What They Say
Occasional DD contributor and HMD guru, Karl Guttag, has published a blog post in which he speculates (based on a forensic analysis of published videos in comparison to his own photos) that the Niantic prototype AR display that it has shown are based on a Lumus waveguide. (Niantic Shows AR Prototype & Nreal Air Supports Consoles)
Guttag believes that:
“the Lumus Maximus has significant advantages in terms of brightness, efficiency, size, weight, and image quality for outdoor use. I don’t know about cost, but Lumus claims they are cost-competitive with diffractive waveguides.”
What We Think
One of the interesting points that I got from this article is the comment that one of the challenges of the Microsoft Hololens HMD in military applications is that there is some ‘eye-glow’ i.e. light that is projected forward from the headset rather than into the eye. He points out that this could cause a user to be spotted by an enemy. He also highlghts that the Lumus technology generates very little forward light compared to others.
Guttag said that someone has lent him a Meta Quest Pro and he plans to look at the ‘very bad’ AR passthrough. As he says ‘It should be fun’ (for those of us not working at Meta). (BR)
