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tech_review 00217.txt

#A Headset Meant to Make Augmented reality Less of a Gimmick Andrew Maimone thinks augmented reality hasn been much more than a gimmick so far. Maimone, a Phd student at the University of North carolina at Chapel hill, is developing a new kind of head-worn display that could make augmented reality hereby digital objects or pieces of information are overlaid on the real world via a screenignificantly more immersive. While it possible to use a smartphone or tablet to, for example, conjure a virtual character and place it onto a real world table viewed on a smartphone screen, this just sn very compellingsays Maimone. he experience doesn occur in one own vision, he says. t acts as a little more than a small window into the virtual place. Conventional augmented reality glasses use lenses, beam splitters, waveguides, reflectors, and other optics to relay an image to the eye, and place the image at a distance where the eye can focus on it. These components add bulk, however, and the resulting glasses usually have limited a field of view. Together with three other researchers from the University of North carolina and two from Nvidia Research Maimone has been working on an entirely new kind of augmented reality device that is light and compact, and offers a wide field of view. Maimone device, called a Pinlight Display, does not use conventional optical components. It replaces these with an array of bright dots dubbed pinlights. transparent display panel is placed between the pinlights and the eye to modulate the light and form the perceived image, says Maimone. ince the light rays that hit each display pixel come from the same direction, they appear in focus without the use of lenses. In this configuration small fragments of the image are flipped and superimposed, so the team has compensated for this by performing some image manipulation in software. ne could think of Pinlight Displays as exploiting how the eye sees an image that is out of focus, in order to form an image that is in focus, says Maimone. he resulting hardware configuration is very simplehere are no reflective, refractive, or diffractive elementso we do not run into the trade-off between form factor and field of view that has been encountered in past glasses designs. The benefits of the approach over previous devices are significant. While state-of-the-art commercial augmented reality glasses have a field of view of 40°or less early Pinlight prototypes have demonstrated fields of view of 100°or more. It an impressive breakthrough, as evidenced by this explanatory video, which shows the difference that a wide field of view makes when viewing, say, a holographic-style spaceship from Star wars. Maimone argues that the potential uses for the technology are wide-ranging. love to be able to navigate a city by following some virtual bread crumbs laid down on the sidewalk, he says. love to have a virtual lunch with my wife every day as if she seated across the table. I love to see the name of a new acquaintance floating next to them when we meet. I love to have all of things happen effortlessly in my glasses and when they do, I think wel start to see computer graphics more as integral part of our visual system, rather than something that exists only on external screens. There may be other potential benefits to the team approach. ince part of the image formation process takes place in software, we can adjust parameters such as eye separation and focus dynamically, says Maimone. Therefore we can imagine incorporating the pinlights into the corrective lenses or ordinary glasses, creating a display that looks like ordinary glasses with the addition of an LCD panel. Problems remain for the team which recently showed off the technology at the Siggraph 2014 conference in Vancouver. The prototype suffers from low resolution and image quality, far below the level of existing commercial augmented reality glasses. Additionally they must successfully implement tracking, networking, low latency rendering, various and other features. he next step is to improve these factors, says Maimone. And despite his skepticism about the current state or augmented reality, he believes that with the right research and engineering, the technology could be ransformed into something practical for everyday use. e

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