Gadgetory

hi everybody it's Tim Stevens with Cena we're here with the CEO of a began to look at a new device you guys are introducing to the market a little bit later this year early next year ed tang CEO a peg and we've got some a bit of a jumble of wires here but it all leads up to this what is this this is a it's a new media platform that we're introducing next year and one of the core technologies that we developed at alpha god is this revolutionary display technology and it's called a virtual retinal display and what's different about a virtual retinal display versus any other kind of display is that it projects light directly in your eye we're actually mimicking your natural vision right because objects around us nothing is emitting light nothing is glowing light right everything we see around us is reflected light and that's why things just seem that much more real vivid natural but most importantly comfortable so from a hardware standpoint how does it compared to something like a traditional virtual reality headset which hasn't been like an LCD in front of your eyes right so LCD panels like LCDs and old LEDs those are all emissive light it's very challenging to get emissive light to look really really good and really comfortable for for your eye and by reflecting light in your eye is how we can how we can mimic that natural vision and we have a really really interesting approach to addressing that issue and what is that we're using we're using a brand new micromirror technology here now I know Google looked into technology like this when they were developing glass they ultimately went a different path because they had some issues were trying to get light to focus correctly for a wide variety of people how have you been able to address that my co-founder is a brilliant brilliant scientist and so he was able to have some of the best optical design resources now I think they're probably some people would be a little bit worried about something beaming and image strictly under their eyes any concern about eye strain no not at all where previously people have tried using lasers and that's that's inherently there's some dangers to that we're not using any lasers using a very very low-power light source and all this is simply shining a really dim light on on some years so from a consumer standpoint what's the the main advantage of this sort of technology over LCD panel or something like that you get a completely different level of realism it's like looking at a TV of a picture of the outside versus looking through a window it's like that's kind of the level of difference you see in image quality and image realism you can stare at it for hours you stare at it all day and feels totally comfortable unlike staring at a LCD screen where your eyes get tired after an element so inherently the resolution of this is WXGA which is 1280 by 800 but what's interesting is because of the way we send light in your eye the perceived resolution is incredibly high so when you get a chance to see it you'll notice that you don't see any pixelation any screen no effect no gaps in the screen the other interesting that point out is not only is the resolution really high but the framerate can be extremely high I mean this prototype right now can run 240 frames a second mom and we were able to push that up if we need to but would you see this hitting the market maybe is something like a competitor to the oculus rift with that gaming style applications or maybe more for in a multimedia style 3d imagery applications or we're focused on the on the media standpoint right now there's a lot of interest in oculus what they're doing the virtual reality I think it's fantastic they're trying to bring virtual reality to the mass-market and then the other end of the spectrum you have something like Google glass were they trying to give you that always connected kind of glanceable display right we're kind of targeting a different market here we think that that with the level of experience that we can deliver here that there is something really interesting and we're seeing a lot of demand from consumers who want to consume media and games so go ahead put it on so what I would encourage you to do is to close one eye and adjust the focus so we can actually adjust the spacing between your office here using single image yeah laughs trouble yeah it is so go ahead and hold on to that okay here whenever you're ready I'm ready all right here we go okay this is a screen this display the image you're seeing is being projected directly on your retina you just get an image that is so much more vivid and realistic but most of all it's a very comfortable image as I've spent a fair amount of time wearing the oculus rift and even with the HD version you can still see some you know some amount of pixelization and there's always a little bit of eye strain you know when you get adjusted right but this is very very comfortable I mean the device itself is perhaps not the most comfortable thing for the family but in terms of comfort for my I yeah it is quite comfortable and yeah the resolution is is quite good and the color is quite good too I wish everybody at home was able to see all right now I have a new version or a different version I guess we should say of prototype here which adds head tracking and slightly different design but the big difference is this was got head tracking stuck on the side here right right yep it's a slightly different prototype based on the same technology we've we're always continually trying out different sensors and different adjustment mechanisms so there's just another element that you can you can experience alright let's try this guy out ah so what you're seeing is a very very low resolution video streaming off the internet hmm so now again prototype hardware when might we expect to see something a little bit more finalized we expect to have a consumer facing prototype early in quarter 1x here maybe see yes time to see us we'll see let me great alright then thanks very much for bring this by the pleasure I can't wait to see the final version again this is Tim Stevens checking out the avocado prototype virtual retinal display