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I will be at AWE 2018 in Santa Clara
Just a quick note. I have been doing quite a bit of traveling lately and have not had time to update the blog. I’m going to be attending AWE 2018 in Santa Clara next week, May 29th through June 1st. I don’t know how much free time I will have, but I might have some time to get together while I am there. I can be contacted at meetkg@kgontech.com if you want to schedule a meeting.
Dang. Just saw this – would have been nice to meet. Will you be writing up your impressions of the eyewear you tried? Any that particulary stood out for you?
Thanks, Patrick,
I did get to try on a lot of different headsets and took a quite a few pictures (mostly of equipment I had not had the chance to try before).
Lumus continues to impress me compared to any of the diffractive waveguides regarding quality; while they are not perfect, they are significantly better in many ways than the other waveguide solutions. Lumus’s 1080p IMO blows away say Hololens at 720p. To be fair, the Lumus 1080p is still a prototype whereas the Hololens is in production, however, Lumus’s 720p in production and used, for example, in the Daqri headsets and looks better than Hololens too. I got some time with the Varjo headsets and they had a very interesting demos which I plan to report on with pictures. Digilens seems to be making headway in terms of getting their technology to market. There was a lot of “same old” technology.
The most interesting technical announcement at AWE was by Plessey with their Micro-LED illumination technology to be used by Vuzix.
Awesome – thanks for the reply! I also thought Lumus had the most impressive waveguide at the show. I also got a chance to try the Varjo – and although the noticeable transition from the higher res to the lower res portions of the display were somewhat distracting, the higher res center spot was INCREDIBLE. Did you get a chance to try out the nreal sets up in their private room?
I hadn’t seen the Plessey announcement – but that does sound interesting.
Hi Karl,
What is your take on the Plessey micro-LED / Vuzix news? Quote: “Plessey has tied up with Vuzix to develop augmented reality glasses, combining Plessey’s ‘Quanta-Brite’ micro-LED arrays and Vuzix’ expertise and IP in smart glasses and optics.” as reported at: https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/plessey-micro-leds-selected-ar-glasses-2018-06/
Thanks, I heard about the Plessey/Vuzix announcement at AWE and consider it a very interesting development. The “Quanta Brite” is like “direct LED illuminated” LCD TV and is sort of a hybrid solution. The Quanta Brite does the illumination but each LED is covering many pixels the illumination overlaps from each LED.
About 50% of an optical engine size is in the combining of RGB and making the illumination uniform and the Plessey Quanta Brite significantly reduces the illumination side. In theory (they have not said), they could do a form of “local dimming” to selectively reduce the background illumination in areas where it is not needed.
This would seem to give Plessey a roadmap to sell the somewhat larger LEDs as Illuminators (Q-Brite) while they perfect process to make “pixel size” Miro-LEDs which they call “Quanta Ray.”
If you go to the Plessey Micro-LED website (http://www.plesseysemiconductors.com/products/microleds/) they are talking some pretty impressive numbers like 1-micron LED size and 100,000 nits of brightness. I suspect these are more “goals” or “lab prototypes” but it shows what they think will be possible.