Introduction to VR, AR, MR and Smart Eyewear: Market Expectations, Hardware Requirements and Investment Patterns

Level: Introductory Length: 2 hours Format: In-Person Lecture Intended Audience: This 2 hour course is structured to be synthetic with a broad overview of the topics. It is intended for a wide audience, ranging from marketing and business development managers, market analysts and venture capital bankers, to product/project managers and engineers in various fields (OE, EE, ME, CR, SWE). The companion day-long course (SC1218) is more specifically intended for Optical Engineers. Description: This course serves as a high level introduction to the various categories of Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) available today: Smart Glasses or Smart Eyewear, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), and provides a synthetic overview of both current hardware architectures and related markets (enterprise and consumer). Products limitations and next generation hardware and functionality requirements to fulfill the expected market will be reviewed in a synthetic way. Learning Outcomes: This course will enable you to: - explain the current product offerings and be able to compare performances of different products as in visual and wearable comfort, display immersion and costs. - describe current HMD optical sensors, including head tracking, gaze tracking, gesture sensing and depth mapping. - explain current HMD hardware ecosystem, from end product design houses, to product integrators, contract manufacturers, optical building blocks vendors, down to mass fabrication equipment providers. - explain the shortcomings of current immersive 3D display architectures. - anticipate next generation HMD hardware revisions and product re-definitions. - explain why it is going to be a long ride towards the ultimate consumer product. - anticipate the rise of new optical building block technologies able to sustain successive hardware revs. - anticipate the fall of existing optical building block technologies unable to sustain successive hardware revs. - identify new niche market segment growths based on next generation features and functionality expectations. - optical architecture analysis of both Hololens V1 and Magic Leap One MR headsets (display engines and waveguide combiner architectures). Instructor(s): Bernard C. Kress has been involved in the field of optics and specifically micro-optics for the past two decades as an associate professor, instructor, author, entrepreneur, engineer, team manager and engineering director. He has been instrumental in developing new optical technologies that have been included in various industrial, defense and consumer products, in fields such as laser materials processing, optical anti-counterfeiting, biotech sensors, optical telecom devices, optical data storage, optical computing, motion sensors, displays, depth map sensors, and more recently head-up and head mounted displays (smart glasses, AR, VR and MR). His is specifically involved in the field of micro-optics, wafer scale optics, holography and nanophotonics. Bernard has published numerous books and book chapters on micro-optics and has more than 50 patents granted worldwide. He is a short course instructor for the SPIE and is involved in numerous SPIE conferences as technical committee member and conference chair. He is chairing the SPIE Digital Optical Technologies and the SPIE AR/VR/MR conference series. He has been an SPIE fellow since 2013 and served as an SPIE Board Director from 2016 to 2019. He was elected in 2020 to the presidential chain of the SPIE, and serves currently as its Vice-President (2021). During the past decade, Bernard has been the principal optical architect on the Google Glass project and the partner optical architect on the Hololens team at Microsoft for the past decade. He is currently the Director for XR Engineering at Google Labs in Mountain View. Event: SPIE Photonics West 2022 Course Held: 23 January 2022