The original note, as written at the time
I think the more immediately achievable and powerful immersion device that we should invest our research resources into is large light collapsible screens. If you can get a high definition image on a screen that you can put away almost instantly, then that will be a wonderful place to start for all immersion pursuing technologies.
Ongoing development
The more immediately achievable and powerful immersion device is a large light collapsible screen — get a high-definition image onto a surface you can put away almost instantly, and you have a good place to start for every immersion technology that follows.
This is the right instinct and it is the unfashionable one. The industry’s answer to immersion is a headset: heavy, hot, isolating, and worn on the face for forty minutes. A screen can be rolled up, carried under an arm and hung on a wall in a minute.
The advantage is social. A screen is visible to everybody in the room, so immersion becomes a shared event rather than a private one. The thing headsets cannot do — four people watching the same thing and talking about it — is the ordinary case, and it is the case worth building for.
The engineering is a known problem in a way that optics are not. Projection, rollable OLED, tensioned fabric with a coating: all exist, all fail on different things — brightness in daylight, creasing, the seam that never quite disappears. Choose the one that fails least in the actual room, which for most of our rooms means brightness.
And there is an argument for the tropics that gets skipped. A screen is the only display technology that does not need to be cool. It does not sit on your face, it does not trap heat, and it works in a classroom with the windows open.
The measure is not resolution. It is setup time. If a screen goes up in ninety seconds and comes down in sixty, it will be used every week. If it takes twenty minutes it will be used twice.