The AR/VR seems more and more crowded, but the number of platforms and headsets is actually shrinking. The market is consolidating and it's getting more and more difficult for newcomers to compete. We will dive in the details of what it really takes to bring an idea to an actual product. Some anecdotes and scars will be shared.
Lynx is an HMD manufacturer and made an early bet on camera passthrough for augmented reality. This Mixed Reality approach, encompassing both VR and AR in the same headset, is sometimes opposed to optical see-through systems. But which one has the Truth? Can passthrough systems reach the glass form-factor? Can smartglasses provide Mixed Reality? We will try to compare these architectures and imagine which system will reach mass adoption first, by also looking beyond the optical choices with metrics like price, timeline and use-cases.
French startup Lynx has had a strong 2021 having redesigned its mixed reality (MR) headset earlier in the year followed by a successful Kickstarter that raised just over $800,000 USD. Founder Stan Larroque will give an update of Lynx-R1, a fully all-in-one (AIO) MR headset featuring a 2.1″ octagonal LCD panel, 1600 x 1600 per eye resolution at 90Hz with a 90° FOV, all powered by a Qualcomm XR2 chipset, 6GB RAM and 128GB internal storage that’s expandable via an SD card slot.
SA Photonics and SL Process have developed a new type of electronic see-through augmented reality head mounted display. Our display utilizes a very compact freeform prism eyepiece that has almost no peripheral obscuration. This provides the wearer with the advantages of an electronic see-through system (occlusion, operation in high ambient environments, high contrast imagery, image enhancement, image export) but in a system that also allows natural vision of the real world outside the field of view of the eyepiece. As such, the user sees a seamless view of the entire real world, with augmentation in the central 62-degree diagonal field of view. The cameras for the see-through imagery are “hidden” behind the eyepieces, so they do not block the view of the real world, providing less than a 10% obscuration of the total visual field, much less than any other electronic see-through system and even less than many optical see-through systems. In addition to providing the see-through imagery, these cameras and SL Process’ innovative video processing architecture provide six degrees of freedom head tracking as well as hand tracking.
The device we are presenting is a patented HMD with a custom stereo camera mounted on the front side. With a 110°field of view for both augmented and virtual realities, we perform live software-based distortions using different methods for the HMD and cameras lenses for real-time rendering and the lowest photon-to-pixel time. The reality and the virtual space are properly aligned thanks to real-time distortion methods. The device is also fully autonomous and can track its translation and rotation in known and unknown environments thanks to Simultaneous Location and Mapping with the cameras, having the option to perform dense 3D reconstruction.
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