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Snap Is Acquiring WaveOptics, Its AR Display Supplier

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Snap is buying WaveOptics for more than $500 million, The Verge reports.

WaveOptics is a UK-based company founded in 2014. It supplies transparent optical waveguides and accompanying projectors.

Snap, the company behind Snapchat, revealed its first AR glasses yesterday, with WaveOptics displays onboard. While the field of view is much narrower than headsets like HoloLens & Magic Leap, the display is much brighter so can be practically used outdoors.

Spectacles

The Verge report claims the roughly 125 person team at WaveOptics will now report to Snap’s hardware vision, but will continue to supply other companies while working to build custom optics for Spectacles.

Back in 2018 Apple acquired Akonia Holographics, a startup working on holographic waveguides. Facebook has spoken of developing custom waveguides, and last year acquired a key microLED display supplier. Microsoft works closely with MicroVision for its HoloLens range. All three have spoken of plans to ship consumer AR in coming years.

As the specs of Spectacles show, AR is still a very early technology. There are still huge technical hurdles to overcome to appeal to a broad consumer market – hurdles that could take the better part of this decade overcome. Companies like Snap are preparing now to shape this new landscape – or at least to not be left behind.

Google Trials ‘Starline’ Glasses-Free Light Field Display

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Google’s research into light fields is bearing fruit with a glasses-free 3D display technology called “Project Starline” available at a few of its offices.

Google revealed the work as part of its annual developer conference this week. It is pitched as working like a “magic window” and relies on “custom-built hardware and highly specialized equipment” with advances in real-time compression, spatial audio, computer vision, and machine learning to provide a sense of being face to face with someone no matter the physical distance.

The image below posted by Google’s Vice President of AR and VR Clay Bavor offers a look at the substantial footprint for the system while it is used in one of Google’s offices.

project starline google

Google also posted a video showcasing the technology used for some person-to-person interactions said to provide “a sense of volume and depth that can be experienced without the need for additional glasses or headsets.” The company says it is planning to trial deployments with enterprise partners later this year.

We tested some early-stage glasses-free light field display technology in 2018 and it required years more development and enormous investments to improve brightness and cost enough to put it within reach of average consumers. In our 2018 demonstration from Light Field Lab, for instance, the 3D effect only worked if you kept your head in a very specific area relative to the display. Indeed, even with Google claiming key breakthroughs in its efforts to prove its glasses-free 3D display technology as a direction “technology can and should go”, the company cautions that only “some of these technical advancements” are likely to make it into its communication products.

Still, we’d love to go eyes-on with Project Starline at some point for a better sense of its use cases and the investment Google will need to spend to bring its advancements into wider use.