IEC
At CES2022 companies were juggling to present solutions, from smart glasses to contact lenses, which enable people to step into this new parallel world called the metaverse.
"We're starting to talk about the metaverse now in the same way we talked about the internet in the early 1990’s,” said Steve Koenig, VP for Research at the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the organization that runs CES, during a press briefing. “When we were all using 56k modems and dial-up internet, it was impossible to imagine the things we'd be doing online today. I think the same is true with the metaverse." Koenig pointed to the building blocks which will be used to assemble “a metaversian immersive digital experience”. These include cloud computing, haptics, volumetric video and 5G networks.
In most of these areas, IEC is laying the groundwork with the appropriate standards. IEC Technical Committee 100 has recently published a new document pertaining to haptic technology. (https://etech.iec.ch/issue/2022-01/how-haptic-technology-is-changing-the-multimedia-experience). The joint technical committee between IEC and ISO, ISO/IEC JTC 1, which prepares standards for IT applications, leads the way on standards for cloud technology and volumetric video.
New comfortable glasses
The perspective of accessing the metaverse has given the makers of virtual, augmented and mixed reality (VR/AR/MR) displays fresh impetus. A new range of smart glasses is about to hit the market, promising a more comfortable experience for wearers than earlier devices such as Oculus Rift, Google Glass and Magic Leap One - all discontinued but with new versions in the works.
“Wearing bulky headsets on your face is not going to be the future of the metaverse,” says Michael Hayes, CEO of a leading Californian company in the field of bio-microelectronic mechanical systems (MEMS) and ophthalmic technologies. “Glasses with headsets are uncomfortable, and you can’t deploy them,” agrees Paul Travers, founder and CEO of an optical technology company which specializes in making AR solutions for the workplace and industry. Jaehyeok Kim, CEO of a Korean startup believes that smart glasses are the only device that can combine the metaverse and the real world and will eventually “change the fundamentals of gaming, of business and of our daily lives.”
Most smart glasses work using optical waveguides. These are structures imprinted on a piece of glass (either on one or both lenses) that bends light to the eye from a source (usually a mini projector) embedded in the corner of the frame. The source overlays virtual objects on the wearer’s vision with data typically derived from a smartphone. Recent developments have tended towards enabling wireless connectivity with the smartphone and reducing the size and weight of the headgear.
Only a few manufacturers can produce plastic AR optics, one of which is T-Glasses, which were shown as a prototype at CES. “Plastic fabrication of smart glasses using injection-moulds is very cost-effective and scalable to mass production,” explains Kim. The company has also developed a patented concept called PinMR that enables manufacturers to pair waveguides with OLED micro displays. Kim claims this technique consumes less power and has a smaller form factor than other light sources.
IEC is developing standards for AR and VR as well as smart glasses displays. ISO/IEC JTC 1 /Subcommittee 24 works on interfaces for information technology-based applications relating to computer graphics and virtual reality, image processing, environmental data representation, support for mixed and augmented reality, and interaction with, and visual presentation of, information.
IEC TC 110 prepares standards for electronic displays, including OLED, 3D, holographic as well as flexible screens. It publishes IEC 62341-2-1 on OLED displays for instance, which specifies the essential ratings and characteristics of OLED display modules. It has also issued IEC 62629-41-1, a technical report on 3D and holographic display devices.
Smart glasses for manufacturing and industry
Analysts such as ABI Research expect the consumer market for smart glasses to grow 100% year on year between now and 2026, (when 28 million smart glasses will ship), but it is applications in the corporate and industrial sphere which have led growth to date.
Travers’ corporate solutions stem from the Tac-Eye monocular weapons sighting system his company developed for the US special forces in 1997. Its M400C glasses are being used today to train surgeons in medical procedures and by shift workers for more efficient picking of parts in warehouses. Shield, the firm’s latest development launched at CES, features some breakthrough technology. Travers explains: “Most activities for which you’d wear AR glasses are conducted at arms’ length, but normal waveguides are set at infinity. It means that when you put a 3D image in front of someone’s eyes to appear 2ft (0,6 meters) away there is a focus problem that causes stress in a lot of people. We’ve designed our waveguides to change the focal distance to converge about 1,5 meters away, making the experience much more comfortable.”
The company has coupled this with another proprietary technology capable of emitting 2 million nits of light from MicroLEDs the size of a grain of rice. Nits are units that measure brightness in terms of area coverage. “MicroLEDs, shrunk to the micron level and packaged into a projector smaller than a pencil eraser, means you can put the technology in a pair of glasses and it practically disappears from view,” Travers describes.
Contact lenses are the next step
With technology included in smart glasses already at the nano-level, the next logical evolution is to eliminate glasses all together. Connected contact lenses point one way forward.
Hayes’ company holds patents for embedding component circuitry into soft hydrogel (as opposed to hard gas permeable) contact lenses and has tested them with a leading lens maker. He was at CES on the lookout for developers to licence the “smart biology.” “Our technology has the dual capability to tune a wearer’s eyesight by enabling bifocal short and long-distance focus as well as to augment vision with graphical information just like a heads-up display,” he says. “Contact lenses will be much more discrete and comfortable than having to wear smart glasses.”
The lenses are powered by a micro battery, which connects to the user’s phone via Bluetooth and has a patented method of harvesting energy from the blinking of the wearer’s eyes. Information displayed could be health related (such as monitoring blood sugar levels) or functions like those available on a smart watch, for example a gyroscope. Hayes’ also points to real world alerts such as speed limits and restaurant discounts and, eventually, full immersion.
Brain-machine interface
The augmented reality and virtual reality software and the hardware with which we will access it remain in the early stages of development. “Down the road you won’t need a phone just a pocket device that is connected,” says Travers. “The tech industry will take all that high compute needed in AR glasses right now and put that in a device which is in your pocket or on your wrist.”
Longer term we may not need a conventional wearable at all. A microchip embedded into our nervous system could enable humans to communicate with the internet by thought alone. An Elon Musk-owned company is taking the brain-machine interface out of science fiction. It is designing a neural implant that will let individuals control a computer or mobile device “unmediated and in high fidelity” according to the company website. The idea is to insert micron-scale electrodes into areas of the brain that control movement. It is about to launch clinical trials with humans.
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