A Headset Meant to Make Augmented Reality Less of a Gimmick
Maimone’s device, called a Pinlight Display, does not use conventional optical components. It replaces these with an array of bright dots dubbed pinlights. “A transparent display panel is placed between the pinlights and the eye to modulate the light and form the perceived image,” says Maimone. “Since the light rays that hit each display pixel come from the same direction, they appear in focus without the use of lenses.”
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’s 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.
Problems remain for the team, which recently showed off the technology at theSiggraph 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.
See the video here: http://media.siggraph.org/et2014/general_0203_pinlight_displays.mp4