CES Asia, to be held June 13-15, 2018 in Shanghai, China, has announced its Innovation Awards. I’ve been focusing recently on AR and VR and two of the awards caught may eye. The first was from HiScene, an AR company that makes the HiAR G100 AR HMD which it targets at the enterprise market. The other is the Detu Max 8K Stereoscopic VR camera.
Zoomlion uses the HiAR G100 AR glasses in the process of production, maintenance, training and so on, it will reduce the learning cost of worker and improve working efficiency. (Credit: HiScene)
HiScene Information Technology Co., Ltd is a Chinese start-up, founded in 2012 Currently the headquarters is in Shanghai and they have facilities in Beijing, Guangzhou, Kunming, Shenzhen and the USA. The company has focused on augmented reality for enterprise applications since its founding. In addition to the HiAR G100 binocular goggles, the company provides HiLeia (yes, named after the Star Wars Princess) AR communications software, AR cloud services and a SDK for the HiAR G100 goggles. Their HiLeia software and the cloud services support all forms of AR, not just the G100 goggles. For example, the company says “HiLeia supports AR glasses, tablets, smartphones and PCs and is compatible with Android and Windows.” In fact, the G100 goggles were designed to work well with HiLeia and HiLeia was not designed around the goggles. Most of the AR examples HiScene gives for the use of its products are, in fact, smartphone, tablet and PC based, not goggle based. MSRP for the HiAR goggles is $2699.
Examples of the use of the HiLeia AR communications software (Credit: HiScene)
HiScene won the CES Asia Innovation Award for its HiAR helmet. (Credit: CES Asia)
HiScend has won the CES Asia Innovation Award for its HiAR helmet design. There are no details available on this unit except the above image from the CES Asia awards page. Given HiScene’s industrial and enterprise orientation, this may be a hard hat with a built in AR display. But maybe not – we will need to wait till the opening of CES Asia June 13 to know for sure.
The Detu Max VR camera won another CES Asia Award for Innovation (Credit: CES Asia)
Oblique view of the Detu Max Camera (Credit: Zhejiang Detu)
The Zhejiang Detu Network Co., Ltd., located in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China, began in 2012 and was officially founded in 2014. The company has always focused on VR, especially VR cameras. The Detu Max VR camera is its latest. The four-sided integrated camera system is designed to produce 8K wide dynamic range stereoscopic 360° video content at 60 frames per second. It will also produce 4K stereoscopic 360° content at 120 fps and do time-lapse photography at 8K. Details on the eight individual cameras in the Detu Max are not available and the 8K applies to the final, stitched 360° panoramic image. Stitching is done internally in the camera using an AI chip.
The camera is said to be designed for professional applications and in addition to the 8K video output, the system will produce RAW video out, for those who want to do their own processing on the video.
Rescaled 360° panoramic image taken with a Detu 8K camera (Credit: Zhejiang Detu)
Detail cropped from the original 8K JPEG image without rescaling. (Credit: Zhejiang Detu)
The previous generation of the Detu 8K camera was called the F4. This camera is still available at $2599. It is monoscopic and will only do 8K at 30fps. The sample image shown is from the Detu F4, not the Detu Max. The small detail was cropped to 640 x 480 from the 8K JPEG version of the image and is shown without rescaling. The full 8K (7680 x 3840) resolution version of this and other 8K 360° still images can be downloaded from Google Drive via a link on the Detu website. Be warned that while the images are in JPEG format, they are still big. This one is 16.2MB. The version shown above has been downsized to a resolution of 780 x 390 taking 110KB. –Matthew Brennesholtz
