’t exactly start out with huge app stores and we didn’t have high expectations for them anyway. Now, our expectations are sky high. We want to replace our phones and laptops with these. So we need that experience but better.

Then on top of that, you need a transparent screen that doesn’t fuck with your vision both while you’re wearing the glasses and permanently that can show high resolution, high frame rate, variably transparent images, video, and text, that can both be stationary in space or motion smoothed depending on the users motion. For example, when you’re sitting and you have virtual computer monitors, you want those monitors to be fixed over a desk, always, even when you turn your head. But when you walk away, you want those monitors to stay there and not move. You want them to be there when you come back though. But you also want them to be able to pop up in the “right” place while you’re on the train so you can work on your commute. You’re facing sideways and the train is moving forward. The glasses need to figure out that motion and allow you to work or watch a movie without a ton of jittering, but it needs enough jittering to match the bounces of the train because otherwise you’ll get motion sickness. It also needs a different interface for while you’re walking and want to do things. It needs stationary menus always in the same place in your field of view (which, define that) but also things that move with the environment, some transparent and others completely opaque.

And it needs to do all of this with absolutely no lag. And not look dorky, and the battery needs to last all day, and it needs to work with different interfaces like keyboards, mice, fingers, eye tracking, figure out when it needs to ignore eye tracking and use the mouse, when it needs to combine the two. And it can’t just be something that only Jeff Bezos can afford.