augmented reality or ar is the technology of projecting images graphics
and videos over top of the real world like in the
movies and it actually exists today
but most of what we have is pretty
unimpressive because the holy grail of ar is of course
not pointing your phone at stuff and seeing
graphics pop up through your phone's camera on your screen
that much would be obvious to anyone who's ever tried to do that for longer
than a couple of minutes during a stage demo the holy grail is integrating it into
something that can be worn comfortably and ideally discreetly
but while many companies some working
privately like magic leap and others beating a drum about it like microsoft
are pursuing head-mounted ar the current solutions are bulky and very expensive a
hololens will set you back 3 000 us
dollars enter scrappy upstart eyeglass
these guys claim that their display tax solves some of
the biggest issues with waveguide ar displays and that they can do it at one
tenth of the cost and i'm actually about to get my first
taste of their prototype
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before i actually try this thing though let's do a little bit of background who
are these guys so sam ewan actually worked at microsoft
from 2012 to 2016 on the original
hololens team as a senior hardware engineer so
obviously he believes in ar and even hololens to some degree it's an amazing
piece of technology that uses cameras to track the environment around the user
letting him or her interact with the digital content
the problem with it though is that the screen is relatively small with about a
32 degree horizontal field of view not to mention that the color is inaccurate
white in particular is very difficult to display and the waveguide type displays
that are built into the lenses in front of each eye are about two thousand
dollars total that is two-thirds of the total cost of the base model on the two
displays alone so by contrast
eyeglass believes that their tech could get closer to about ten dollars per eye
or 20 bucks one percent of the cost which would make
it easier to build an affordable device around it so it uses what's called off
axis imaging instead of putting a light source perpendicular to your eye so
you're you're looking into a display directly with a backlight behind it it
actually puts the display and the backlight above the eye so you can
actually see that if i flip it up like this and then it reflects it off a
curved piece of glass this makes it see-through kind of like
if you were wearing sunglasses which means that you can see the world around
you it also gives you a field of view that is only limited by the size of the
lenses so our prototype here apparently offers an 80 degree field of view and it
can use either a normal lcd display or
even an OLED display or i mean who knows i guess a future display
technology is not out of the question okay
so this is the part where i finally get to put it on and sam's gonna kind of
help me with the demo here so uh just a normal velcro strap
it's very 3d printed at this point guys so we need to be very careful with it
uh okay so did they use what you saw so it looks
like the image is probably about
i'd say about 10 feet in front of me right now so now when i have content
running on it it is obviously a harder to see through
it but like i can read my teleprompter right now i can interact with pella but
if i focus on that image that's about 12
feet in front of me things start to kind of fade away yes so without anything
running on it it's about as dark as i'd say my my pretty dark sunglasses
it's kind of weird it doesn't um because it's like sitting so close to your eyes
it doesn't feel like there's two lenses in front of you so right now i can
really see the curvature of the glass like i can see a curve to the top of it
a curve to the bottom and then it gets kind of like the shape gets kind of cut
off here but what sam explained is that
really any technology any display technology
that relies on a curved piece of glass
is going to need processing done ahead of time to kind of pre-distort the image
so that it ends up having those nice uh those square
corners that you would expect blacks and really dark colors are a
little bit tough because those are obviously the display to the best of its
ability being off meaning that you see right through it
but white is actually surprisingly opaque
i mean these are the same challenges that you run into with something like a
projector for example that's why a dark room would be ideal i
mean trying this in the dark that would be trippy actually can we kill the
lights now that is really cool
like if i was on a nighttime flight or something
in a dark environment like i could be convinced i'm looking at
a really nice projector so there's no reason then
that you couldn't have effectively like a ceiling mounted
giant display so you guys are quoting this at what about
120 inches at 12 feet ish right
ours is probably twice or even even
higher than the tv conveyor device in terms of angular resolution
right so i did guess right it is 1080p per eye
but we're stretching it over a relatively small area compared to a vr headset so
it actually looks pretty fine and
it should be noted that eyeglass has no intention of turning this prototype into
a fully functional ar headset what they're really focused on is developing
the core technology which is projecting
the display into the viewer's eye so like on the business side
you guys are more looking for partners to take this display tech and then use
whatever resolution they want and maybe external tracking cameras if they're
into that right or whatever you guys don't care yes you're focused on
these displays up here the curvature of the lens and then all the software that
goes along with that right interesting
one thing i'm also noticing sitting here and using this is that compared to vr
even though the image is moving around it's more like a uh it's more like a
virtual screen sitting in front that moves like i'm not getting motion sick
right why is that because you can see this stable
background so it's another trick of the brain that's helping with motion
sickness now you get the best ex watching experience actually when even
like you stabilize your head on something and the screen is very still
because otherwise it's it's pretty easy to get distracted by things the real
world moving behind it but whenever you do move you do lose
that immersion for a little bit like it's it's not as immersive as vr and i
don't i don't foresee a future where it ever would be
but even though you lose that immersion a little bit this serves a purpose
because it also allows your brain and your eyes to work together to see the
objects that are fixed around you and keep you from getting disoriented
so so this is a purely 3d printed serves
no purpose other than to try the display tech
thing in order for me to see the content i have to get
it about here yeah like if you were watching porn
right now i wouldn't know until probably about
here that there's like naked bodies let's try something here because i have
actually i have a victoria secretary
okay let's give it give it a shot can you see the content tell me what's
happening that's definitely breasts yeah
so from there yes but if i'm any further away
i would have to be about here brandon
what you're watching at work there wow i don't know this is pretty cool though
what are they wearing what the hell
it looks like she's wearing like part of a trash like bag
well it's better than the whole trash bag
this is cool pretty neat though hey like it's actually surprisingly good so i
have to get to see what you're watching i have to get about here oh Colton you
want to try it it's pretty cool i would love to
it's ar i just want to know i don't want to ruin it whoa
what do you say hey yo oh hey there how are you doing
you're very bad interesting okay
like it's like a good image too yeah it's a video's help yeah wow i can
actually see the screen like really well so you could be working while you watch
the victoria secret oh this is perfect show that's awesome hey i'm banning
these these aren't allowed come on man come on
no it's really cool like i do like the image quality like even compared to something like a goodbye or whatever
it's crisp like it's yeah
so the way that they envision people using this
is mobile entertainment so you have privacy because nobody can see what
you're watching unless they got like right under by your chin and looked up
at your displays the ability to have a bigger screen for
entertainment on like a train or a bus or the plane so this would be an
alternative to listening to podcasts for example
they foresee a use case where you could walk around on the street
playing games or watching youtube videos but then without your head either buried
in a phone or i mean much more danger i've never seen anyone doing this but
inside a vr headset that would be super stupid or even just
doing chores around the house like uh watching a movie while you vacuum
i do have to say i haven't personally witnessed the demand for these use cases
yet in all my travels i have yet to see someone using a vr headset on a plane
so they they did some studies internally
asking people in a double-blind comparison
to rate their experience in vr or ar and
they said that most people preferred ar but i do wonder is that a purely
academic question since i haven't yet seen people using either
i would like to hear your feedback
if you could have a 120 inch screen in a device this size that you could
carry around with you would you use it
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