Gadgetory

could light field displays be the tech that replaces our smartphones in recent years mixed reality headsets and so-called smart glasses have been promising to give us an interactive experience right in front of our eyes instead of having to stare down at our phones but the glasses and headsets that have come out have either been awkward or have found a niche firmly in the enterprise market which is what a company called avacado can change this is a mixed reality headset it's called mixed reality because you can still see the physical world around you but you're also seeing digital objects laid over the real world and this is a Baggins newest headset prototype the one that the company is built to show hardware partners what it can do specifically with light fields displays now like microsoft hololens the Ovid on headset shows digital objects that appear to be floating in space unlike hololens this headset prototype is tethered to a PC running unity this is the optics engine that we have this is what you know creates the entire image this has our retinal imaging technology the same technology we've used previously in the glyph so we're using micro mirror technology to project images to your retina and also inside of this we've incorporated our new light field optics in here we're simultaneously sending you multiple focal points so that means is we're not actually tracking your eyes so as you can even do this with a single eye so if we close one eye you can feel the focus change with a single eye between the two points so what can you do with something like the avocado headset well I needed the solar system and saw the room around me transformed into a giant fish tank the experience was partly enabled by camera tracking systems placed either in the corners of the room or directly on the headset I also tried a couple of apps that have been shown in promotional videos but haven't been experienced by many people in real life before one app was a beating human heart and it was originally made for Holland and another app let me hold digital objects right in the palm of my hand Rhyno Oh syringe oh that were creepy oh it's going into my hand oh oh I have a syringe it's stuck in my hand this is bizarre okay so in order to get a sense of what abakan is trying to do it helps to understand how light-filled technology works and it comes down to how we perceive depth if you hold something up in front of your face for example what you're seeing is the light that bounces off its surface and passes into your eyes from multiple angles your brain combines the 2d image from each eye and uses visual cues like the rotation and focus of your eyes to create a sense of depth you'll also notice that you can really easily shift your focus from the thing that's right in front of your face to this stuff it's in the background when you start looking at digital images through smart glasses or mixed reality headsets you're usually seeing a flat 2d image with a fixed focal point and when you've got a display meshed right up against your face it just doesn't feel natural by using light-filled optics and it's headset or what abakan calls its multifocal plane approach avec on says it's essentially cutting up the images in front of you into different focal planes and sending that light into your eyes so when you go to look at different digital objects it's supposed to replicate the way your eyes would naturally focus without a headset on so right now isn't looking at you're in focus but the arcade game behind you is not but if I were to keep moving my eyes back and forth they're sort of naturally adjusting and you're saying that when someone wears a Navigon headsets that your technology lets that happen sort of naturally doesn't feel like you're straining your eyes that's right so when you tried the light field technology you should not only feel more realistic you also should feel a lot more comfortable and natural for your eyes there are some elements of avocadoes technology that the company declined to talk about like the number of planes it uses in this multifocal plane approach and exactly how it's creating this continuous focal experience one industry expert pointed out to me that terms like light fields and Holograms can be a little overused technically speaking the best way to look at these kinds of solutions is to sir them a practical approximation of an analog light field display right now abakan seems confident that its technology is superior to at least some of its competitors out there although it's hard to say how it stacks up to other companies that are holding their tech pretty close to the vest so how is that different for what something like Holland's there are fixed focus right so the image that you see is fixed at a certain distance now they try to use like stereoscopic 3d effects to make your eyes converge at different angles to give you a sense of 3d but they're not really changing the focus of that image and that's okay when things are generally farther away but that whole display and experience breaks down the second then you get within about a meter so we think about like if I want to hold an object in my hand if I want to have a face-to-face conversation with a virtual person you actually really can't do any of those things unless you have a light-filled display unless you solve those focused problems how does it compare to what magic bleep is doing we don't know exactly what mathematically maybe maybe you guys have a better idea sure you've read a lot about it certainly I mean we can just see what's in the news we don't know exactly what they're doing but at least from what's public I would say that we both believe that light field is a critical part of the experience you might have heard of magic leaf by now it's a super secretive company in Florida that has raised more than a billion dollars to date to finance its digital light field technology I reached out to magic leap and not surprisingly the company didn't want to share specific details on their technology but one thing that magic leap has said is that they're building what you might call a full stack solution they're building the computing system the headset the software they're even working with content creators avec on splat for now isn't to build a product it's going to ship directly to consumers but to partner with other hardware companies who will use avocado optics in their own headsets this could come as soon as 2018 avec on says but it could take longer to get to the consumer market but when that happened they believe there's a very real chance that something like this could replace the smartphone as we know it we always knew that as things are moving to mobile devices like phones and tablets that the next evolution with that was going to this this idea of the ambient computer something that can put on like we're and suddenly I'm surrounded by these experiences and not limited to the screens that we can fit in our pockets or fit in our bags so do you really envision a world in which people are just walking around wearing air classes all the time even if they're not currently people who wear glasses or something on their face I actually do I think the smartphone as we know today will get replaced by smart glasses and once the industry overcomes some of the challenges that still exist today to make the devices much lighter and less bulky I think yes people will be wearing those glasses for an extended period of time this is the thing that a lot of technologists are talking about right now what's the next big thing beyond smartphones is there a thing beyond mobile or will we all be staring at the glass rectangles in our hands for many more years to come if we really are approaching a post mobile world and avec on is trying to position itself at the forefront of this and while a lot of headsets so far haven't really caught on with the mass market avec on thinks there's a time in the very near future when these things are just like eyeglasses that you just carry them in your pocket and slip them on instead of staring at your smartphone it's a bold idea of a computing future and it's going to take a lot more than optics to make it work things like apps and content that make people want to wear displays on their faces it might be a future that we're not quite ready for but it might also be one that's happening anyway you must never get tired of looking at people you know it's the typical look you sit there he's very quiet jaws always open a little bit just like you saw for the first time what's funny is I actually can't hear you at all right I just see this