Avegant Light Field Puts Augmented Reality in the Palm of Your Hand
The imaging technology startup Avegant says its light field prototype provides a truly immersive experience that is critical for the future success of the entire mixed reality industry.Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of the Stanford University Virtual Human Interaction Lab, was deeply impressed by his test of the Avegant Light Field prototype.
"One of [Magic Leap's] first signature images was of an elephant being cupped by a hand. That's what I experienced in the Avegant demo, to be able to hold a planet in my hands," Rubin told Seeker. "It's the difference between seeing animated objects out of your reach and being able to actually walk up to things, put your hands around them and navigate within the mixed reality space."
Avegant's light field headset works by mimicking the way that real-world objects emit light. In the real world, light enters the eye as a collection of rays, which are focused for the brain. Objects that are different distances from the eye emit different "light fields," requiring the eye to constantly adjust like the autofocus setting on a camera. In humans, our combination of binocular vision and the ability to switch between different focal planes gives real-world objects their depth and distance.
"It's not often you witness a technology that could disrupt an entire industry," Bailenson was quoted as saying in an Avegant press release. "Avegant Light Field is that kind of a breakthrough. I had long heard about the possibility of seeing close fields and far fields in the same scene, but experiencing it firsthand was believing. This is how the visual system was designed to work."
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