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Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Miesnieks article starting to float around again...

A high-res OLED microdisplay from e-magin, suitable for a HMD (or a Watch). The image is projected into the waveguide which spreads it over the plastic lens in the glasses so you can see it in front of your face.

  • Optics that fit inside a consumer frame and are bright enough for daylight use, sharp enough to easily read text & have a wide enough field of view. There’s really not much point to AR products that only work indoors. The whole point of AR is that you can get out & about & wear them as part of your daily life. The optics need to work outdoors on sunny days, and be sharp enough to read text. FoV is less important to AR than VR as the utility use-cases aren’t as immersive as games which depend on peripheral vision. FoV mostly matters to avoid the distration from clipping the content. Today the state of the art that can be manufactured in volume is an OLED microdisplay powering an injection molded waveguide. Single focal plane. We’re a year or two away from nicely functional better displays, and probably another year or so after that before those better displays can be manufactured in volume. I heard a story a couple of years ago about a very technical strategic investor from a large OEM who passed on investing in Magic Leap early on. Not because he thought the displays were snake oil, they weren’t, they worked & the demos were amazing, but because of the challenges he understood in scaling up the manufacturing volume and maintaining a good yield without optical defects. I haven’t heard that ML has solved these challenges, and The Information reported recently they may be using a different & easier to manufacture type of display. This is the reason the military still uses OLEDs & waveguides today (not for a lack of funding & research into better systems!). Also the unit cost to produce a wave guide is very low ($1–2) if it is injection molded. There’s a 7 figure up-front one-time optics design cost, and the hi-res micro-oleds have been expensive but they are dropping in price fast. Also as yet no one has applied smartphone scale production economics onto hmd manufacturing.

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