Nvidia’s ultra-thin VR glasses concept wants to banish bulky headsets
1 of the major concerns facing mainstream adoption of VR headsets is their type component. Everyone common with the tech will have the image in their intellect: a cumbersome, binocular-seeking blob connected to you like the facehugger from Alien.
But Nvidia needs to deal with this — and has just produced a investigate paper in collaboration with Stanford College that exhibits a thought for an extremely-skinny pair of holographic eyeglasses for digital fact.
To start with off, let us look at why today’s VR headsets are so bulky.
Properly, this is down to the magnifier basic principle of VR exhibit optics. As for each Nvidia’s and Stanford’s paper, typical headsets get the job done with the “lens [enlarging] the image of a small microdisplay.”
This necessitates a significant length amongst the two, expanding the size of today’s headsets to accommodate the technological innovation.
Other approaches have been explored to lower the gap between the lens and microdisplay — this sort of as so-named “pancake lenses” which lower the optical route as a result of folding — but this has its limitations, in this occasion, with the technology only supporting 2D pictures.
Even though researchers have tested other ways, these typically have their possess disadvantages, which include very low resolution output.
What the scientists at Nvidia and Stanford propose is distinctive. Their principle is a holographic around-eye display screen that offers a 2D or 3D graphic to each individual eye, all even though only staying 2.5mm thick.
So, how did they attain this?
Nicely, assume back to the gap concerning the lens and microdisplay that, in standard VR headsets, is applied to magnify photos and make holograms. Rather of this solution, Nvidia’s VR eyeglasses principle makes use of one thing called “a spatial light modulator,” which makes a hologram ideal in front of the user’s eyes.
This picture will help sums it up:
That’s not all while. In purchase to strengthen the image top quality of the thin VR eyeglasses, the scientists used “artificial intelligence tactics,” so they could “accelerate the computation of laptop-generated holograms.”
To set that yet another way, they approached the high quality and size of the VR screen as a computational situation — meaning they made the optics utilizing an algorithm in get to come across the highest quality output.
One of the paper’s authors summed it up as this kind of:
This extremely-slender layout was doable mainly because of the new digicam-in-the-loop optimization. Due to the fact the waveguide gives the scrambled-section illumination, traditional airplane wave-based mostly algorithms won’t work. This is a fantastic example of ‘Computation can redesign the display’
[3/4] pic.twitter.com/LgVnIt1y2a— Jonghyun Kim (@jkim_kr_) Might 4, 2022
It’s also crucial to observe that the photos you see of the ultra-slim VR eyeglasses present a wearable prototype. As Jonghyun Kim — Senior Analysis Scientist at Nvidia — puts it, these are a “working demo, while the driving board, energy, and the gentle resource ended up detached for the conceptual photo.”
As you’d expect from a study paper from Nvidia and Stanford, there is a entire large amount much more depth that I stimulate you to dive into. You can browse the complete point below — as nicely as watching a relatively helpful movie in this article.
While we’re a extensive way from these thin-ass VR glasses hitting the market, work like this displays the likely long run of the technologies.
Virtual fact headsets have been around for some time but they nevertheless haven’t been fully embraced by the mainstream. A single prospective reason for this is the unwieldy sort element. I mean, existing VR headsets merely never appear superior — so obtaining persons to don them is tough.
The much more researchers can counter this and make virtual fact headsets resemble frequent eyeglasses, the nearer we’ll get to VR being a aspect of our life.
Regardless of whether that’s a excellent or bad factor, I’ll leave to you — but it is difficult not to be impressed at what scientists are taking care of to do, as perfectly as what the foreseeable future holds.
If you are intrigued about what other research papers Nvidia is placing out at SIGGRAPH 2022, you can locate extra information and facts on that right in this article.
Right until then? Perfectly, here’s hoping to see you in a really comfy virtual fact before long.