Introduction

At AWE 2024, I was on a panel discussion titled “The Current State and Future Direction of AR Glasses.” Jeri Ellsworth, CEO of Tilt Five, Ed Tang, CEO of Avegant, Adi Robertson, Senior Reporter at The Verge, and I were on the panel, with Jason McDowell, The AR Show, moderating. Jason McDowell did an excellent job of moderation and keeping the discussion moving. Still, with only 55 minutes, including questions from the audience, we could only cover a fraction of the topics we had considered discussing. I’m hoping to reconvene this panel sometime. I also want to thank Dean Johnson, Associate Professor at Western Michigan University, who originated the idea and helped me organize this panel. AWE’s video of our panel is available on YouTube.

First, I will outline what was discussed in the panel. Then, I want to follow up on small FOV optical AR glasses and some back-and-forth discussions with AWE Legend Thad Starner.

Outline of the Panel Discussion

The panel covered many topics, and below, I have provided a link to each part of our discussion and added additional information and details for some of the topics.

• 0:00 Introductions
• 2:19 Apple Vision Pro (AVP) and why it has stalled. It has been widely reported that AVP sales have stalled. Just before the conference, The Information reported that Apple had suspended the Vision Pro 2 development and is now focused on a lower-cost version. I want to point out that a 1984 128K Mac 1 adjusted for inflation would cost over $7,000 adjusted for inflation, and the original 1977 Apple 2 4K computer (without a monitor or floppy drive) would cost about $6,700 in today’s dollars. I contend that utility and not price is the key problem with the AVP sales volume and that Apple is thus drawing the wrong conclusion.
• 7:20 Optical versus Passthrough AR. The panel discusses why their requirements are so different.
• 11:30 Mentioned Thad Starner and the desire for smaller FOV optical AR headsets. It turns out that Thad Starner attended our panel, but as I later found out, he arrived late and missed my mentioning him. Thad, later questioned the panel. In 2019, I wrote the article FOV Obsession, which discussed Thad’s SPIE AR/VR/MR presentation about smaller FOV. Thad is a Georgia Institute of Technology professor and a part-time Staff Researcher at Google (including on Google Glass). He has continuously worn AR devices since his research work at MIT’s media lab in the 1990s.
• 13:50 Does “tethering make sense” with cables or wirelessly?
• 20:40 Does an AR device have to work outside (in daylight)?
• 26:49 The need to add displays to today’s Audio-AI glasses (ex. Meta Ray-Ban Wayfarer).
• 31:45 Making AR glasses less creepy?
• 35:10 Does it have to be a glasses form factor?
• 35:55 Monocular versus Biocular
• 37:25 What did Apple Vision Pro get right (and wrong) regarding user interaction?
• 40:00 I make the point that eye tracking and gesture recognition on the “Apple Vision Pro is magical until it is not,” paraphrasing Adi Robertson, and I then added, “and then it is damn frustrating.” I also discuss that “it’s not truly hands-free if you have to make gestures with your hands.”
• 41:48 Waiting for the Superman [savior] company. And do big companies help or crush innovation?
• 44:20 Vertical integration (Apple’s big advantage)
• 46:13 Audience Question: When will AR glasses replace a smartphone (enterprise and consumer)
• 49:05 What is the first use case to break 1 million users in Consumer AR?
• 49:45 Thad Starner – “Bold Prediction” that the first large application will be with small FOV (~20 degrees), monocular, and not centered in the user’s vision (off to the ear side by ~8 to 20 degrees), and monochrome would be OK. A smartphone is only about 9 by 15 degrees FOV [or ~20 degrees diagonally when a phone is held at a typical distance].
• 52:10 Audience Question: Why aren’t more companies going after OSHA (safety) certification?

Small FOV Optical AR Discussion with Thad Starner

As stated in the outline above, Thad Starner arrived late and missed my discussion of smaller FOVs that mentioned Thad, as I learned after the panel. Thad, who has been continuously wearing AR glasses and researching them since the mid-1990s, brings an interesting perspective. Since I first saw and met him in 2019, he has strongly advocated for AR headsets having a smaller FOV.

Thad also states that the AR headset should have a monocular (single-eye) display and be 8—to 20 degrees on the ear side of the user’s straight-ahead vision. He also suggests that monochrome is fine for most purposes. Thad stated that his team will soon publish papers backing up these contentions.

In the sections below, I went from the YouTube transcript and did some light editing to make what was said more readable.

My discussion from earlier in the panel:

11:30 Karl Guttag – I think a lot of the AR or Optical see-through gets confabulated with what was going on in VR because VR was cheap and easy to make a wide field of view by sticking a cell phone with some cheap Optics in front of your face. You get a wide field of view, and people went crazy about that. I made this point years ago on my blog [2019 article FOV Obsession] was the problem. Thad Starner makes this point: he’s one of our Legends at AWE, and I took that to heart many years ago at SPIE AR/VR/MR 2019.

The problem is that as soon as you say beyond about 30-degree field of view, even projecting forward [with technology advancements], as you go beyond 30-degree field of view, you’re in a helmet, something looking like Magic Leap. And Magic Leap ended up in Nowheresville. [Magic Leap] ended up with 25 to 30% see-through, so it’s not really that good see-through, and yet it’s not got the image quality that you would get of an old display shot right in your eyes. You might you could get a better image on an Xreal or something like that.

People are confabulating too many different specs, so they want a wide field of view. The problem is as soon as you say 50 degrees and then you say, yeah, and I need like spatial recognition, I want to do SLAM, and I want to do this, and I want to do that. You’ve now spiraled into the helmet. I mean, you know, Meta was talking the other day about the other panels and said they’re looking at about 50 grams [for the Meta Ray Bans], and my glasses are 23 grams. You’re out of that as soon as you say 50-degree field of view, you’re over 100 grams and and and and and heading to the Moon as you add more and more cameras and all this other stuff, so I think that’s one of our bigger problems whereas AR really Optical AR.

The experiment we’re going to see played out because many companies are working on adding displays to to so called AI audio glasses. We’re going to see if that works because companies are getting ready to make glasses that have 20—to 30-degree field of view glasses tied into AI and audio stuff.

Thad Starner’s comments and the follow-up discussion during the Q&A at the end of the panel:

49:46 Hi, my name is Thad Starner. I’m Professor Georgia Tech. I’m going to make a bold prediction here that the future, at least the first system to sell over a million units, will be a small field of view monocular, non-line-of-sight display, monochrome is okay now; the reason I say that is number one I’ve done different user studies in my lab that we’ll be publishing soon on this subject but the other thing is that you know our phones which is the most popular interface out there are only 9 degrees by 16 degrees field of view. Putting something outside of the line of sight means that it doesn’t interrupt you while you’re crossing the street or driving or flying a plane, right? We know these numbers, so between 8° and 20 degrees towards the ear and plus or minus 8 degrees, I’m looking at Karl [Guttag] here so he can digest all these things.

Karl – I wrote a whole article about it [FOV Obsession]

Thad – And not having a pixel in line of sight, so now feel free to pick me apart and disagree with me.

Jeri-  I want to know a price point.

Thad, I think the first market will be captioning for the heart of hearing, not for the deaf. Also, possible transcription, not translation; at that price point, you’re talking about making reading glasses for people instead of hearing aids. There’s a lot of pushback against hearing, but reading glasses people tend to do, so I’d say you’re probably in the $200 to $300 range.

Ed – I think your prediction is spot on, minus the color green. The only thing I think is that it’s not going to fly.

Thad – I said monochrome is okay.

Ed – I think the monocular field of view is going to be an entry-level product, and you see, I think you will see products that will fit that category with roughly that field of view with roughly that offset angle [not in the center of view] is what you’re going to see in the beginning. Yeah I agree with that but I don’t I think that’s the first step I think you will see a lot of products after that that’s going to do a lot more than monocular monochrome offset displays, start going to larger field of view binocular I think that will happen pretty quickly.

Adi – It does feel like somebody tries to do that every 18 months, though, like Intel tried to make a pair of glasses that did that. It’s a little bit what North did. I guess it’s just a matter of throwing the idea at the wall because I think it’s a good one until it takes.

I was a little taken aback to have Thad call me out as if I had disagreed with him when I had made the point about the advantages of a smaller FOV earlier. Only after the presentation did I find out that he had arrived late. I’m not sure what comment I made that made Thad think I was advocating for a larger FOV in AR glasses.

I want to add that there can be big differences between what consumers and experts will accept in a product. I’m reminded of a story I read in the early 1980s when there was a big debate between very high-resolution monochrome versus lower-resolution color (back then, you could only have one or the other with CRTs) that the head of IBM’s monitor division said, “Color is the least necessary and most desired feature in a monitor.” All the research suggested that resolution was more important for the tasks people did on a computer at the time, but people still insisted on color monitors. Another example is the 1985 New Coke fiasco, in which Coke’s taste studies proved that people liked New Coke better, but it still failed as a product.

In my experience, a big factor is whether the person is being trained to use the device for enterprise or military use versus whether the user is buying it for their own enjoyment. The military has used monochrome displays on devices, including night vision and heads-up displays for decades. I like to point out that the requirement can change if “If the user paid to use versus is paying to use.” Enterprises and the military care about whether the product gets the job done and pay someone to use the device. The consumer has different criteria. I will also agree that there are cases where the user is motivated to be trained, such as Thad’s hard-of-hearing example.

Conclusion on Small FOV Optical AR

First, I agree with Thad’s comments about the smaller FOV and have stated such before. There are also cases outside of enterprise and industrial use where the user is motivated to be trained, such as Thad’s hard-of-hearing example. But while I can’t disagree with Thad or his studies that show having a monocular monochrome image located outside the line of sight is technically better, I think consumers will have a tougher time accepting a monocular monochrome display. What you can train someone to use differs from what they would buy for themselves.

Thad makes a good point that having a biocular display directly in the line of sight can be problematic and even dangerous. At the same time, untrained people don’t like monocular displays outside the line of sight. It becomes (as Ed Tang said in the panel) a point of high friction to adoption.

Based on the many designs I have seen for AR glasses, we will see this all played out. Multiple companies are developing optical see-through AR glasses with monocular green MicroLEDs, color X-cube-based MicroLEDs, and LCOS-based displays with glass form-factor waveguide optics (both diffractive and reflective).

Update 2/21/22: I added a discussion of the DLP’s new frame rates and its potential to address field sequential color breakup.

Introduction

In part 3 of my combined CES and AR/VR/MR 2024 coverage of over 50 Mixed Reality companies, I will discuss display companies.

As discussed in Mixed Reality at CES and the AR/VR/MR 2024 Video (Part 1 – Headset Companies), Jason McDowall of The AR Show recorded more than four hours of video on the 50 companies. In editing the videos, I felt the need to add more information on the companies. So, I decided to release each video in sections with a companion blog article with added information.

Outline of the Video and Additional Information

The part of the video on display companies is only about 14 minutes long, but with my background working in displays, I had more to write about each company. The times in blue on the left of each subsection below link to the YouTube video section discussing a given company.

00:10 Lighting Silicon (Formerly Kopin Micro-OLED)

Lighting Silicon is a spinoff of Kopin’s micro-OLED development. Kopin started making micro-LCD microdisplays with its transmissive color filter “Lift-off LCOS” process in 1990. 2011 Kopin acquired Forth Dimension Displays (FDD), a high-resolution Ferroelectric (reflective) LCOS maker. In 2016, I first reported on Kopin Entering the OLED Microdisplay Market. Lighting Silicon (as Kopin) was the first company to promote the combination of all plastic pancake optics with micro-OLEDs (now used in the Apple Vision Pro). Panasonic picked up the Lighting/Kopin OLED with pancake optics design for their Shift All headset (see also: Pancake Optics Kopin/Panasonic).

At CES 2024, I was invited by Chris Chinnock of Insight Media to be on a panel at Lighting Silicon’s reception. The panel’s title was “Finding the Path to a Consumer-Friendly Vision Pro Headset” (video link – remember this was made before the Apple Vision Pro was available). The panel started with Lighting Silicon’s Chairman, John Fan, explaining Lighting Silicon and its relationship with Lakeside Lighting Semiconductor. Essentially, Lightning Semiconductor designs the semiconductor backplane, and Lakeside Lighting does the OLED assembly (including applying the OLED material a wafer at a time, sealing the display, singulating the displays, and bonding). Currently, Lakeside Lighting is only processing 8-inch/200mm wafers, limiting Lighting Silicon to making ~2.5K resolution devices. To make ~4K devices, Lighting Semiconductor needs a more advanced semiconductor process that is only available in more modern 12-inch/300mm FABs. Lakeside is now building a manufacturing facility that can handle 12-inch OLED wafer assembly, enabling Lighting Silicon to offer ~4K devices.

Related info on Kopin’s history in microdisplays and micro-OLEDs:

• 2022 AWE Video Discussion with Brad Lynch Kopin (LCOS and OLED microdisplays)
• 2021 Pancake Optics Kopin/Panasonic
• 2013 Kopin Displays and Near Eye (Follow-Up to Seeking Alpha Article)
• 2013 Extended Temperature Range with LC-Based Microdisplays (about Kopin)

02:55 RaonTech

RaonTech seems to be one of the most popular LCOS makers, as I see their devices being used in many new designs/prototypes. Himax (Google Glass, Hololens 1, and many others) and Omnivision (Magic Leap 1&2 and other designs) are also LCOS makers I know are in multiple designs, but I didn’t see them at CES or the AR/VR/MR. I first reported on RaonTech at CES 2018 (Part 1 – AR Overview). RaonTech makes various LCOS devices with different pixel sizes and resolutions. More recently, they have developed a 2.15-micron pixel pitch field sequential color pixel with an “embedded spatial interpolation is done by pixel circuit itself,” so (as I understand it) the 4K image is based on 2K data being sent and interpolated by the display.

In addition to LCOS, RaonTech has been designing backplanes for other companies making micro-OLED and MicroLED microdisplays.

04:01 May Display (LCOS)

May Display is a Korean LCOS company that I first saw at CES 2022. It surprised me, as I thought I knew most of the LCOS makers. May is still a bit of an enigma. They make a range of LCOS panels, their most advanced being an 8K (7980 x 4,320) 3.2-micron pixel pitch. May also makes a 4K VR headset with a 75-degree FOV using their LCOS devices.

May has its own in-house LCOS manufacturing capability. May demonstrated using its LCOS devices in projectors and VR headsets and showed them being used in a (true) holographic projector (I think using phase LCOS).

May Display sounds like an impressive LCOS company, but I have not seen or heard of their LCOS devices being used in other companies’ products or prototypes.

04:16 Kopin’s Forth Dimensions Display (LCOS)

As discussed earlier with Lighting Silicon, Kopin acquired Ferroelectric LCOS maker Forth Dimension Displays (FDD) in 2011. FDD was originally founded as Micropix in 1988 as part of CRL-Opto, then renamed CRLO in 2004, and finally Forth Dimension Displays in 2005, before Kopin’s 2011 acquisition.

I started working in LCOS in 1998 as the CTO of Silicon Display, a startup developing a VR/AR monocular headset. I designed an XGA (1024 x768) LCOS backplane and the FGA to drive it. We were looking to work with MicroPix/CRL-Opto to do the LCOS assembly (applying the cover glass, glue seal, and liquid crystal). When MicroPix/CRL-Opto couldn’t get their backplane to work, they ended up licensing the XGA LCOS backplane design I did at Silicon Display to be their first device, which they had made for many years.

FDD has focused on higher-end display applications, with its most high-profile design win being the early 4K RED cameras. But (almost) all viewfinders today, including RED, use OLEDs. FDD’s LCOS devices have been used in military and industrial VR applications, but I haven’t seen them used in the broader AR/VR market. According to FDD, one of the biggest markets for their devices today is in “structured light” for 3-D depth sensing. FDD’s devices are also used in industrial and scientific applications such as 3D Super Resolution Microscopy and 3D Optical Metrology.

05:34 Texas Instruments (TI) DLP^®

Around 2015, DLP and LCOS displays seemed to have been used in roughly equal numbers of waveguide-based AR/MR designs. However, since 2016, almost all new waveguide-based designs have used LCOS, most notably the Hololens 1 (2016) and Magic Leap One (2018). Even companies previously using DLP switched to LCOS and, more recently, MicroLEDs with new designs. Among the reasons the companies gave for switching from DLP to LCOS were pixel size and, thus, a smaller device for a given resolution, lower power consumption of the display+asic, more choice in device resolutions and form factors, and cost.

While DLP does not require polarized light, which is a significant efficiency advantage in room/theater projector applications that project hundreds or thousands of lumens, the power of the display device and control logic/ASICs are much more of a factor in near-eye displays that require less than 1 to at most a few lumens since the light is directly aimed into the eye rather than illuminating the whole room. Additionally, many near-eye optical designs employ one or more reflective optics requiring polarized light.

Another issue with DLP is drive algorithm control. Texas Instruments does not give its customers direct access to the DLP’s drive algorithm, which was a major issue for CREAL (to be discussed in the next article), which switched from DLP to LCOS partly because of the need to control its unique light field driving method directly. VividQ (also to be discussed in the next article), which generates a holographic display, started with DLP and now uses LCOS. Lightspace 3D has similarly switched.

Far from giving up, TI is making a concerted effort to improve its position in the AR/VR/MR market with new, smaller, and more efficient DLP/DMD devices and chipsets and reference design optics.

Added 2/21/22: I forgot to discuss the DLP’s new frame rates and field sequential color breakup.

I find the new, much higher frame rates the most interesting. Both DLP and LCOS use field sequential color (FSC), which can be prone to color breakup with eye and/or image movement. One way to reduce the chance of breakup is to increase the frame rate and, thus, the color field sequence rate (there are nominally three color fields, R, G, & B, per frame). With DLP’s new much higher 240Hz & 480Hz frame rates, the DLP would have 720 or 1440 color fields per second. Some older LCOS had as low as 60-frames/180-fields (I think this was used on Hololens 1 – right), and many, if not most, LCOS today use 120-frames/360-fields per second. A few LCOS devices I have seen can go as high as 180-frames/540-fields per second. So, the newer DLP devices would have an advantage in that area.

The content below was extracted from the TI DLP presentation given at AR/VR/MR 2024 on January 29, 2024 (note that only the abstract seems available on the SPIE website).

My Background at Texas Instruments:

I worked at Texas Instruments from 1977 to 1998, becoming the youngest TI Fellow in the company’s history in 1988. However, contrary to what people may think, I never directly worked on the DLP. The closest I came was a short-lived joint development program to develop a DLP-based color copier using the TMS320C80 image processor, for which I was the lead architect.

I worked in the Microprocessor division developing the TMS9918/28/29 (the first “Sprite” video chip), the TMS9995 CPU, the TMS99000 CPU, the TMS34010 (the first programmable graphics processor), the TMS34020 (2nd generation), the TMS302C80 (first image processor with 4 DSP CPUs and a RISC CPU) several generations of Video DRAM (starting with the TMS4161), and the first Synchronous DRAM. I designed silicon to generate or process pixels for about 17 of my 20 years at TI.

After leaving TI, ended up working on LCOS, a rival technology to DLP, from 1998 through 2011. But then when I was designing a aftermarket autmotive HUD at Navdy, I chose use a DLP engine for the projector for its advantages in that application. I like to think of myself as a product focused and want to use whichever technology works best for the given application. I see pros and cons in all the display technologies.

07:25 VueReal MicroLED

VueReal is a Canadian-based startup developing MicroLEDs. Their initial focus was on making single color per device microdisplays (below left).

However, perhaps VueReal’s most interesting development is their cartridge-based method of microprinting MicroLEDs. In this process, they singulate the individual LEDs, test and select them, and then transfer them to a substrate with either passive (wire) or active (ex., thin-film transistors on glass or plastic). They claim to have extremely high yields with this process. With this process, they can make full-color rectangular displays (above right), transparent displays (by spacing the LEDs out on a transparent substrate, and displays of various shapes, such as an automotive instrument panel or a tail light.

I was not allowed to take pictures in the VueReal suite, but Chris Chinnock of Insight Media was allowed to make a video from the suit but had to keep his distance from demos. For more information on VueReal, I would also suggest going to MicroLED-Info, which has a combination of information and videos on VueReal.

08:26 MojoVision MicroLED

MojoVision is pivoting from a “Contact Lens Display Company” to a “MicroLED component company.” Its new CEO is Dr. Nikhil Balram, formerly the head of Google’s Display Group. MojoVision started saying (in private) that it was putting more emphasis on being a MicroLEDs component company around 2021. Still, it didn’t publicly stop developing the contact lens display until January 2023 after spending more than $200M.

To be clear, I always thought the contact lens display concept was fatally flawed due to physics, to the point where I thought it was a scam. Some third-party NDA reasons kept me from talking about MojoVision until 2022. I outlined some fundamental problems and why I thought the contact lens display was a sham in my 2022 Video with Brad Lynch on Mojovision Contact Display in my 2022 CES Discussion video with Brad Lynch (if you take pleasure in my beating up on a dumb concept for about 14 minutes, it might be a fun thing to watch).

So, in my book, Mojovision, the company starts with a major credibility problem. Still, they are now under new leadership and focusing on what they got to work, namely very small MicroLEDs. Their 1.75-micron LEDs are the smallest I have heard about. The “old” Mojovision had developed direct/native green MicroLEDs, but the new MojoVision is developing native blue LEDs and then using quantum dot conversion to get green and red.

I have been hearing about using quantum dots to make full-color MicroLEDs for ~10 years, and many companies have said they are working on it. Playnitride demonstrated quantum dot-converted microdisplays (via Lumus waveguides) and larger direct-view displays at AR/VR/MR 2023 (see MicroLEDs with Waveguides (CES & AR/VR/MR 2023 Pt. 7)).

Mike Wiemer (CTO) gave a presentation on “Comparing Reds: QD vs InGaN vs AlInGaP” (behind the SPIE Paywall). Below are a few slides from that presentation.

Wiemer gave many of the (well-known in the industry) advantages of the blue LED with the quantum dot approach for MicroLEDs over competing approaches to full-color MicroLEDs, including:

• Blue LEDs are the most efficient color
• You only have to make a single type of LED crystal structure in a single layer.
• It is relatively easy to print small quantum dots; it is infeasible to pick and place microdisplay size MicroLEDs
• Quantum dots converted blue to green and red are much more efficient than native green and red LEDs
• Native red LEDs are inefficient in GaN crystalline structures that are moderately compatible with native green and blue LEDs.
• Stacking native LEDs of different colors on different layers is a complex crystalline growth process, and blocking light from lower layers causes efficiency issues.
• Single emitters with multiple-color LEDs (e.g., See my article on Porotech) have efficiency issues, particularly in RED, which are further exacerbated by the need to time sequence the colors. Controlling a large array of single emitters with multiple colors requires a yet-to-be-developed, complex backplane.

Some of the known big issues with quantum dot conversion with MicroLED microdisplays (not a problem for larger direct view displays):

• MicroLEDs can only have a very thin layer of quantum dots. If the layer is too thin, the light/energy is wasted, and the residual blue light must be filtered out to get good greens and reds.
  • MojoVision claims to have developed quantum dots that can convert all the blue light to red or green with thin layers
• There must be some structure/isolation to prevent the blue light from adjacent cells from activating the quantum dots of a given cell, which would cause the desaturation of colors. Eliminating color crosstalk/desaturating is another advantage of having thinner quantum dot layers.
• The lifetime and potential for color shifting with quantum dots, particularly if they are driven hard. Native crystalline LEDs are more durable and can be driven harder/brighter. Thus, quantum dot-converted blue LEDs, while more than 10x brighter than OLEDs, are expected to be less bright than native LEDs
• While MojoVision has a relatively small 1.37-micron LED on a 1.87-micron pitch, that still gives a 3.74-micron pixel pitch (assuming MojoVision keeps using two reds to get enough red brightness). While this is still about half the pixel pitch of the Apple Vision’s Pro ~7.5-micron pitch OLED, a smaller pixel size such as with a single-emitter-with multiple-colors (e.g., Porotech) would be better (more efficient due to étendue see: MicroLEDs with Waveguides (CES & AR/VR/MR 2023 Pt. 7)) for semi-collimating the light using microlenses as needed by waveguides.

10:20 Porotech MicroLED

I covered Porotech’s single emitter, multiple color, MicroLED technology extensively last year in CES 2023 (Part 2) – Porotech – The Most Advanced MicroLED Technology, MicroLEDs with Waveguides (CES & AR/VR/MR 2023 Pt. 7), and my CES 2023 Video with Brad Lynch.

While technically interesting, Porotech’s single-emitter device will likely take considerable time to perfect. The single-emitter approach has the major advantage of supporting a smaller pixel since only one LED per pixel is required. This also results in only two electrical connections (power and ground) to LED per pixel.

However, as the current level controls the color wavelength, this level must be precise. The brightness is then controlled by the duty cycle. An extremely advanced semiconductor backplane will be needed to precisely control the current and duty cycle per pixel, a backplane vastly more complex than LCOS or spatial color MicroLEDs (such as MojoVision and Playnitride) require.

Using current to control the color of LEDs is well-known to experts in LEDs. Multiple LED experts have told me that based on their knowledge, they believe Porotech’s red light output will be small relative to the blue and green. To produce a full-color image, the single emitter will have to sequentially display red, green, and blue, further exacerbating the red’s brightness issues.

12:55 Brilliance Color Laser Combiner

Brilliance has developed a 3-color laser combiner on silicon. Light guides formed in/on the silicon act similarly to fiber optics to combine red, green, and blue laser diodes into a single beam. The obvious application of this technology would be a laser beam scanning (LBS) display.

While I appreciate Brilliance’s technical achievement, I don’t believe that laser beam scanning (LBS) is a competitive display technology for any known application. This blog has written dozens of articles (too many to list here) about the failure of LBS displays.

14:24 TriLite/Trixel (Laser Combiner and LBS Display Glasses)

Last and certainly least, we get to TriLite Laser Beam Scanning (LBS) glasses. LBS displays for near-eye and projector use have a perfect 25+ year record of failure. I have written about many of these failures since this blog started. I see nothing in TriLite that will change this trend. It does not matter if they shoot from the temple onto a hologram directly into the eye like North Focals or use a waveguide like TriLite; the fatal weak link is using an LBS display device.

It has reached the point when I see a device with an LBS display. I’m pretty sure it is either part of a scam and/or the people involved are too incompetent to create a good product (and yes, I include Hololens 2 in this category). Every company with an LBS display (once again, including Hololens 2) lies about the resolution by confabulating “scan lines” with the rows of a pixel-based display. Scan lines are not the same as pixel rows because the LBS scan lines vary in spacing and follow a curved path. Thus, every pixel in the image must be resampled into a distorted and non-uniform scanning process.

Like Brilliance above, TriLites’ core technology combines three lasers for LBS. Unlike Brilliance, TriLites does not end up with the beams being coaxial; rather, they are at slightly different angles. This will cause the various colors to diverge by different amounts in the scanning process. TriLite uses its “Trajectory Control Module” (TCM) to compute how to re-sample the image to align the red, green, and blue.

TriLite then compounds its problems with LBS using a Lissajous scanning process, about the worst possible scanning process for generating an image. I wrote about why the Lissajous scanning process, also used by Oqmented (TriLite uses Infineon’s scanning mirror), in AWE 2021 Part 2: Laser Scanning – Oqmented, Dispelix, and ST Micro. Lissajous scanning may be a good way to scan a laser beam for LiDAR (as I discussed in CES 2023 (4) – VoxelSensors 3D Perception, Fast and Accurate), but it is a horrible way to display an image.

The information and images below have been collected from TriLite’s website.

As far as I have seen, it is a myth that LBS has any advantage in size, cost, and power over LCOS for the same image resolution and FOV. As discussed in part 1, Avegant generated the comparison below, comparing North Focals LBS glasses with a ~12-degree FOV and roughly 320×240 resolution to Avegant’s 720 x 720 30-degree LCOS-based glasses.

Below is a selection (from dozens) of related articles I have written on various LBS display devices:

• 2012 Cynic’s Guild to CES — Measuring Resolution – Discusses how LBS companies confabulate resolution with scan lines
• 2018 North’s Focals Laser Beam Scanning AR Glasses – “Color Intel Vaunt”
• 2015 Celluon Laser Beam Scanning Projector Technical Analysis – Part 1 More on LBS and Resolution:
• 2019 Hololens 2 First Impressions: Good Ergonomics, But The LBS Resolution Math Fails! – This article goes into the basic math behind LBS
• 2020 Hololens 2 Display Evaluation (Part 1: LBS Visual Sausage Being Made) – This article details the Hololens very complex LBS scanning process and its problems
• 2021 AWE 2021 Part 2: Laser Scanning – Oqmented, Dispelix, and ST Micro – Goes into the problems with Lissajous scanning in a display device.
• 2023 Humane AI – Pico Laser Projection – $230M AI Twist on an Old Scam (Title says it all)
• 2016 Wrist Projector Scams – Ritot, Cicret, the new eyeHand
• 2018 CES Haier Laser Projector Watch – (Wrist Projector Scams Revisited)
• 2018 Intel AR “Fixer-Upper” For Sale? Only $350M ???
• 2018 Magic Leap Fiber Scanning Display (FSD) – “The Big Con” at the “Core”

Next Time

I plan to cover non-display devices next in this series on CES and AR/VR/MR 2024. That will leave sections on Holograms and Lightfields, Display Measurement Companies, and finally, Jason and my discussion of the Apple Vision Pro.