Augmented Reality (AR) or smart glasses might be the next big thing in the field of wearable consumer electronics. Ideas, concepts and even products exist since a while but still they are all quite far away from being perfect. AR glasses act as an add-on to the smartphone or -watch, bringing the visual content to the line of sight with no need to look at the mobile device’s display. All-day-use glasses need to look fashionable, need to provide a high level of wearing comfort (weight, heat dissipation) and should provide a reasonable battery live time which enables several hours of operation. Laser Beam Scanning (LBS) might be the display technology of choice for such consumer AR glasses because it enables ultra-small optical engine sizes of below 1cc and the laser diodes can be switched off for image areas without content. But there are also many technical challenges to overcome. Beside the complexity of the scanning itself the interaction of the coherent laser light with the optical combiner optics can lead to image artefact. In this paper we present the ams- Osram laser source solution and give an outlook how to further improve system performance.
Small projector units for Near-To-Eye (NTE) displays such as AR glassed are currently a field of intensive research and development activity. To industrialize the first generation of user-friendly consumer smart glasses we propose using LED based solutions. LED illuminated DLP/LCoS pico-projectors are a mature technology which can be further optimized for the use in AR glasses. This article paper will share some updates on recent LED based NTE activities, and describe important design challenges such as etendue match, integration size and power efficiency.
Augmented Reality (AR) Smart Glasses might be the next big thing in consumer electronics. These devices can be used as an add-on to the smartphone or -watch bringing the visual content to the line of sight. This gives comfort, provides safety and enables new kind of use cases and applications not doable with direct view mobile displays. It’s obvious that such glasses should be small, lightweight and smart looking and at the same time projecting a large, bright, colorful and high-resolution image. Optimizing all these characteristics at same time would be like the squaring of a circle, thus tradeoffs have to be made. Depending on the glasses use case, different technologies for light source, light modulator and combiner optics might be chosen. In this talk we present both LED and laser devices to fuel the future of AR smart glasses. Besides offering RGB LEDs which are well known from LCoS and DLP pico projectors we are also working on devices optimized for the use in AR glasses. In the field of lasers we developed a compact RGB module enabling Laser Beam Scanning (LBS) light engines with a volume of 1cc or less.
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