Smart Glasses With Ar
With the rise of augmented reality (AR), smart glasses are becoming a must-have. But they have some major challenges to overcome before they become mainstream.
For starters, they have to look good and be comfortable enough to wear for long periods of time. So they need to have a streamlined design.
Optical Modules
Smart glasses with ar, or augmented reality (AR), provide digital information in front of a user’s eyes. These devices are designed to enhance the user’s experience in a variety of ways, including by allowing them to see objects in a 3D space and by supporting collaboration and communication through a host device or a virtual assistant.
Companies that develop smart glasses with ar include Magic Leap, Longan Vision, Kopin, and Epson. These companies all focus on developing and delivering solutions for different use cases.
For example, Magic Leap provides an enterprise-level headset that features a multi-user interface, dynamic dimming technology to make content more legible, and access to high levels of computing power. The headset also offers a customizable UX to meet the needs of different industries.
Another company in the smart glasses space is Kopin, which produces a range of wearable computer solutions for industrial environments. These include the BT-45CS, which features a ruggedized design, an 8MP centralized camera and intelligent control systems.
These systems can be controlled using a smartphone and are designed with the needs of engineers and production managers in mind. For instance, the BT-45CS’s integrated barcode scanner enables users to high tech glasses share hands-free information, while its onboard processor provides fast and reliable operation.
Additionally, the BT-45CS comes with an ergonomic design that allows it to fit comfortably on the face. It also includes a robust battery and wireless connectivity options.
The company also produces the Moverio BT-35E solution pack, which is specifically designed for industrial environments and includes an onboard processor, an internal camera, and a durable battery. It is approved for ATEX Zone 1 and is CSA C1-D1 certified.
Optical modules are crucial for achieving the design goals of AR smart glasses, which often include near-to-eye display waveguides. These are a vital component for creating a seamless and natural interface that is comfortable to use, and they can also minimize the visual impairment associated with large and bulky optics.
ams OSRAM recently announced a new optical module that reduces the size of the light engine in smart glasses by up to half. This enables developers to create information-rich smart glasses that are as stylish and fashionable as ordinary sunglasses or spectacles.
Free-Form Light-Guiding Prisms
Smart glasses with ar are an important part of the augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) industries, and consumers want them to be small, light-weight, and stylish. But they also need to deliver high-quality performance and image quality.
One way to achieve this is with free-form optics. These are surface-based optics that allow optical designers to design a system with more degrees of freedom than rotationally symmetric surfaces, which usually lead to lower wavefront errors and distortion.
Typical free-form surfaces include spherical or aspherical surfaces. This allows optical designers to achieve a high degree of accuracy and precision in the design of the system. However, an inadequate method of representing and optimizing a free-form surface can lead to poor results, which may discourage optical engineers from using these technologies.
A prism-lens 110 is attached to the free-form surface 120 to maintain a nondistorted see-through view of the real world scene. This prism-lens is designed to minimize the axial deviation and off-axis aberrations introduced by the curved free-form surfaces.
The FFS prism-lens was optimized to achieve a modulation transfer function of at least 10%x30 lps/mm across the entire visual field. This value was selected for the exemplary design to be practical and achievable without too much difficulty.
This exemplary design was developed using a PMMA material having a refractive index of 1.492 and Abbe number of 57.2. This material was chosen because it has a moderate range of refractive indices and is less expensive than some other materials commonly used in the industry.
To make this exemplary design more effective, we used an auxiliary free-form lens 120 in conjunction with the prism-lens 110 to maximize the accuracy of the overall design. This auxiliary lens is configured to totally internally reflect the received light from the first free-form surface. This is a very efficient way to cancel the optical power of the FFS prism-lens and prevent the rays from traveling out of the auxiliary free-form lens and into the eye.
Another way to achieve a wide eyebox and FoV is with the help of exit pupil expansion (EPE). EPE techniques involve expanding the eyebox and FoV by duplicating the light path using partial reflection and transmission of the image-propagation path. This process can be implemented with different types of optical elements, including half-mirror arrays, prism arrays, segmented mirror arrays, gratings, or holograms.
MicroOLED Screens
During IFA this year, Lenovo unveiled a pair of smart glasses that utilise two 1080p Micro OLED screens to provide a private display. Its new Glasses T1 is meant to be like a USB-C monitor that’s been specifically built for your face, and the company is betting that it’ll see a lot of people want to use these devices to watch movies or play mobile games.
Unlike a conventional LCD, which has its screen built on a glass substrate, Micro OLED displays use silicon wafers that are directly mounted on the surface of the chip. This allows Micro OLED screens to be smaller and less power-consuming than conventional LCDs.
This also ensures that Micro OLED screens have high luminous efficiency and are able to provide superior picture quality. They’re also very durable and offer a high tech glasses wide color gamut to help you view colours that may be more difficult to see on other types of displays.
These features are ideal for applications that require near-eye displays, such as medical and sports wearables, which need to deliver high contrast and excellent image quality, while being incredibly lightweight and consuming minimal power. Sony is currently working on microdisplays based on OLEDs that could be used for this purpose, and it’s been reported that the HYPOLED project is aiming to have a commercial product within a few years.
The HYPOLED project is a consortium of companies and research institutions in Europe, Japan and the US that are working to develop new display technologies. The consortium will create an open source platform and share knowledge on the design, fabrication, and encapsulation of Micro OLED displays.
While OLED is an extremely powerful emissive display technology, it’s not without its drawbacks. It’s relatively expensive, and it has a limited market capacity (and can be hard to produce).
However, OLED isn’t the only display tech that might one day be used for these wearables, as Samsung recently announced it will be using Micro LED panels in its Smart TVs in 2025. There’s also a report that Apple is looking into this display technology, and it’s possible we could see it integrated into the Apple Watch as well.
Wireless Charging
The augmented reality smart glasses come in many different shapes and styles, but they all have one thing in common: they’re packed with technology that alters your view of the world. Whether you want to get directions, translate texts, see your workout progress, or listen to music, these smart glasses will do it all with a few taps of the smartphone on your wrist.
While the design of these wearables varies, most are asymmetrical and feature one or more monocular displays in each pair, often with advanced waveguide and micro-LED technology to deliver crisp, bright images. Some of them even have built-in gyroscopes, accelerometers, magnetometers, altimeters, GPS receivers and other nifty features to make your life more convenient or fun.
But with so much innovation crammed into each pair, it can be difficult to find a way to power it all up. Thankfully, it’s becoming more and more possible to charge smart glasses with ar without the need for an external battery.
Wireless charging is based on Faraday’s law of induced voltage, which allows devices to receive power through electromagnetic induction. This is a technology that was first pioneered by Nikola Tesla, and it’s gotten a lot of attention in recent years because of its ability to power tiny Internet of Things devices several feet away from a wireless charger.
There are many different types of wireless charging, but most rely on an electromagnetic field between a transmitter and a receiver to transfer energy. This type of charging has been used in smartphones and other consumer electronics since the 1990s, but it’s only been recently that researchers have developed ways to transfer enough power to tiny IoT devices to let them run for hours without having to be plugged in.
In addition, many wireless charging technologies have developed ways to trickle power a device over time so it can maintain its charge even as the battery depletes. That’s especially useful for reducing power usage on small batteries like AAs, which aren’t as efficient and can lead to overheating problems.
For example, California-based company PowerByProxi has developed a method that allows it to fit its wireless charging technology into rechargeable AA batteries, making it easy for companies to integrate wireless charging into products and devices without needing to embed it directly into the battery. This allows for more freedom in positioning and shorter charging times, but it also increases the size of the battery and takes up about 10% of its height.