Augmented Reality- What can we expect?

sahilpotnis

With ever demanding and competitive consumer electronic market, new and high-end technologies are stretching the horizons of designeering. Consumer electronic giants as well as medium scale enterprises are equally progressing in the Research and Development of Augmented systems.

Augmented reality or specifically display (which I will be talking about) blurs the line between what is real and what we see; by augmenting what we see, hear and feel. Major difference between ‘Virtual Reality’ and ‘Augmented Reality’ is that, in the later case the elements of graphical world interact with the real environment. The Augmented Reality concept creates a direct connection between our data and the real time environment in which we live. Thereby, it eliminates the need of multiple interface and creates a single universal interface allowing us to perform wide range of tasks.

Let me shed some light on the well know Augmented  reality display technologies before moving on to the advanced complete Immersive augmented displays.

Sixth Sense– No one needs an introduction to this augmented reality system! Talking about sixth sense, Steve Mann is considered as the father of sixth sense technology who made wearable computer as the neck projector originally referred to as ‘ Synthetic Snyestheisa of Sixth sense ‘. Further, Pranav Mistry from MIT Media lab prototyped the concept and introduced it at a completely new level. The basic block diagram of the technology looks like the following, [1]

                                  

You can build your own sixth sense device and code custom applications from the open source project link : https://code.google.com/p/sixthsense/

Different color markers used in the device helps the camera to keep a track of the fingers and capture the gestures to link it with pre-defined actions. For more information visit the home page of Project –Sixth Sense

Project Glass

Moving on, One of the first widely acknowledged augmented reality display device that came out in the market was ‘The Glass’ by Google. With a limited field of vision and set of optics, it performs unimaginable tasks. The primary aim of the Project glass was to develop a “Wearable Computer that will help to explore and share the world”. Conceived and developed at the Google X laboratories, Glass creates a visual layer over our normal vision [3]. The principle behind working of the Glass can be understood by looking at the following figure-

Image Source: dailymail.co.uk
The design of the prism location takes care that the visual overlay is not formed exactly in the line of sight which otherwise could damage the eye seriously.The image clearly illustrates how the Glass works, more bout it can be found on Wikipedia so I will not mention those tech specs here.
Immersive Augmented Displays : One of the recent advancements in the field of Augmented reality is completely immersive augmented displays. An important reason why we cannot have something close to our eye as a sunglass is because we cannot focus at such short distances.
Challenges: Unlike focusing in digital camera where the distance between the lens and imaging plane can be adjusted, in case of a Human eye the Lens-Retina distance remains fixed being 17 mm. Our lens has to focus the image on the retina, if the object if beyond the 'Near point' blurring occurs because of ill focused image on the fovea.

Typically, the way to deal with this is to insert a bunch of clunky optics in between your eye and a display to allow your eye to deal with something that close, which is what a system like Google Glass does. But as you increase the display size and field of view (a requirement of truly immersive augmented reality), the amount of optics required to make it work increases geometrically, and eventually you’ll end up with something very immersive but very gigantic like the Oculus Rift. Realistically, the widest field of view you’ll be able to get in a compact wearable display is probably 25 or 30 degrees; Google Glass is just 13 degrees, and the much more chunky Epson Moverio only manages 23 degrees [2].


Solutions- Innovega at Consumer Electronic show 2014, Las Vegas has been working and exhibiting platforms for high resolution augmented reality displays with enormous fields of view that fit into a pair of slightly hacked Oakley sunglasses.

                 Image Source: IEEE Spectrum
The lens consists of three primary components: two filters, and one lenslet. Most of the lens is covered by a filter that blocks out three very narrow bands of red, green, and blue light. Not coincidentally, these are the bands of light emitted by the transparent RGB displays that Innovega is using. This filter makes sure that you can see normally while making the displays invisible, which is important, because your eye can’t naturally focus on the displays at that distance. Without the filter, you’d just see a blurry mess all the time.

The only part of the lens that isn’t covered by the display-blocking filter is the very centre, which is a tiny lens. This lenslet refocuses the light coming in from the display so that you can see it even though it’s so close, while a filter behind the lenslet blocks all wavelengths of light except for the three narrow bands emitted by the display to keep you from getting a blurry spot in the middle of your vision.

                                                   Diagram Source: Innovega
The upshot of all this is that with Innovega’s iOptik contact lenses in, your vision is completely normal, but when you put on one of their immersive wearable glasses displays, it’s magically in perfect focus. More importantly, the display and the rest of the world is in focus at the same time, which is a necessity for augmented reality.
Innovega’s eyeball hack allows for some seriously impressive displays. Since the focusing bit is in your eye, and not in the display itself, there are only minimal restrictions on what sort of hardware you can use. If you can cram a transparent, 8K, 120-degree field-of-view, wafer-thin display into a pair of glasses, an iOptik lens can make it work. By way of comparison, this is approximately equivalent (in field of view, at least) to the display you’d get sitting in an IMAX theater.
The prototype was a “glanceable” display (like Google Glass), where you can look slightly upwards or sideways to see a display that won’t otherwise block your vision. Innovega’s current glanceable display has 40x the screen area of Google Glass with 6x the resolution, and Innovega’s demo had it hooked up to an iPhone and displaying a smartphone-sized version of Google Maps at 720p.

In about a year, the prototype should look more like this, with all of the electronics integrated into the frame itself. The glance-able screen will have a 60 degree field of view, and a resolution of 1280 x 1024 at more than 2000 DPI.

Image Source: IEEE Spectrum

Here is the video in which Innovega talks about its new augmented display systems, [2]

Not everyone has greeted the concept of Augmented reality with similar enthusiasm. With devices linked to cloud based data storage, whenever an image is being taken it gives a license for that company to use and redistribute the data as required . It could impair the ability of performing some other tasks while a message window pops-up.  Privacy issues such as facial recognition, prohibited photography will be on rise. We will have to wait for these advanced prototypes to enter the commercial market until its utility is put for a test…!

Well for now we can expect the advanced augmentative devices to entertain us through their prototyped versions and expect in the near future to erase off the line between “Data” and “Real World”.

References-

[1]-http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense

[2]-http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/consumer-electronics/audiovideo/innovega-delivers-the-wearable displays-that-science-fiction-promised/utm_source=techalert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=011614

[3]-http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/other-gadgets/project-glass4.htm

(NOTE: External source’s content has been duly acknowledged and references are cited along with the links)

Leave a comment