Tag: augmented reality

The company says that its Smart Helmet will be helpful for workers in a range of different industrial ecosystems.

The latest unveiling from Daqri, in its ongoing tradition of forward thinking and providing special features for which its customers will be willing to pay a premium price, has been a unique type of augmented reality helmet.

This strategy takes the company in the exact opposite direction from the rest of the sector.

The majority of companies in this area focus more on ensuring the lowest possible price in order to stand out. Daqri has decided to look for incredible features that will be attractive to its customers and worth the money that they pay. The company is a startup based in Los Angeles and it has now unveiled an augmented reality hardhat that it feels will be highly attractive to industrial employers who are seeking to improve the ability of their workers to do their jobs accurately and efficiently.

Daqri is betting that those employers will be willing to spend in order to obtain these high quality augmented reality features.

The Smart Helmet looks like a traditional hard hat that has travelled to the future. It is built to include a transparent visor as well as special lenses to provide it with a kind of heads up display (HUD). Also built into this protective equipment is a series of sensors and cameras that give users the ability to gather and access a considerable amount of information about his or her present environment.

Daqri has already been selling software that gives businesses the ability to incorporate AR technology into their functions. This type of application will usually involve the use of a smartphone, so that the camera can be directed at trigger image which will then bring the broader function “to life”. For example, if the trigger was worked into a magazine ad, then viewing it through a smartphone could cause a video to play. An instruction manual could offer audio or video instructions to enhance the text and diagrams.

This latest product, however, would build the augmented reality experience right into the helmet and would broaden its capabilities quite a bit.

A new type of wearable technology could redefine the AR experience.

Andrew Maimone, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill PhD student, has developed augmented reality (AR) glasses that would allow users to digitally interact with the real world, except Maimone’s glasses are sleek, compact, and light and are realistically wearable and less of a “gimmick” in comparison to conventional AR devices.

The new AR glasses provide a wide field of view.

Maimone commented that while it is possible to utilize a tablet or a even a smartphone to call up a virtual place and character and superimpose it on the real world via a small mobile screen, this experience is not “very compelling” because the experience does not occur through a person’s vision. The smartphone or tablet only allows the user to look at the virtual place through a small window.

On the other hand, traditional augmented reality glasses are bulky due to several components that are required to make the technology work, such as lenses, waveguides, reflectors, beam splitters, and additional optics that relay a digital image to the eye and place it at a distance where it can be focused on by the eye. Unfortunately, all of the bulk this tech creates can limit a person’s field of view.

Maimone’s device is called a Pinlight Display and he has been working on this device in collaboration with three researchers from the University of North Carolina and two from Nvidia Research. The Pinlight Display does not rely on standard optical components. Instead, it utilizes an array of “pinlights”, which are essentially bright dots.

Maimone explains that “A transparent display panel is placed between the pinlights and the eye to modulate the light and form the perceived image.” He added that “Since the light rays that hit each display pixel come from the same direction, they appear in focus without the use of lenses.”

Early prototypes of the augmented reality Pinlight Displays have demonstrated 100 degree fields of view.

Currently, the best commercial augmented reality glasses only offer a field of view of up to 40 degrees, while Maimone’s glasses have demonstrated fields of view of 100 degrees or higher. While this is no doubt impressive, the present prototype is not without its problems. It currently has image quality and low resolution issues. Maimone says that the next step is to work on improving these elements. He firmly believes, however, that with the proper engineering and research, the technology could be made into something realistic for use in everyday life.