It’s been a minute since we’ve talked a bit about augmented reality here at SiliconANGLE.  For a while there, like a flash in a pan, there was a glut of news on the topic.  Almost as quickly as it surfaced, compelling augmented reality news died down a bit.

Part of the reason for that is that the majority of interesting augmented reality work is taking place on the iPhone, with a little bit happening on the Android platform. To a part of me, I’m still excited by the news and development taking place there, but to be quite honest, there’s another, larger part of me that is still waiting for hardware to catch up with what the software is capable of.

The biggest missing piece in the equation for ubiquitous augmented reality is the display devices.  A mobile communications device is certainly good enough for the moment, but to use it for much more than novelty’s sake is uncommon.

Part of the problem is that wearable computing display systems have an incredibly low resolution, as a rule.  I don’t care who you are, if you’re doing your day-to-day desktop computing in anything less than 1024×768 resolution, you’re living in the 90s. Almost all wearable computing display resolutions fall under the 640×480 dimensions, which is untenable for anything but the most basic of applications.

That’s why I was pretty excited by the product news that came out yesterday from the UK Register: “Brother creates direct retinal imaging specs.”

The display device paints the image directly on the retina at 800×600 resolution, and though it hasn’t been priced out yet, Brother deals primarily in consumer products, so it’s a reasonable assumption that they’ll be priced to move despite being a bleeding edge product.

This could completely change the game in mobile computing.  Amazing work has been done this year at Microsoft and at countless startups in gestural input, and I’m sure most of us remember a number of effective (but not widely used) alternative input devices like the long-lost Twiddler.  With trends in miniaturization of netbooks continuing down their affordable and physically shrinking trend, we may be sitting at the advent of the affordable wearable computer for the average consumer.

This device from Brother could be as potentially game changing as the mobile phone was or as the eReader threatens to be – changing the way in which we interact with the virtual world in a practical way.

Alternatively, the specs could be horrendously overpriced or not perform as advertised when they do indeed come out, but as someone who’s lusted after the possibility of a practical and affordable wearable computer for the better part of a decade, I’m going to remain optimistic until I’m shown a reason not to be.