What They Say
A hat tip to DSCC’s weekly subscription newsletter for pointing me to a blog and interview with Kelly Peng of Kura, a company developing some AR glasses that have very (too?) impressive specifications and that are now said to be available in kit and production versions. Features are
- 150° FOV diagonal, about 120° horizontal, 82-90° vertical, with around 75% area overlap of the eyes
- 8K resolution per eye, with foveation and frame prediction. Foveation is necessary because even the most recent Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset can’t handle dual 8K displays with a high framerate. On PC, it is possible to do full-frame rendering, though.
- Framerate is going to be 120 Hz, just could be adjusted to higher or lower based on the use case and situation
- High-brightness display (up to 3M nits from image source) used to guarantee constant vividness of the augmentations notwithstanding the environment light around the user (e.g. indoor vs outdoor)
- USB-C connection to a compact wearable computing pack for the computational power
- PC version works with Windows, but we’re doing our best to support Android and Linux. The official computational unit runs Android.
- High-precision 6DOF tracking, eye tracking, gesture inputs, with dedicated input controllers
- The SDK will support Unity, with Unreal coming Soon. All APIs have a plain C version
The goal weight is said to be 80-82g although it may be up to 100gms with all features. The display devices are said to be microLEDs and the optics and display have to be customised to work together.
HTC is said to be an investor in the company along with Corning. Peng said it has had a seed round of funding, and is about to go for a Series A round (hence, I suspect, the promotion).
There is a one hour+ video here.
What We Think
This all sounds a bit too good to be true. In the interview transcript, Peng says ‘we haven’t set up our lab or prototype yet’, but is still ‘sending the first units to core strategic partners….in 1-2 months’, with volume production starting later this year and with pricing of $1,500, falling to $1,000.
When I first saw the diagram of the optics, it reminded me of the pin mirror technology from LetinAR that we have been reporting on for three years, now. One of the challenges for that firm has been that, with the right (expensive) tooling, the optics become quite cheap, but you have to have a high volume of a particular design. That makes it very hard to be a start-up or to develop the technology without huge resources. Kura says it is not the same as LetinAR and has a comparison table of technologies. The Kura technology looks more complex to me, but in the interview, Peng said that she has ‘good quotes’ for the optics. Hmmm… quotes if you are a month or two away from shipping a product?
I’d love to believe the claims of Kura, but, frankly, the time scales, specifications and costs look way off to me. Still, I’d love to be wrong! (BR)
