What They Say
Wearables-era.com published an interview with John Fan, CEO of Kopin, looking at developnments in AR/VR. He said that
- Disruption of markets by new technologies often happen from doing one thing very well, rather than solving ‘everything’
- He pointedly avoided commenting on any plans of Apple in AR/VR
- In reference to Qualcomm’s 5G XR Viewer project, he sees the latest VR viewers from e.g. Panasonic (and using Kopin displays) as being usable for 3-4 hours and sees the Panasonic design as the current ‘gold standard’.
- Near term he sees video pass-through AR as having a lot of potential.
- He highlighted the ‘Display on Chip’ concept of Kopin, where the DDIC is on the backplane as being the future for microdisplays. He also highlighted Kopin’s dual stack (tandem) and even triple stack architectures.
Insight Media’s Chris Chinnock issued a commentary on the article and contrasts the very integrated Kopin approach to that used by Sony which has a larger OLED (>2.0″) on glass and with a separate DDIC that is bonded on. He also discusses the improvements in pancake optics. (Kopin Corporation Announces New All-Plastic Pancake® Optics with Excellent Performance for Virtual Reality (Metaverse) Applications)
What We Think
The Panasonic headset was one of the items I really would have liked to have tried if I had been able to go to CES. (Kopin & Panasonic Subsidiary show VR Headset). I found this video from someone that did see it.
The comments from Fan on pass-through AR are also interesting. I am also leaning towards believing that this is probably the way to go for now. However, to have this accepted, the reliablity has to be very, very good (and demonstrable somehow) and the video processing latency has to be extremely short. I was impressed with the work that Varjo has done on this. (BR)
