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 hours 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 Over the past two decades, Bernard Kress has made significant scientific contributions as an engineer, researcher, associate professor, consultant, instructor, and author. He has been instrumental in developing numerous optical sub-systems for consumer and industrial products, generating IP, teaching and transferring technological solutions to industry. Application sectors include laser materials processing, optical anti-counterfeiting, biotech sensors, optical telecom devices, optical data storage, optical computing, optical motion sensors, digital displays systems, and eventually HUD and HMD displays (smart glasses, AR/MR/VR). Bernard has been specifically involved in the field of micro-optics, wafer scale optics, holography and nano-photonics. He has published half a dozen books and has more than 35 patents granted. He is a short course instructor for the SPIE and has been chair of various SPIE conferences. He is an SPIE fellow since 2013 and has been elected to the board of Directors of SPIE (2017-19). Bernard has joined Google [X] Labs. in 2011 as the Principal Optical Architect on the Google Glass project, and is since 2015 the Partner Optical Architect at Microsoft Corp. on the Hololens project. Event: SPIE Photonics West 2018 Course Held: 30 January 2018